Part Two: Percy Fawcett: Real-Life Indiana Jones, or Deluded Psychic Racist?

Robert concludes the tale of Percy Fawcett by discussing how he came to believe a hidden jungle portal would turn his son into a god (spoiler: they died horribly).

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to behind the bastards a podcast for the
very worst people in all of history where i just
thought i was about to sneeze but i didn't and
so we're able to start now as opposed to like
three seconds later mazel tov robert unless i sneeze in
like a second there's no way to know there's no
way to know it's really dusty out there right now
what with all the fire everything's on fire yeah you

(00:26):
know who's not on fire In like a bad way.
But in a good way, they are. Being on fire
can mean a confusingly wide variety of things. Hello, Miriam.
How are you?

Speaker 3 (00:36):
I'm doing good. I'm not on fire in any way
that I'm aware of. Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Okay. Neither in a good nor a bad way.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, I don't think so. Again, yeah, like you said,
it can mean a lot of things. So, you know,
I don't want to foreclose on every possibility, but.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, that makes sense. So whether or not you're on fire,
I hope you're ready to listen to the next part
of our series on the life of Percy Fawcett, the
guy who was probably the most direct inspiration for Indiana Jones,
just like the archetype of the gentleman adventurer, and who also,
as we're about to discuss, is going to go increasingly

(01:15):
crazy over the course of this episode. So when we
left him off, he had first listened to his mom
and broken up with his fiance, and then years later,
gotten back together with her. He's converted to Buddhism. He's
become a theosophist, and he's gotten really into the occult.

(01:37):
And after being trained up as an adventurer and working
briefly as a spy, he's finally wound up back in
Ceylon in 1903, which he really likes because it's this place.
It's filled with all these Buddhist temples. It's filled with
what he sees as like these people who are seekers
of the truth. There's a lot of not just like
local Buddhists, but a lot of like white people who

(01:57):
are really into the occult are in Ceylon and moving
because it's really hip to travel to the East and
travel to these parts of the world where there's people
who are like Buddhists and Hindus because a lot of
these Victorian age and like slightly post-Victorian age white people
are really into like co-opting little bits of different Eastern
religions and sort of like tacking them on these pieces

(02:20):
of like theosophy and other spiritualist like belief systems that
are starting to be cobbled together as like a hobby.
This is like a hobby for a lot of people, right?

Speaker 3 (02:29):
It stays fashionable for a while.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
It stays fashionable. And Percy's kind of using his military
career as a way to also further his hobby in
this way. Like he's really happy to be stationed here
with his wife. And Nina seems to be as well.
She was born there. So many descriptions of Percy Fawcett's
life start, like depict the beginning of his career as
a boundary surveyor as if it suddenly ignites a desire
for exploration. And Gran's book, Chapter 8, Into the Amazon,

(02:55):
goes straight from Percy returning to England in 1902 to
him then being in Bolivia like six or seven years later,
which is like where the first adventure from the movie
The Lost City of Z starts to. And that leaves
out years of his life where he was like getting
increasingly into Buddhism and theosophy in Ceylon. And it's kind
of important because that sets the stage for what's going

(03:16):
to happen next. So from what I can tell, despite
Percy's aptitude for surveying, he doesn't seem to have been
particularly drawn to it as a career at this point.
In 1903, his chief interest was a different sort of exploration,
the search for lost treasures and esoteric truths via meditation
and other forms of spiritual exercise. And because Percy's talking

(03:37):
a lot about finding lost treasure, I think people draw
this too much to like archaeology and think that he's
often literally seeking like lost cities of gold. That's not
the truth as much as he's speaking more metaphorically about
these kind of spiritual treasures that he wants to uncover
by finding places that are supposedly lost.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
So like the real treasure was in fact within you
all the time?

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, but also the real treasure is going to make
you and your son gods. He's not selfless in where
he thinks this is going to bring him, right? It's
still crazy, but it is different. Yeah. In the movie,
Percy's depicted as an ambitious man weighed down by his
father's reputation, who's just like ready for any chance to

(04:23):
become like a military hero. And the real Fawcett is
exhausted by military life, of military life by 1903. But
he was so good at cricket. He's so good at cricket.
But he's made a vow not to kill anybody, and
cricket's only good for killing. Right, right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
A.J.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Lee, who read through Percy's many letters during this time,
describes Fawcett as still captivated by Ceylon and his understanding
of Buddhism. In fact, he may have returned there for
what we would today call therapeutic purposes. Lee describes him as, quote,
being So, In this account, too, it's not just that

(05:08):
he wants to learn magic to become a powerful wizard,
which is definitely part of it, but it's that he's
working through some shit. And, like, these Buddhist holy men
and these other sort of, like, mystics that are all
kind of clustered in Ceylon are at least giving him
an opportunity to, like, talk about his childhood. And that's
not really a thing men of his stature get to
do back in England. Right.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Men will literally go across the world to hunt for
gold before going to therapy and then trick themselves into
going to therapy.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Into going to therapy because the real gold is within
you all the time, right? That's sort of what Percy's doing.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
The real gold is figuring out that your mom was
kind of the worst.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Your mom was kind of the worst, yeah. So Percy
and Nina both grow obsessed with Eastern mysticism during this time.
She's also really into this stuff. They're a legitimately good match.
She gets pregnant in Ceylon and Percy would later claim
that before they announced to anybody that she's pregnant, quote,
a deputation of soothsayers and Buddhists somehow found out you're

(06:10):
supposed to believe that they like it was magic or
something that they found out that he was going that
his wife was going to have a baby. And they
all show up to demand an audience with him because
they've made predictions. There's a prophecy around this baby. And
I'm going to quote from A.J.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Lee's book here.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
That didn't happen. After the usual. Yeah. I don't believe
this really happened either. But I'm going to read you
what Percy says happened. After the usual formalities, I was
informed I was about to become the father of a
son whose appearance was minutely described. I suggested that it
was obvious that something of this sort might reasonably be anticipated,
but that a daughter would upset the prophecy. No, I

(06:47):
was to have a son. He was the reincarnation of
a very advanced spirit, and my wife and I had
been specially selected, etc., etc. I mean... Percy.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Writes in the etc.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
etc.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Bro, married.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Couple predicted to have child in early 1900s. We're at what,
1903 at this point?

Speaker 3 (07:09):
1903, yeah. Like, you're really not doing... They.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Describe a mole that Jack has perfectly. So, Sophie, I'm sorry,
but they described the mole. That means he's a reincarnation
of a powerful spirit.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
Crazy thing that people have. A mole. Wow.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
It's super funny. It's the only baby with a mole, actually.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Actually. Never happened before. Their first son, Jack, was born
in 1903. Tom Holland. Yeah, Tom Holland. And was probably
named after Helena Blavatsky because Blavatsky's preferred nickname was also Jack,
which is kind of why I think they named their
son Jack. Yeah. The Faucets make a big deal out
of the fact that Jack is born on the anniversary
of Buddha's birth. Although Percy then explorings that like, well,

(07:52):
Buddha's birth is like was over. There's a range of
days that they all celebrate because they don't know exactly
what one it is. And he was born on the
one that everyone says is the most likely of the days.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
He was actually.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
This very special baby was born on all those days.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah. He was born on every one of Buddha's birthdays.
All five of them or however many he's got. Ceylon,
I don't know. um i don't believe this either percy
would later write that until he went to school he
was intermittently clairvoyant jack right that like his son was
clairvoyant as a child until the school beat it out
of him basically and he went on to add and
this is from a letter that percy wrote to a

(08:29):
magazine called the theosophist in 1913 both parents are psychic
he's like writing about his son he's like yeah he
was intermittently clairvoyant by the way both me and his
mom are psychic like That does not come up enough
in the Percy Fawcett literature that he desperately believed he
was psychic and wrote about it constantly.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Yeah, no, that should be one of the first things
you learn about a person, I think.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
People really should learn that. You should also have to
read the three paragraphs or something of him explaining how
because his son Jack was born in Asia, he has
slanted eyes.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Oh, no. That's Percy.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
That's Percy. Look, it's pretty rough. Yeah. So from this
point on, Nina and Percy would both refer to Jack
as the special one.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
I'm sorry. I don't want to be distracted by this
little racist thing.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Let it out. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
Did other people... Sort of two questions here. Did other
people also think that the son looked like he might have,
for example, had one Asian parent? And are we sure that.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
I haven't heard that. It's not impossible. But I don't
think that's the case.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
That would be very funny. I mean, I think it's
probably just bad scientific racism.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
There's pictures of Jack. I've looked at pictures of Jack.
I think this was him saying, as a baby, his
eyes were slanted so you could tell that he had
the spirit of a great Tibetan mystic or whoever, whatever
kind of mystic. I don't know which country he thought
the spirit came from. Um, but I think it was
the spirit of a great Eastern mystic, but Jack's white.
That's also important that Jack, that you are aware Jack

(10:05):
is white.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
I'm looking at this image that I've quickly Googled.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
Uh, no.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Percy's racial politics are fascinating. Like we don't, we don't
make them like this anymore.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
No, it would take, it would take a while to
unpack all of the, because he was born in Asia.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Um, there's a lot going on here. Um, He and
Nina would both refer to their first son, Jack, as
the special one or the great one. And, like, you
get the feeling because his youngest son wrote about being
kind of, like, Jack wasn't great. Like, first off, let
me just say, he was kind of a dick. He
wasn't even as funny as people think. Like, his youngest

(10:42):
brother seems to have been kind of pissed by this. Yeah,
I mean, I can see how that would happen.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yeah. The special one and... the other special one.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah. Look, we love all our children, but we only
think one of you was the magical reincarnated spirit of
a wizard, you know, or a mystic or whatever.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
I love all my children equally the special one and
the other ones.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Also, Percy is seeing like a Buddhist mystic is indistinguishable
from Merlin. Like let's be honest. Like that's, I'm not
saying that's accurate to the Buddhist mysticism, but that's what
Percy thinks about these people. Um, In 1906, Percy is
called up for duty by the new president of the
Royal Geographic Society, a no-nonsense military man named Sir George

(11:25):
Taubman Goldie. In The Lost City of Z, this is
how Grand describes him. Famous for his keen intelligence and
volatile temper, he had an almost single-handedly imposed the British
Empire's control over Niger in the 1880s and 1890s. He
had shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with
a governess and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin's
theory of evolution. Goldie is my favorite fact about this

(11:47):
guy is he apparently always kept poison on his person
so that he could kill himself if he were rendered
handicapped immediately. Like that's the kind of dude that this
man is. So just shockingly weird men are only the
only people who reach high levels in the RGS. Like
all of the maps were made by crazy people.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
So not carrying poison because he was like behind enemy
lines and like he was caught and tortured, but just
like if he fell down and broke his hip real bad.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
If I have to be in a wheelchair, I want
to be out immediately. It's got to be on site
for Goldie. He will not handle being taken care of.
No one is caring for Goldie.

Speaker 3 (12:25):
There was an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation
where Worf tried to do this.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
He does have Worf's attitude. Yes, that's right.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Worf tries to get his son to stab him to
death when a.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Box falls on him. If you want to imagine Sir
George Taubman Goldie calling in Percy for this meeting as
Michael Dorn, I won't stop you. And you won't be
entirely wrong.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
That's the direction I'm going with this. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
All right. So Michael Dorn calls Percy in and asks
if he's ever been to Bolivia. Goldie shows him a
map and he says it's full of blank spaces and
explains that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru are all up in
arms over the precise extent of their borders. Now, we
just did episodes on the dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez,
and the war of the Triple Alliance that occurs not

(13:11):
far from here. And A border dispute helps lead to it.
In Gran's book, The Lost City of Z, Gran wrongly writes,
the boundary issues between Paraguay and its neighbors caused the war.
That's not true. There were boundary issues that were inherent
to conflicts between those countries previously, but the war was
caused because Francisco Solano Lopez was a fucking maniac who

(13:34):
wanted to get involved in Uruguayan politics and then invaded Brazil, Argentina,
and tried to invade Uruguay. It was not caused by
a boundary dispute. Anyway, I just, I had to correct
Grant on that as well.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
Well, and boundary dispute usually means more than like, oh,
we thought the line was over here and you thought
it was a half mile this way. Like, it's usually
more like, we want more of your stuff.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, we really want these mines is generally, and that's
what's happening here, right? It's mines and rubber is generally
what's at like the root of these. But also when
the boundaries were set up, people couldn't make good maps.
Like we didn't have the ability to really make high
quality maps anymore. And so the boundaries were also not fixed.
Like it very much is a problem that was going

(14:19):
to need to be solved. The first thing Percy does
here is good. Like it was necessary for some motherfucker
to get out and map some of these rivers. And
when I say he was mapping them for the first time,
the way that's depicted in the movie is he's going
into a place like no one's ever been back from.
That's nonsense. there were stations all up and down the
river people knew how to sail it that doesn't mean

(14:41):
there were maps of it right that you could like
set boundary lines on those are two different kinds of
things it's.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Very possible to live somewhere for hundreds and thousands of
years and not know the coordinates of.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
It right exactly that's what needs to be done if
someone needs to go through and do that pain in
the ass work and actually lay out where the boundaries
are right um And so the British– part of why
the RGS is getting involved here even though none of
these are British territory is that there's a lot of
like money involved in particularly the rubber trade at this point.
And the British are worried there's going to be a

(15:14):
war over some of these boundary disputes as there are periodically.
And they're like, well, maybe if we can get this
all mapped out, we can settle that ahead of time.
And both countries are willing to have the British do
it because they're seen as like a neutral party, right?

Speaker 3 (15:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
So in Grant's book, he describes the area that Percy
is going to map as several hundred miles of nearly
impassable terrain. And he continues with language that is going
to do that. Like this is very clearly written, expecting
there to be a movie made of your book, The
Lost City of Z. Quote, the expedition would take up
to two years and there was no guarantee that its

(15:48):
members would survive. Disease was rampant in the region and
the Indians who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers
murdered interlopers. And this is how the movie depicts things too.
Like as soon as Percy and his small team, including,
including Robert Pattinson set off on like this primitive rickety
raft down the river, they're ambushed by Indians with bows.
One man is wounded and he falls into the water
and he gets tangled in a fishing net and the

(16:10):
piranha eat him alive.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
Oh shit.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
That's a fantasy. That's a complete fantasy. Both depictions of
this voyage are complete fantasies. Both David Grand's depiction in
his book and the depiction of the movie made off
of his book. Now, Some of that is because Percy
Fawcett lied about his own adventures. He was a huge
fan of adventure novels and he couldn't resist making claims,
not in his actual, like the paperwork he submitted to

(16:35):
the RGS was always really good. Most people seem to agree,
but he would give public speeches and he would like
write articles where he would make lavish claims like that
he had shot an attacking anaconda 49 feet long in
the spine with his 44, 10 feet below its wicked
head and killed it right before it could murder them all.
And like, first off, I mean, it's theoretically possible for

(16:56):
an anaconda to get that big, but they haven't, like
on record, been quite as big as the one he
was claiming. And also they don't act that way. I
found a critique of Fawcett by Hugh Thompson, another veteran.
Thompson is like a real explorer, like today, who's led,
I think it's Peru where he's done a shitload of expeditions,
but he's led a lot of expeditions into the jungle.

(17:17):
And he writes, quote, those who've traveled on the Amazon
know that it is in reality mundane, soapophoric, and almost dreamlike.
Very little happens slowly. It is perfectly possible to travel
for days without seeing any wildlife, let alone an anaconda,
which would slither away at the sound of oncoming canoes.
It's just a fantasy. Like, and there are crazy ass

(17:39):
animals in the Amazon, but you don't see them because
they don't want to be near you. They're scared of
people usually, right? You have to kind of go out
of your way and they're not generally going to attack
you unless you're a huge fucking asshole. The thing that's
going to kill you is the same thing that's going
to kill you in most places of the world where
people die from the environment. It's little bugs that give
you diseases.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
Or like you get a blister on your foot and
die of gangrene.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
And it gets infected because of the water and your
foot rots off. Yeah. One thing every actual jungle explorer
I have ever read from will point out is that
if your narrative of an Amazon exploration has stories about
being constantly attacked by deadly fauna, it's a lie because
that doesn't really happen very often. Right. Fawcett's first real-life

(18:26):
trip was mapping the Upper Heath River. The movie shows
him mapping the Rio Verde first. He doesn't do that
until years later. Here's how an actual world-renowned expert on
the region, John Henning, described Fawcett's first trip mapping Heath.
This survey was the best thing Fawcett did, but he
described it as boring because the new frontier was all
along rivers. This was the height of the great Amazon

(18:48):
rubber boom, so he and his team cruised from one
comfortable rubber baraka to the next, taking their regular measurements. Again,
the movie shows them, like, fighting off death at every
single turn. In reality, they're going down to different places
that all have food and, like, a pretty comfortable raft.
There's people all around. All they're doing is just some math, basically, right?
And Percy's work here does make history, but in the

(19:10):
rather pedestrian sense of, like, oh, well, we finally have
a map for this area that we didn't have a
map before, rather than, like, well, this bold adventurer carved
a path through the howling wilderness to make this great discovery, right?
And in the movie, at the end of this first voyage,
he finds a bunch of pottery shards and ruins in
the jungle, which is what leads, convinces him that there's
this lost city in the Amazon. That's not what happens.

(19:32):
In reality, Fawcett does, once he comes back to England,
he gets famous for doing this because it was good
work and no one had before. And he was also
good at like self-mythologizing, right? Once he gets back to England,
he's not just telling people about the actual mapping he did.
He's like, he's he's judging it up a little bit
he's making it a better story than it really was
anacondas at least anacondas and shit he gives at least

(19:56):
one lecture prior to the outbreak of World War I
in which he discusses seeing what might have been ancient
ruins in the rainforest. Now, we now know there are
ruins in the area. Fawcett said that there were ruins,
but they're not stone ruins, which is what he always
described and was looking for. They're like earthworks. And now
that we have LIDAR, we can see where some of
them would have been, right? So we do know that

(20:18):
there was large scale habitation in this part of the
Amazon previously to cut like European contact. And that is
kind of what Fawcett was saying. And he's so he's
sort of right. But again, as I'm going to talk
about everything he believed about that habitation was wrong. Now,
one thing the movie does get right is that once
Percy gets a taste of the jungle, he starts going back, right?

(20:41):
He leaves his family for like a year or so
to do, you know, this, this first mission. And he
keeps going back and he just abandons them for years
at a time to hang out in the jungle, mostly
with a bunch of dying men. And that is accurate.
That's what Percy does from like the next eight, most
of the next eight years leading up to world war
one is he just keeps heading back to the jungle
to do different like surveying and explorational missions. Like, He

(21:03):
cannot abandon his family often enough or long enough for
his taste. There is no amount of being with his
family that he will not immediately get the fuck out
of England to go back to the Amazon for. You
cannot make this man raise his kids. He won't do it.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
So he did learn something from his own father after all.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah, he picked that up from his dear old dad.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Incredible.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
For his dad, it was gambling and alcoholism. And for Percy,
it's exploring the Amazon. Grand describes Fawcett's next several years
as exploring thousands of square miles of Amazon and helping
to redraw the map of South America, painstakingly working his
way inwards over years of voyages, cataloging exotic species until
he had explored as much of the region as anyone.

(21:45):
That's how Grand describes Percy and its nonsense. He is
spending a lot of time in that part of the world,
but Percy only surveyed about 300 kilometers of Bolivian rivers.
And as Henning writes, Fawcett's own writings reveal no special
interest in flora or fauna, let alone his collecting or
cataloging rare species. So he's just not doing a lot

(22:06):
of the stuff Grant is. He's doing a pretty pedestrian job,
or he's getting up to complete nonsense looking for ruins
that absolutely aren't there, right? There's kind of two things
that Percy is into. One of them is semi-useful, and
one of them is getting everyone killed for no reason
at all.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
I don't know how he's failing to find these ruins when,
as we know, he's a powerful psychic.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
That's right. His psychic powers have not let him keep
just leading people in circles in the jungle until they
die or starve. Crazy stuff.

Speaker 3 (22:35):
Come on, man. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
And one of the things that's very silly about Gran's
book is that he describes basically that like, while Fawcett's
continuing to try to get deeper and deeper into the
jungle to explore more, he's opened up the jungle to
other explorers. And so now he's got to compete with
these like, less skilled, but better financed amateurs who don't
know the jungle like he does. And they're tramping around

(22:58):
and ruining things, you know, at best, right? And this is,
I want to read you one paragraph of Grant's book
describing some of these other explorers, right, who are only
able to get into the Amazon because Percy Fawcett opens
it up. There was the Brazilian colonel and part Indian orphan,
Candido Mariana del Silva Rondon, who had helped lay telegraph
lines across the jungle, lost a toe to piranhas and
started the Indian protection service. And again, he describes this

(23:21):
as a guy who's able to like do all these
good things because Percy helps to open up the Amazon.
That's really fucked up because Rondon, like Candido Mariano da
Silva Rondon is like almost inarguably the greatest explorer in
Brazilian history. By the time Fawcett got famous, Rondon had
already spent 17 years straight exploring Southwest Brazil and in

(23:43):
fact discovered so much of Southwest Brazil that the state
of Rondonia is named after him.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
You said he lost a toe to a piranha. Like,
that's pretty legit.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
He actually got attacked by a piranha.

Speaker 3 (23:58):
Like, not in the movie. Like, actually.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Not in the movie.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Like, for realsies.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Henning describes Rondon's expeditions as having made faucets look like
a jaunt up the Thames. Just some beautiful British shade
right there. So at least Grand does correctly credit Rondon
with founding the Indian Protection Service, whose noble motto was,
die if you must, but never kill, right? That's the

(24:23):
motto of the Indian Protection Service. The Faucet of Fiction
would have agreed with this. His belief in the city
of Z is depicted as being fueled by a belief
that indigenous Amazonians were more intelligent and capable than white
Europeans gave them credit for being. And it is true
that Percy was less racist against Indians than most British
explorers of his station and era. That's probably fair. But

(24:46):
Grand turns this into some great history of, like, enlightened
first contact and credits him with, quote, discovery of so
many previously unknown Indians who taught him their languages, their
herbal medicines, and their hunting methods. In reality, Fawcett never
learned a single native tongue. He never wrote about learning
native hunting or farming methods. And he also murdered a

(25:06):
native guy and covered it up. Here's Henning again. Quote,
Fawcett's attitudes towards indigenous peoples were contradictory. He deplored the
Rubbermen's cruelty to Indians, whom they pressed into forced labor.
He admired the three tribes whose villages he entered. But
he could also lapse into extreme racism, talking about dangerous,
repulsive cannibals, degenerate indigenies, or villainous savages scarcely evolved beyond

(25:27):
the level of beasts, whereas others were robust and fair
people of civilized origin. David Grand is as perplexed as
anyone by such contradictions. He feels that Fawcett was impressed
by the eugenic movement of the early 20th century, but
struggled to reconcile what he observed with everything he had
been taught and could not rid himself of the pernicious
disease of race. Grand does not quote the worst of
Fawcett's racism. When he described Mariaxi warriors as hairy men

(25:51):
with sloping skulls and long arms of Neanderthals, unlike any
indigenous people, Fawcett allowed his team to fire into the
air to frighten off these great ape-like brutes. But when
the Grand discovered the journal of companion Henry Causton, this
revealed that one shot had been aimed at a Maracoxi
and hit him in the stomach. Fawcett, therefore, doctored his
official report to the RGS and concealed the truth his

(26:11):
entire life.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
Jesus. That's real. So he sucks. So basically, Fawcett, first off,
lied about this group, these group of Maracoxi warriors and
described them as looking like ape men, basically, when, like, Well,
we just know that they aren't because those people exist
and we know what they look like, right? They're just
some people out in the jungle. And also, and Gran

(26:35):
describes him as like shooting up into the air. Fawcett
describes himself shooting up into the air. But his companion,
Henry Costin, played by Robert Pattinson in the movie, is like, no,
he fucking murdered a dude. He murdered a dude and
he made us all lie about it. Yeah, he sucks.
But we didn't want to say shit.

Speaker 3 (26:49):
Well, it seems like his... you know, this sort of
combination of like, oh, there are these enlightened people in
the jungle at some point in ancient times. And now
there's just all of these people I will say racist
things about. It does not feel unconnected to the spiritualism
Blavatsky stuff where there's like- Super connected. Where it's like,

(27:13):
where you can romanticize and idealize a completely fucking made
up uh group that you might sort of have like
a that might like be located somewhere in real geography
and like linked to real stuff but not actually like
exactly you're not allowing them to like self-represent or or
you're making them up entirely and it doesn't actually lead
to you treating well yeah people who are currently living.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
There yeah like the reality of faucet isn't that he
was like had an enlightened view of what like ancient
indigenous people were capable of it's that Well, he believed
that a certain number of them were basically descended from
white people who had made a civilization here before that
had collapsed for some reason or that they had ascended
into some sort of spiritual realm because he thought there
was a portal hidden in the jungle that he was
looking for. This is what we're all building towards in

(27:58):
the Percy Fawcett story. But it can sound on the
surface when he's talking about like the great achievements of
these Indians, like he's actually like woke. And he is
for sure not. He's just a lunatic, guys.

Speaker 3 (28:09):
I mean, calling them apes and murdering them and covering
it up is not.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
Just shot a man in the gut for nothing.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah. Well, and the thing where he claimed to have
learned stuff from indigenous people, but never actually, like, bothered
to study them in any meaningful way. It's like, he
is somebody who thinks that the idea of being, like,
taught secrets by indigenous people sounds very cool. And he
would like to be the kind of person who people

(28:34):
assume has been taught secrets by indigenous people. But, like,
he's not actually interested in what any indigenous person has
to say. He's not going to talk to them. They
have weird foreheads or something. What did he say? Slope?

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Like.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
You know, he doesn't like the shape of their skulls.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
No.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
In reality, all of the ancient mysticism that he attributes
to them came from, like, a Russian lady and his brother. Yes.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
He's like, yeah, it sure would be cool to talk
to them. I bet they think all the same things
as that Russian liar. But I'm not going to talk
to them because, again, do not like the shape of
their skulls.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Oh, man. Anyway, you know whose skulls I like? The
skulls of these advertisers. Bring them to me.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
Wait.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, yeah. And we're back. Ah, so the reality of
Fawcett's journeys and competence have been greatly exaggerated, not just
by David Gran. I think this has established that Gran
left out a lot of important stuff and also just

(29:36):
added a lot of stuff that Fawcett himself didn't even
put in the narrative. For his part, Fawcett bragged about
his own toughness constantly, claiming to feel none the worse
for wear after losing 53 pounds in a disastrous expedition.
And that's often, like, you'll see that fact mentioned as, like,
evidence of how hardcore this guy was. Like, this was
a real man. You know, he could really take punishment.

(29:58):
That's what it took to be a great explorer. No,
it's not. He lost 53 pounds because he was a
fucking idiot who got a bunch of people killed for
no reason, planning an expedition really badly. And now we're
going to talk about... So in the movie, it shows
his first expedition as being... which was like his first
actual expedition was up the Heath River. And as we've discussed,

(30:19):
it was not at all that interesting or harrowing. The
journey that most of that first journey in the movie
is based on is a 1908 trip. That's the only
true expedition that Percy Fawcett ever planned. And it was
a five week trip to survey the river Verde for
the state of Brazil. This is the only time that
he actually like planned an expedition into an area that

(30:41):
had not been mapped or charted and tried to map
or chart something. As Henning wrote in an article for Spectator,
Holy shit! In the movie, in like his second or

(31:15):
third expedition, he goes back with this famous explorer that
he actually did go on an exploration with, this guy
who had been an Arctic explorer, and they actually did
have a big falling apart. And the movie shows this
guy is like destroying and wasting all of their rations.
And I just love that in Fawcett's actual worst expedition,
he just didn't think to bring them.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah. You said he lost like 53 pounds or whatever.
If you're losing 53 pounds on a five week trip,
you fucked that trip up.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
You're really bad at planning, man. Like, I'm not a
great backpacker, but I think I do better than that.
My God.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
And he's just and like the people working for him
who he like doesn't seem to be talking.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
About a lot.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
I'm sure carrying all his shit and maybe him sometimes
are just dying. And he's like, what can you do?

Speaker 2 (32:02):
Just dropping like flies. What can you do? I didn't
bring food. I thought there'd be people to hand me food.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
It just proves how hardcore I am, that all of
my people I'm responsible for are dying. It just shows
how good at this I am, actually.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
So much of his reputation for toughness comes from the
fact that he survived starving to death because he himself
did not bring enough food repeatedly. It's very funny. Fawcett
kept going back to the Amazon, though. Even after this
disastrous trip, he would not stop going and he would
not stop writing breathless articles and giving speeches about his
harrowing journeys with nightmare encounters of deadly insects and creatures

(32:39):
and Indians that he'd survived. Hugh Thompson describes Fawcett's public
image pre-war this way. Fawcett self-mythologized, presenting jungle journeys as
if they were Homeric odysseys. He was inspired in his
descriptions by adventure novels such as Jules Verne's La Giganda
and the works of H. Ryder Haggard. All featured trusty companions,
unreliable natives, and clues given by some ancient chronicle. The

(33:00):
relationship between Edwardian writers and explorers was a symbiotic one.
In other words, Fawcett's framing of his own life and
the things he's trying to do in the jungle are
inspired by fiction. He's not... a scientist most of the time,
really ever past those first couple of journeys. He's a
crank who thinks he's in a novel.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
He's kind of LARPing.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
He's LARPing, yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Paying people to come along and pretend with him that
they are doing an adventure, except those people are getting killed.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
He wants to be Alan Quartermain.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
Yeah, not a real guy.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
He keeps getting people killed to do it. Not a
real man.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
Percy was in central Bolivia in September of 1914 when
word came through that his old buddy, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand...
Hadn't made it through his last trip. And there was
going to be a World War I thing starting up soon.
So he probably better get home.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
A World War I thing.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows. Got to get home for World
War I. Don't want to miss that. Don't want to
miss World War I. That would have been a good
time to stay in the jungle, to be honest.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
That World War I thing.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
I'd have gone right back. I don't even care if
there's food. Better than the front.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
I would take starving in the jungle over the trenches. Yeah, no,
for sure. Yeah, easily.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
You can even lie about how hard it was.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
You can even lie about it later. In one of
the few passages where he is far too kind to Fawcett,
Henning writes this about Percy's time at war. He'd hurried
home and by January 1915 was back in the artillery.
In his late 40s, he was too old for frontline service,
but he fought a good war, ending as a lieutenant colonel.
This is Henning trying to be nice to Percy Fawcett

(34:43):
because actually Henning knows that this isn't true. I think
he was just trying to be polite.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
Fought a good war is such a like.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
He did not. He fought.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
He did not. It sounds like it sounds like, you know,
when when the kid like strikes out in a baseball game,
you're like, no, you did. You did good. Like, yeah, try. Yeah,
that's more accurate. Fought a good war is such a.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yeah, that's usually what people describe as like, well, he
did fine in World War I. The movie goes kind
of crazy. It shows him leading a charge across no
man's land during the Battle of the Somme. And again,
he was an artillery man. He stayed behind the lines.
He was not charging into the fucking no man's land.
He wasn't running at German machine gun nests, guys.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
He actually shot a German anaconda.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, he shot a German anaconda right in the belly.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
As Henning stated, he stayed behind the lines, but he
did not do what anyone would call fighting a good war.
During research for the book Brazil That Never Was, author A.J.
Lees happened by chance on a copy of a book
titled Tommy, the British Soldier on the Western Front. And
as he's just doing research on Fawcett, he's thumbing through
this completely unrelated book, and he sees Fawcett's name listed

(35:53):
in the index. And he's like, well, I should probably
look into that, right, if I'm going to be writing
a book about the guy. Yeah. Here's a quote from
his book. I leafed through to the relevant page, dealing
with the problems encountered by the British artillery in quelling
the German heavy guns, and read, Perhaps the most notorious
problem came in 6th Corps in late 1916 when the
Amazon explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett arrived to take up the

(36:14):
new post of Corps Counter Battery Colonel. He immediately declared
that he was not in the least bit interested in
the innovative work being done on the detection of German
guns by flash spotting and sound ranging. The only counter
battery shots which he would allow were those against targets
clearly visible from British lines or those he had personally
detected on his Ouija board. Fuck yes.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
Oh my God.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Love the Ouija board part. These fucking idiots.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
Love that.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
These dipshits who serve under Percy Foster are like, Colonel,
we found that when the gun fires, if you count
how much time happens between seeing the flash and hearing
the explosion and then it landing, you can determine the
distance and use that to directly determine the position of
the German guns and thus shoot at them with our
own guns and take them out. And Percy says, you're

(37:04):
a fucking idiot. I've got a weapon. Ouija board! Like,
that's literally what he's doing. Percy's incredible. It's so fucking funny.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
Fuck your math. I've got a board game I can
use to talk to ghosts.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Trying to spot the German guns and count how far
they are away? No, we'll talk to ghosts about it.
They told me where a city in the jungle is.
It's hard to hear the Ouija board sometimes over the
sounds of all of the men I've led to death
in the jungle. But I think he's saying there's a
gun over there. Incredible. So, I gotta say, when I found...

(37:35):
When I came across this fact, that's what made me
decide to do an episode on Percy Fawcett. The fact
that he's there at the front in the fucking 1916
trying to spot German cannons with a Ouija board. Beautiful stuff.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
And that it's happening as an actual technique for this
exists is amazing.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
And historians wrote about it.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
It's not like you're out at sea before they have
radar and you're like trying to guess where enemy ships are.
It's like, no, we have a way to do this.
You're fucking around with a Ouija board.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
You can actually triangulate the distance of artillery in a
number of ways. But okay, we're just doing nonsense. All right.
And Lees, when he finds this fact in this book,
he writes to John Henning. And Henning, who had written like, well,
Percy fought a good war. And under this questioning, Henning
kind of breaks down and admits like, So actually, my
dad served under Fawcett in World War I. And maybe

(38:30):
I have a couple of reasons to be annoyed by
the guy other than Grant's book. And so Henning's father
served under Fawcett with another officer named Bragg. And the two, quote,
despaired when they learned that the mad psychic Fawcett had
added non-existent German gun emplacements to their highly accurate positions.
In other words, Henning's dad and this other guy were
trying to use like math to find out where the

(38:51):
German guns were. And Fawcett just kept sticking more pins
in and being like, the ghosts have revealed another gun
emplacement to me. Such a cool guy. I love him.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
How did this guy not get shot in the back
by his own men?

Speaker 2 (39:04):
He really was like the prime target for getting shot
in the back by his own men. No officer ever
deserved to be fragged more by his own guys.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
Unbelievable. Like, really amazing he made it out without that
happening to him.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
It's astonishing. So after the war, Percy only grows more
obsessed with his lost city. He'd given exactly one lecture
to the RGS before the war in which he discussed
the possibility of ancient ruins in the Amazon. As Jason
Colavito summarizes, Fawcett's public proclamations on the lost city of
Z were fairly sober. He spoke of the possibility of

(39:38):
a monumental city akin to those of Mesoamerica or the Inca.
And That might seem like kind of plausible because there
are these big stone cities that are really fucking cool
and crazy looking and other jungles, right? Why couldn't there
be something like that in the Amazon? And so like
that makes sense to people. And Percy has another piece
of evidence that he's able to pull up. He's found

(39:58):
by this point a report from 1753 published by a
Portuguese explorer who had run into what he described as
a city in the jungle deep in the Amazon. Percy
had found this on this document in some government files
in Rio de Janeiro, and he brought it forward, and
he would put this forward as evidence that, no, no,

(40:19):
there are credible accounts from white explorers that they found
something in the jungle that resembles this city I've been
talking about. And this account talks about this large, opulent
city made out of stone. There's an entrance gate with
these three huge arches, and it's covered in hieroglyphics of
this indecipherable alphabet. Nearly all of the Fawcett myth today

(40:39):
centers on this 1753 report, which Fawcett learns about after
the war. Now, this is a real report. It does exist.
Other people have seen it. Like, it's been basically everyone
who writes a book about him, like, goes to the
library where it's stored and looks at this fucking thing
as if it's going to bring them more details. And
this is an account by a Portuguese fortune hunter who
goes searching in the Brazilian jungle for rumored lost gold mines.

(41:03):
The party allegedly spent, like, 10 years in the jungle
and never found anything. And one might argue their reports
of a fantastical lost city that they brought back no
evidence of might just have been an attempt to save face. Like, well,
we all were starving in the jungle for fucking years.
But yeah, there's some stone stuff there. Sure.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Did he maybe write this while he was trying to
secure funding for the next expedition?

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Yeah, maybe he wanted to get some money out of someone.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Whatever the truth, the fantastic city described in this paper
is unlike anything Percy Fawcett or anyone else has ever
uncovered in the Amazon. Jason Colavito, who wrote an article
titled Percy Fawcett, Victim of a Theosophical Obsession, provides a
translation and a summary of the sights of this purported city. Quote,
A black stone column of extraordinary greatness and atop it

(41:48):
the statue of an ordinary man with one hand on
his left hip and the right arm extended, pointing the
index finger to the north pole. Another statue depicted a
beardless youth crowned with laurel. A great temple was a
work of such amazing artistry that the writer was left
in awe. Beyond the city was a river leading to
a field of great tombs, all covered in writing. Much later,
Barry Fell would declare the writing, based on hand-drawn copies

(42:09):
in the manuscript, Ptolemaic Egyptian, and the city therefore classical.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
Right?

Speaker 2 (42:14):
So that's this report of, like, this Egyptian-almost-looking city with
hieroglyphics that are clearly of Western origin, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
A youth crowned with laurel sounds a little.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
Okay, doesn't sound like anything in the Amazon, but sure.
As Henning noted in two articles of his own, anyone
with experience in the Amazon finding a city of this
description there would be impossible. The first thing that probably
stands out to most of us is these claims of
hieroglyphic writing. In his article, Jason Colavito accuses Grant of
misleading his readers in a description of the report. Quote,

(42:45):
he edits the manuscript to remove all elements of the fantastic,
listing only stone archways, a statue, roads, and a temple.
He makes the city seem plausible by removing the improbable.
And in a separate critique for the Times Literary Supplement,
Henning accuses Grant of worse obfuscation than this. To bolster
the notion that there might be a lost stone city
in the Amazon forests, Grant quotes from one of my books,

(43:07):
a German-led expedition in the 16th century that saw a
large town that contained golden objects. What he does not
make clear is that this was Philip von Hutten's expedition
of 1543 in the northern Andes of Colombia, and that
the town was of the usual thatch and the gold
was musica. When Grant himself visited the upper Zingu River,
he met the Amazon anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, who was excavating

(43:27):
causeways and concentric ramparts around the current Kukiru village. Heckenberger
explained to him why ruins of a stone city will
never be found in lowland Amazonia. Stone is rare in
a rainforest, whereas timber and thatch are superabundant, but are
perishable to termites and to decay.

Speaker 3 (43:41):
Right?

Speaker 2 (43:42):
We know there were cities.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
That they did earthworks. Exactly. And that makes sense, whereas
quarrying stone in the Amazon would be pretty hard, I imagine.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
It's just not going to happen, really, in the extent
you need for a massive stone city. And Gran leaves
out a lot of details that would make this seem
less plausible and make it clear that Fawcett isn't looking
for a real place. He is looking for a fantasy, right? Right. Now,
Grand does ultimately conclude that Fawcett's vision of Z was
heavily influenced by his spiritual beliefs and not reality. But

(44:15):
the fact is that Fawcett's entire conception of this lost
city and the people who made it was from the
jump based on a theosophic fantasy. In other words, he
believed there was a lost city in the Amazon because
of the occult tradition he followed and because it talked
of fallen cities and advanced elder races. He saw that
1753 report not as confirmation of evidence he'd actually found

(44:36):
in the jungle, but as confirmation of his religious beliefs
that he took with him into the jungle. And yeah,
like that's the core of kind of what's happening here.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
Yeah, so he's genuinely looking for these like theosophical ideals
that that are not a real thing. And he's sort
of pinned it on this thing written by somebody whose
motives we don't know in the 17th century.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Right.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yeah. And that Grant is kind of taking this to
make Fawcett look like more of a man searching for,
more of a man outside of his time, you know,
who believes in something that was eventually proven true. Because
we know there were some larger, you know, there were
some much more habitation in the Amazon than like certainly
Europeans thought there was in that day. We do know
that's true, but Fawcett's not thinking about that. Fawcett believes

(45:26):
there's like a magical city of wizards that he can
access through a portal. Fawcett believes in some Lovecraft shit.
That's what Percy Fawcett's really looking for in the jungle.
He thinks fucking Cthulhu's in there. He thinks he's going
to run into a temple to fucking Azathoth or something
like that, right? He is not thinking. This is all

(45:47):
fucking novels and fantasy shit.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
Yeah, he's not a man out of time because sitting
around and doing drugs had fully been invented by then.
And like, that's how you like meditation and doing drugs.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah. And to be fair, one thing Grand does point
out is that Fawcett's dreams of the city of Z
had a lot in common with fiction stories that writers
like h writer haggard who were his friends wrote right
and that is a good point but i i don't
think he carries it through to his conclusion which is
that like percy just didn't know fantasy from reality like
i really do think that's what's going on here like if.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
You're sitting around writing books about this idea or like
talking about how cool that would be like that's one
thing but you are like getting real actual people real looking.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
For this Yeah, just like you probably got real people
killed trying to hunt down German artillery with a Ouija board.
Who knows who you shot? My God, man.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
There's no good way to die in World War I,
but dying because your commanding officer is using a Ouija
board is particularly bad.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Conductive Iraq counter-battery fire? My God. So Fawcett spends his
post-war years trying to hunt down this fanciful place. In 1920,
for some reason, he leads an expedition and he follows
the route of a German anthropologist nowhere close to where
he thought Z should have been. He was forced to
abort the mission and try again in 1921, further down
the Atlantic coast. He interviewed a bunch of local miners

(47:14):
who knew nothing about a lost city. And this is
kind of accidentally one of the funny things about the
movie is that it'll show Percy periodically just stumbling up
to some man in the jungle and being like, have
you heard of a city? And they'll be like, yeah,
I don't know, maybe, man. And then he'll just wander
back into the jungle. And I think that is kind
of what he's doing for some portion of this.

Speaker 3 (47:33):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
It's like, have you heard rumors of a city? Yeah, okay.
And then off he goes back into the fucking jungle, right?

Speaker 3 (47:41):
He's trying to live out that scene in the book
or the movie of an explorer where they... hear from
some guy in some bar that like oh the city's
out like he's trying to make that scene happen for
him in real life and is instead just like interrupting
some dude doing like his going about his day have

(48:02):
you heard any weird stories and he's like i don't.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
Know sure sure man yeah over there why don't you
go back into the jungle.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
Yeah, all the stories I've heard are about how you
should get away from me.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
You should be far away from my home. You look
like you're riddled with disease, Percy. And he was. He
often was. None of these voyages panned out, and Percy
Fawcett ran out of money. going broke again he can't
like give up this dream so he embarks on a
series of get rich quick schemes that all fail in

(48:36):
at least one instance he seems to have at least
both been conned and possibly robbed he moves his family
to california and they like lose everything i think like
an oil scam um there's a brain yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:47):
He deserved it frankly he couldn't.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
He probably did he did have it coming a little
bit yeah you know who else has it coming the
products and sponsors of this show yeah yeah They have
your money coming to them, I hope. And we're back.
So by this point, the early 20s, his son Jack

(49:13):
is a young man. And both Nina and Percy, while
Percy didn't really raise him, but Nina had raised him
to believe that he was holy, a great spirit destined
for some fine cosmic purpose. Jack tried to live up
to this. He seems to have taken very seriously the
fact that he was like the special golden boy. So
he's trained constantly as a young man in expectation of
the fact that one day dad's going to get enough

(49:35):
money for the final big expedition that will take us
to the lost city of Z. And I've got to
go with him because my destiny's there. He and mom
have both told me my whole life my destiny's there.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
Oh, this kid's going to die in the jungle.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
This kid's so fucking duped. Yeah, he's going to die
in the jungle so bad.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
I mean, parental expectations are hard at the best of times.
But like, I think what most people deal with is
the like, you know, your father and mother and I
worked very hard to send you to school and you
better become a doctor. And like, that's rough. But like,
you are a higher spiritual being.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
And your father has to find enough money to lead
an expedition into the jungle so that you can ascend
through a portal.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
That's what they're teaching this boy.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Tell me about this portal. You've mentioned the portal a
couple of times.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
I have. I have. So by this point, if Fawcett's
view of Z had ever been a belief in a
real physical city that someone could do archaeology on, it
had morphed into a theosophic belief, into a sort of
portal that might lead you to a place or at
least like a place where the veil of reality is
thinner and And one can commune with the secret masters

(50:44):
of the world, right? That's what he's looking for.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
Yeah, you gotta get away from the thick veil we
got over here.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Right. You gotta get to where the shimmer starts or whatever.
Jack became a devoted spiritual practitioner. One friend described his
slight aesthetic restraint as reminiscent of one of the Knights
of the Grail. So he is like living like a
monk almost in order to prepare himself for his great purpose. Now,
I've mentioned H. Ryder Haggard several times. He's the creator

(51:14):
of Alan Quartermain, right, who was played by Sean Connery
in Sean Connery's last movie, which was not very good,
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
Not a good movie. A better graphic novel.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
Yeah, a pretty good graphic novel, yeah. He and Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle became close friends with Percy. Not just
because they loved stories of adventure, but because they were
all spiritualists who were into the same weird occult shit.
Doyle based his novel The Lost World on some of
Percy Fawcett's absolutely falsified accounts of his adventures. And that's
why I say that you can kind of say Alan

(51:46):
Grant is inspired by Percy, too, because The Lost World
is one of the things that helped inspire Michael Crichton
to write Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
They're somewhat different, very different books in a lot of ways, obviously,
but it's in this tradition, and Percy Fawcett is a
part of this tradition. He helps inspire these. You can
draw a line from him to Jurassic Park in some ways,
as well as to Indiana Jones.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
Which just means he could have stuck to writing novels.
We could have a whole series of trashy novels by
this guy that people would probably be facing. This real explorer, right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
He could have maybe fed his family. Yeah. Raised his kids.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Yeah. All kinds of stuff he could have done. Gotten
fewer people killed.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Yeah, certainly would have gotten fewer people killed. Now, for
his part, Haggard helped set Fawcett's doom into motion by
bringing Percy. One day, this novelist comes to his friend's
house with a small stone idol that he'd received from
a fan in Brazil who claimed Indians somewhere in the
interior had made it. And we have an illustration of
this idol that H. Ryder Haggard has, gets given by

(52:47):
this fan. So Sophie will show it to you now.
It looks like an Egyptian idol. idol it's like a
statue of a guy and he's holding like a a
tablet with either hieroglyphics or cuneiforms whatever on it right
yeah it does look kind of very egyptian it certainly
seems like something you'd see in an adventure movie or
even like a lovecraft thing right if you make that
face a little fishier that could work as like a

(53:08):
lovecraft sort of idol right there's something like this at
the start of the call the short story the call
of cthulhu yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
It looks like a good mcguffin it looks like you
start out a movie with somebody finding this absolutely you
got a movie.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
Yeah, you got a movie. This is all you need
to start your journey of exploration. Nicolas Cage could vamp
on this statue for 90 minutes at least.

Speaker 3 (53:27):
Oh, he could do that with anything. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Fawcett became instantly convinced that this statuette came from one
of the lost cities. So now there's more than one
that Percy's convinced of. Oh, cool. Now, unfortunately for both-
One of the lost cities. One of the lost cities.
Come on, my guy. All right, man.

Speaker 3 (53:46):
You gotta find at least one before you can start
talking about there being more than one, I think.

Speaker 1 (53:51):
God.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Men, why? This is crazy. Either of these guys. If
you want to see how much do these men really
know about ancient artifacts- I found an article by the
Archaeological Institute of America, which analyzed the illustration, at least,
we have of the statuette, and noted, however and wherever
Haggard got the thing, it's a fake. The figure's costume

(54:13):
and writing are on par with something from the prop
department of Hercules Conquers Atlantis and have no parallels in
real artifacts. Fawcett took it to the British Museum where,
he noted, experts were unable to tell me anything about
the idol's origin. If not a fake, I was told,
it's quite beyond our experience. Which is a polite way
of them to say to this respected explorer, this is
clearly a fake.

Speaker 3 (54:33):
Yeah, yeah. I think that's the polite British version of.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:39):
Looks like bullshit to me.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
You're a fucking idiot, dude. That's bullshit. That's nothing. I'm sorry, man.
But Fawcett just listens to the it's quite beyond our
experience part. Again, you can't be kind to these people.
They're crazy. You have to be direct to them. Otherwise,
they're going to take their son and his friend to
die in the jungle. Now, on Daunted, Fawcett sought to
learn the secret of the stone image, that's his words,

(55:01):
by having a medium hold the figure in complete darkness
and write down any impressions. The psychometrists saw a large
continent between Africa and South America. Long prior to the
rise of Egypt, there are elaborate temples with beautifully carved
columns and processions of what look like priests, including a
high priest or leader wearing a breastplate similar to the
one in the figure. Then disaster struck. Volcanoes and violent eruption,

(55:25):
flaming lava pouring down their sides. The whole island shakes
with a mighty rumbling sound. The sea rises as if
in a hurricane, and a huge portion of land on
both east and west sides disappears under the water. Is
this Atlantis? It's an Atlantis myth. Yeah, he thinks he's
going after Atlantis and it's in the Amazon.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Awesome. Awesome. It's so cool.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
He's going to get his kid killed doing this. It's
really funny, though.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
And again, he thinks it's from Atlantis because.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
A psychic held it in the dark. Well, he did
try to get his first opinion from an actual reputable expert.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
And when they didn't know anything, he went to a psychic.
And she said it was from Atlantis. Great. So Fawcett,
who published a number of articles in the Occult Review magazine,
believed in the existence of Atlantis and was convinced that
he could find a remnant of its advanced population. After all,
the psychometrist saw the high priest take the very idol

(56:27):
Fawcett possessed and hand it to another priest with instructions
to retain it carefully and in due course deliver it
to an appointed one who in turn must pass it
on at length until it comes into the possession of
a reincarnation of the personage it portrays, when numerous forgotten
things will through its infiniteness be elucidated. In other words,
this medium says like, oh, I'm seeing as the city falls,

(56:48):
they're handing this idol off and say, pass it on
until you find the man who can deliver it to
the reincarnation of our great priest.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
And we've already set up that he thinks his son
is a reincarnation.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
He thinks it's his son?

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Yes!

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Oh, no. So he thinks H. Ryder Haggard's given him
a little statue of his boy in the past. It's
really funny.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
Well, this will end well.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Yeah, this is going to end great. In his own book,
based on extensive letters between Nina and Percy discussing this, A.J.
Lee has come to believe that Percy grew so obsessed
with the lost city of Z because it thought it
would lead him to an underground great white lodge. where
he could execute what he and Nina had taken to
calling the Great Scheme. And they capitalized each of the
first letters in those words.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
I don't want any great white lodges executing any great schemes.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (57:36):
This is a great scheme. You're going to love this scheme.
He would send word to Nina after finding it, the city,
whereupon she, along with other sympathizers, would join the three
men and form a community on the Brazilian plateau, broadly
modeled on the one Harold Large had created. Now, I
got to stop you there. Harold Large was a wizard
and a friend of the Fawcetts from New Zealand, and
in 1907— Large had founded an experimental magical community named

(58:00):
the Havelock Work in New Zealand. This was a free
love and also art and woo-focused place where everyone could
fuck and make art and do sex magic, I think,
is the basic idea behind this commune.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
I mean, that honestly, that sounds fine if people want
to do that. That sounds pretty great to.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Do in New Zealand. Yeah. Like, not the middle of
the Amazon with just you and your son and his friend.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
I mean, I would even venture to say maybe go
back to England and do it there.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Go back to England anywhere.

Speaker 3 (58:30):
But yeah, I mean, you know, it's fine. People are
going to be wizards.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
I don't know much about this free love wizard community.
But I will say that his largest focus was that
like the modern world is destroying us. It's this tyrannical
place that is like destroying the human soul. And so
we have to create these communities so that like enlightened
beings can gain the actual psychic power that they're supposed
to have or something like that. I think it's the
basic idea behind the Havelock work.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
So the Faucets are so inspired by what their friend
Large is doing that they kind of work this into
their vision of what's going to happen when Percy finds
this mystical city, right? That he'll send for his wife
and all of their friends. and they'll all move to
this like place where the veil of reality is thin
in the Amazon and they'll live forever as like free
love wizards, I guess. I think that's the basic idea.

(59:20):
And it's important that you note that Percy's bringing his
son to this place, but the commune isn't going to
have a place for Jack, which I guess is good
because that would be kind of weird because his parents
are both going to be, I guess, fucking all their
friends there. I'm going to continue from Lee's book.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
I wish there was a responsible adult taking over for
this kid, but I don't think they're going to find
him in the wizard commune, frankly.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
No, they have not. Um, How old is the kid?
He's like 19 or 20 or something right now. He's
a young adult. No, no, no. He's got to be
older than that. He's got to be in his early
20s because he was born in like 1903, right? Yeah,
early 20s. So Lees writes, Jack Fawcett would be handed
over to the Earth Guardians and his physical body would

(01:00:03):
be taken over by an ancient other. He would then
depart Brazil and set up a new lodge near Trincomalee
in Ceylon. There, a new colony of evolved beings would
wrest control from national governments and become the masters of
the universe, guiding the human race back to a new beginning.
So that's the best explanation I've seen is what Percy
thought he was really doing out in the fucking jungle.

(01:00:24):
I got to give my son up to these spirits
so that he can take over governing Ceylon. And then
me and my wife will get to fuck in the
jungle with our friends forever. I think that's kind of
the idea as far as I can tell.

Speaker 3 (01:00:37):
He's signing over his son's actual body to a spirit.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
To the Earth Guardians. Okay. To the Earth Guardians.

Speaker 3 (01:00:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
Who are going to give his body to another. Don't
know what happens to Jack's spirit. That's actually kind of unclear.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Yeah, I hope I hope it gets a break from
all this. This kid never had a chance.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
No. So as evidence that the Jack was fucked from
the jump, as evidence that the faucets really believed this stuff,
Lee's includes in his book, a letter that Jack wrote
to their to large the guy with that commune in
New Zealand in 1924. And this is Jack. I begin
to look upon Ceylon as my own private property now
and feel quite annoyed to think there are thousands of

(01:01:16):
strangers laying down the laws there. You seem to think
we shall soon go, and that always cheers us up.
Where clairvoyants fail, we always say, well, H.L. did not
say that, or H.L. says we must go, and he knows.
So this guy, Henry Large, definitely gets them killed too, right?
He's for sure a part of this. He's hugely to blame.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
I begin to look on Ceylon as my private property now.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Look, how could this not go to your head? And
that you get a bit of that from his younger
brother who writes the book, like who edits his dad's
notes into the book Expedition Faucet because he's like, Jack
wasn't a great spirit. He was kind of a dick sometimes.
I think he probably was an asshole.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
I mean, again, this is a little bit too much
cultic belief for like one child. Like this kid is
going to be messed up.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
I could both say he was probably pretty annoying to
be around because he thought he was a god. But also,
what else could have happened here? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
If he made it into his mid to late 20s
and got away from his parents, it would be his
responsibility to figure things out and become a better person.
But I'm guessing he doesn't get that chance. Sure.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
He doesn't, and even then, it's not just his parents.
As that letter shows, guys like Large, who are famous
and rich and very well-regarded, keep coming up to him
and saying, yep, you're definitely a great spirit in there. Yep, yep,
you're going to become a god and rule over Ceylon
one day, my boy. It's not just his parents. He's
really getting this reinforced by a lot of adults who

(01:02:44):
should know better.

Speaker 3 (01:02:45):
Yeah, and who are using him to play out just...
They're sort of spiritual fantasies, just like stuff they think
would be cool.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
No, and they're pissed because World War I happened, and
it kind of proved that the world isn't just getting better,
even though you thought it was. Things are really bad, actually,
and they're about to get worse. And all these people
just want to break away and go fuck somewhere pretty
and do magic.

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
Yeah, but, you know, whom's among us?

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
And I get it, but you can do that without
sacrificing all of your... For example, you could have just
written some books, Percy, and bought a house, done that.
That's an option.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
That's a lovely option. Just spitballing here, man. Sounds great.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Just spitballing. I'm not doing an episode on H. Ryder Haggard,
you know? I mean, maybe I should, actually. Because he
and Lars are definitely two of the people besides Percy
who are most to blame for what happened. Next. In 1925,
broke and aging, Fawcett put together one last Hail Mary
of an expedition. It included Jack and his son Jack's
best friend, Raleigh Rimmel. Before going, Percy visited a psychic

(01:03:48):
named Helen Berry. She claimed to have been born into
a mysterious mystical order dedicated to preparing human beings for
important spiritual tasks. And she basically tells him, oh yes,
this statue, Percy, is a statue of yourself as a
priest in a past life, and you must take it
into the jungle. Also, and this is something Lees writes
in his book, Other mediums that Fawcett contacted around this

(01:04:10):
time provided him with advice on the exact location of
the South American lodge and answered some of his other uncertainties,
such as whether humans can have sexual relations with elementals.

Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
I'm so glad he cleared that up. I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
First off, that should tell you what Percy's really thinking
about with this journey is like the sex magic is
a big part of this for him. I think I
don't think that gets enough credit in any of the
books about this.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
Again, it's so many people do sex magic without getting
anyone killed. Like exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
Very rarely do they get people killed. Um, this is
not anti-sex magic. This is an anti-whatever the hell Percy
Fawcett's doing podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
Whatever you're into, you know, but like, and it's amazing
how many psychics he seems to find who tell him
what he wants to hear. Weird how that works out.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
You'll note that that psychic's telling him a little bit
different thing from the last one, right? And he interprets
them all a little differently, but The fact that no
one's ever saying exactly the same things never really dissuades Percy.
Maybe these people are all just kind of making shit
up separately, right? So as for why this 1925 expedition
winds up being Percy's last, here's John Henning again. The

(01:05:24):
old surveyor, Percy, made two suicidal pronouncements. One was that
the trio should travel light with nothing more than small packs.
Everyone in Amazonia knew that you could not cut trails
and keep your team fed with fewer than eight men.
I can confirm this having done months of such cutting
and carrying. But Fawcett sent their pack animals and porters
back and continued with only his two novices. His other

(01:05:46):
dictum was that Indians would look after them. This was
equally dangerous. The Zingu tribes pride themselves on generosity, but
they expect visitors to reciprocate. All expeditions in the past
four decades had brought plenty of presents, such as machetes, knives,
and beads. Fawcett had none. And this is a thing
that when people have talked to the actual indigenous folks
who were alive at the time, as a number of

(01:06:07):
expeditions did, they'd all be like, well, he kept asking
for food and he didn't like have anything. Like he
wasn't doing the thing you're supposed to do, which is
where you like, give us a gift. And like, sometimes
they stole shit sometimes they were rude you hear different
stories some of them are true some of them probably
aren't but like the one thing that comes through is
that they were seen as rude and they were seen
as rude in part because they didn't bring anything with

(01:06:28):
them and it is it's actually kind of rude to
like stumble into a place you've never been and don't
understand starving to death because you didn't bring enough shit
and they'd be like hey guys can i have your
food can me and my butt my kids have your
food sorry can we have like all of it we
are starving It's kind of a dick move.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
If that happens because, wow, something really bad happened to you,
your boat wrecked, whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
Of course we'll help you out, man. Shit happens. It's
the jungle.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
You, on purpose, didn't bring the stuff you had the
resources to bring because you had this idea. based on
your refusal to study and learn from the indigenous people.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
You're a white man. We know the shit white people
have access to. You should be bringing stuff with you,
first off. We've seen others. And also, we know you, Percy,
by this point. You kind of have a reputation for
being a cheapskate. You know?

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
But the psychic said he was entitled to it, so...
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
He had to take over Ceylon. God.

Speaker 3 (01:07:27):
You know what? It's nice that just once the white
male entitlement will get this guy what he deserves.

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
Yeah, he and his son and his son's buddy, who
all die. Long story short, they all die. They all
die probably horrifically. These are probably not good deaths. They
are never heard from again. They send a couple of
letters early in their expedition, then they just disappear. And
we have no idea what happened to them unless you
take the highly credible accounts of local tribesmen... We say
they were murdered for being dicks or going in a

(01:07:58):
place they shouldn't have gone or a combination of the two, right? Now,
there are some other plausible theories. Maybe they got lost
and sick because they didn't bring enough stuff. Maybe there's
even one account that they were mercy killed because some
locals are like, oh, you guys are going to get
yourselves murdered. And we know the people you're going to
get murdered by are really fucked up. So we're actually
going to kill you now out of kindness because we

(01:08:19):
can't stop you. You're clearly deranged, but we don't want
you to suffer. Wow. That is one of the accounts.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
Damn. I mean, is it also possible that they found
a portal that led them to Atlantis and their king's
there now?

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
Maybe they found a portal. Has anyone been to Sri
Lanka ever? I don't know. I've never heard of a
person from Sri Lanka. It's possible. No way to know.
Other than by briefly researching if there's things in. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
Turns out a whole country.

Speaker 3 (01:08:48):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
Is it governed by the ghost of a white boy? Nope. Nah,
it's not. Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
So not that then.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
Not that then. I'm sorry, guys. I did a little
bit of research there. It turns out not. um that
was my bad that was my weird.

Speaker 3 (01:09:01):
This ouija board says they totally made it wow oh
okay well two sources different things you know that means
it's in dispute if we're the.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
I'm not interested in litigating like what exactly happened to
Fawcett and his kid and his kid's friend because it's
not really a mystery. They did a stupid thing in
a dangerous place and they died. That's what happened to them. Um,
Large and Nina corresponded for years after Percy went missing.
And there's some really upsetting passages in their letters in

(01:09:32):
the book, Brazil That Never Was, where Nina is clearly
really worried about her son and her husband. And Large
is like, don't worry. I know they're going to be fine.
They're going to come out of the jungle. Percy will
be out of the jungle any day now. Don't you worry.
And he, she really gets strung along for a while there.
It's kind of a bummer. That's a bummer.

Speaker 3 (01:09:49):
Yeah, that sucks.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
Yeah. Modern historiography has proven Fawcett's theory about a lost
city sort of right, if you squint. We do know
that the Amazon was much more densely peopled, prival to
the arrival of white people and disease. I think one
theory is that during roughly the medieval period, what we'd
call the medieval period, there would have been a population

(01:10:10):
of between 1.5 and as much as like 2 to 2.5,
maybe even 3 million people living in the Amazon, which
is much more densely peopled than certainly the Europeans knew
it to be after contact. And they did have, we
have also found evidence using LIDAR scans of what very
likely were semi-large urban communities around where Percy expected to
find Z. These were not cyclopean stone cities or modern metropolises,

(01:10:34):
but we're talking, you know, populations in the thousands, you know,
five or six thousand, not millions, right? These are not
like vast, you know, things. But these were fairly advanced
sites created by fairly advanced cultures. And one very prominent
theory suggests that a lot of the Amazon was crafted
intentionally over a long span of time as basically a
giant living grocery store, a food forest, right? And so

(01:10:56):
we should look at the Amazon not as like this
primeval unspoiled wilderness that people never advanced in, but as
a thing that people shaped and changed and engineered to
a significant extent in order to better suit their own
needs and provide them with a more comfortable lifestyle. And
then they all got sick and died. A lot of them,
not all of them, but a lot of them got

(01:11:16):
sick and died. And so a lot of the larger
communities that had existed were gone by the time Europeans
were fucking around there. And they were just like, it's
complete wilderness, which is not really the case probably, right?
We don't know for sure. These are theories, you know?

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
And none of those people were ancient Greeks or ancient Egyptians.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
We know that. They definitely were ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Yeah,
that's 100% confirmed.

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
Wow. Yeah, I do want to quote once more from
an article by Hugh Thompson, who's that Peruvian scientist and
adventurer who led numerous expeditions, and he wrote this of
Fawcett for the Washington Post. As Grant acknowledges in his book, again,
you will find nothing of it in the film, Fawcett
was deeply conflicted about his suspicion that there might have

(01:11:59):
been an earlier advanced civilization in the Amazon, a suspicion that,
for all the wrong reasons, he was right about, although
he himself never found anything to prove it. He could
not reconcile this with his poor opinion of the Indian tribes,
So he postulated the existence of white Indians who had
somehow traveled across the Atlantic from Europe and brought civilization
with them.

Speaker 3 (01:12:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
And that's all you deserve to remember Percy Fawcett as.
He was a crank who got his kid killed.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
And if he'd been less racist and paid attention to
what people there said and how they lived, then he
probably wouldn't have died. So, like, congratulations, white man dies
of racism. That's actually kind of cool.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:12:36):
Too racist to live.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
Yep. Wow. Yep. Cool. Well.

Speaker 1 (01:12:42):
Miriam, you got anything you want to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:12:46):
Yeah, there's this secret lost city in the jungle, actually.
So I would like to plug my podcast, which I
do with members of my anarchist publishing collective that I'm in,
which is called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Your friend,
Margaret Kiljoy, is also in that collective. So she is

(01:13:07):
also on the podcast a lot. Um, the podcast is
live like the world is dying and it is a
podcast for people who feel like it's getting pretty fucked
up and we'd like to talk about what to do
about it. And also we're not, um, trying to hide
in a bunker with beans, but, uh, build community and, um,
skills and also beans are good, you know, but we're just,

(01:13:30):
beans are good. We're mostly anti bunker, I would say. Um,
But yeah, we got stuff going on over there. We're
Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness on some various social media platforms,
and check us out.

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
Sweet. Yeah, check it out, and check out the Amazon.
You know what? I'm going to go on an expedition
down there and find a commune, or a place for
a commune, and then... some ghosts and i don't know
i think one of us will wind up ruling an
island in southeast asia pretty good chance if you just
go to the jungle just buy a buy a plane
ticket to brazil or anywhere with a jungle just fly

(01:14:06):
there and start walking just walk out you'll find me
you know just go into the jungle.

Speaker 1 (01:14:11):
Bad news my ouija board just told me if you
do that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:14):
You'll die well i don't believe your ouija board it
wasn't right about the artillery stuff good night everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of
Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every
Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you
don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog,

(01:14:46):
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at
Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
We love you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
About 40% of you, statistically speaking.