Exploring Ancient Civilizations with Albert Lin

0:02You see the bricks there, and then you see little bits of pottery lying on the ground, and you pick up a piece of pottery, and you look at it. I mean, it's just a shard. It's just like this piece of pottery that's been sitting in the jungle for 800 years or something like this. And it still has the fingerprint of the person who made it on the inside, and you put your thumb against that fingerprint, and you are there. You're holding the thumb of the person who made this 800 years ago.

0:38Wild Ideas Worth Living:Albert Lin is a renowned explorer, scientist, and storyteller. He has accomplished a lot, but he's probably most known for his TV presence as the host of multiple National Geographic series, including Lost Cities. In these expeditions, Albert and his team use satellites, drones, ground-penetrating radar, and cutting-edge LIDAR technology to uncover ancient civilizations from Guatemala to Sudan in Scotland. On the show, you may have seen him hacking through the jungle with a machete, a prosthetic leg, and lasers in the sky to find secrets of our past that can shape our future. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:25Wild Ideas Worth Living:This episode contains a discussion about Albert's experience using psilocybin for medicinal treatment. It does not constitute medical advice. Listen responsibly and consult your doctor about your medical care.

1:40Wild Ideas Worth Living:Albert largely grew up in Northern California, where his dad was an astrophysicist and his mom was an actress and musician. In a household where big questions were always on the table, Albert developed a deep sense of curiosity. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in science and engineering from UC San Diego. After he graduated, Albert's life took a turn when he traveled to Mongolia in search of answers about his family's heritage. While he was there, he connected with the culture and became fascinated with the story of Genghis Khan, the legendary and controversial leader who once ruled the largest empire in history.

2:23I learned from the Mongolians that Genghis Khan was a hero to them. Not a villain like you hear about in the West, but like a hero. And the story about him was never really told. No paintings were ever made of him while he was alive. Nobody really ever had any documentation of him from his own people while he was alive. No tombs of he or his ancestors have ever been found. So there's just never been any hard evidence. It's all just conjecture. And yet for the Mongolian people, he created the largest empire in human history in landmass and population in a single lifetime, like more than the Romans, more than anything.

3:00And so growing up, I was like, well, where are my heroes? And all of a sudden I find this hero. And at the same time, I have to fly home and finish my PhD in engineering. And I'm like, well, what the hell? Like I need to merge these two worlds together. And so essentially the next step was figuring out how to use engineering and technology to go find this tomb. And that's when I graduated.

3:27Wild Ideas Worth Living:So you applied for this grant to go find, and I'm saying his name wrong, Genghis Khan's tomb. Yeah, Genghis Khan. How do you say it? Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan. That's what the vogels call it. I love that. Okay. Did you find it? Here's what we found. we found a series of temples buried in the roots of trees that were surrounding this plateau on the exact mountain that we had identified as where the tomb should be. And no one else had found that? Nobody. And it's because it is in the center of a precinct that's known as the Forbidden Precinct, the Ikkorik, that's been protected and hidden away by the Kree of Genghis Khan himself for 800 years.

4:09and it's right on the border of outer Mongolia and Russia.

4:12Wild Ideas Worth Living:How did you find it when no one else had? So to get access to this sacred site, we had to find a way to look non-invasively without digging. So all of a sudden I started turning to all my friends and we're like, okay, let's use satellites. Let's get drones. Let's get radar. And we built out this whole virtual expedition that could sense through the ground without digging the ground. But what ended up happening was while we got permission to this sacred place that had been forbidden to go to for 800 years, we get there and all these storms are whipping all around us. And all of a sudden, the storms rip up all this earth into the roots of trees.

4:51So the trees tip over and they rip up like these windows into the earth. And as we're hiking up to try to scan this mountain with all our radars, all of a sudden we're looking and it's like the mountain had shown us what was there. and it was this just cluster of temples right underneath our feet. And as we walk across, you're standing on a roof and then you reach into the roots of a tree and you pull out an arrowhead and a horse tooth and a gold bit of lacquer and some other piece of pottery. And you're like, wow.

5:18Wild Ideas Worth Living:Wait, that is like most people's dream to discover something like that. How did you feel when that happened? You know, it's like every cliche about life, You know, that moment of discovery, that moment where you actually find something that's been hidden away for hundreds of years. I think it's the same thrill that drives us to stay curious. But when it actually gets realized like that, that feeling, that aha, it's so remarkable. It sends all these chills up your back. And, you know, you're just like, what? And it takes a while to sink in. And we ended up finding all this stuff in the base of the temples.

6:00Even though we didn't excavate, we could see these voids. And we think those are burial chambers. I think they are. And all the horse bones and all the little bits of fragment, burnt wood, everything that we found there dates to exactly the time of Genghis Khan's death. So that's what I'll leave it at. We were about to get the cover story of Newsweek. And then all of a sudden, the Mongolian government embargoed the findings. And they were going to create this big protection zone around it. heritage thing around it. And now, you know, I've been invited to maybe go back and publish the remainder of the work, but there's literally hundreds of pounds of artifacts from that place in the lab showing that, I mean, what else could it be, right?

6:39And not only did I find this deep story of Genghis Khan and of the Mongolian culture, but I think I found my roots in something about being human, you know, like believing that there is this deep curiosity in me that is real and that doesn't need to be denied because it sounds childish or a thing of the past or whatever, but that it's real. That journey taught me that asking big ideas and searching for mysteries, that's the life for me.

7:17Wild Ideas Worth Living:In the process of searching for this tomb, Albert realized that he had a deep passion for exploring ancient civilizations. He began learning more about technology used by experts in the field. But in 2016, after becoming a prominent archaeological engineer, Albert's life was upended by a major traumatic event. He was riding in an ATV outside of San Diego when he was in an accident. When the roll cage came down on my leg, it was just, everything was shattered to bits. And then all of a sudden, I'm sitting in a hospital, and I'm like wondering, am I ever going to walk again or anything? And that was a little bit scary at first.

7:55Then they went through months, about a month of surgeries to do what they called limb salvage. Getting your leg opened and closed and opened and closed through all these surgeries and all this. I mean, it was mostly metal at that point anyway.

8:13Wild Ideas Worth Living:After many unsuccessful surgeries, Albert chose to have his leg amputated. It was a hard decision, but he preferred the certainty of amputation to the unpredictability of continued pain and mobility issues. As he was navigating this massive life change, there were big things happening in the world of archaeology. Scientists were using new LIDAR technology to search for ancient Mayan ruins in the Paten jungle of Guatemala This technology uses laser pulses to cut through layers like dense forest canopies to create highly detailed three-dimensional maps of the terrain It was the kind of project that Albert had always dreamed of Despite the fact that he was still recovering, he was invited to participate in the expedition

9:03in the recovery period i get this message from my friend tom who just collected this landmark data set of the jungles of the paten there was 60 000 new mine structures discovered he's like well the data's looking pretty crazy right now you know there's just so much out there that has yet to be discovered and then i get this other call from nat geo saying hey well you you know you're very good at telling these stories uh we want you to go all through the paten right now and meet all the different archaeologists as they're making the discoveries we've got a helicopter on standby be ready to go and i was i was still in a wheelchair you know but that's what i love about nat geo in that they didn't make that the decision maker they were they let me decide where my limits were, you know?

9:54And so the funny thing is I never did PT. Really the first few major steps, like long journeys were in the jungles with my new body. And it was all happening at the same time. So, you know, I -

10:11Wild Ideas Worth Living:So you got a prosthetic leg as you went to Guatemala. Basically to go to Guatemala, I had to get my first prosthetic leg built. And I was still using walking sticks and it was still really raw. But all this data had come in and it was about to go down. And I remember my friend calls and he's like, okay, well, they're about to let us in, but the permits are getting held up and everything's getting weird. And everybody was stuck in the town outside of the jungle in Guatemala. And I flew in. He's like, come in, come in, let's go. And I was still getting around everywhere with walking sticks. and all the archaeology digs were held up, but there was this one guru archaeologist, this guy, Steve Houston, who basically decoded the Mayan glyphs.

11:02But he doesn't stop, you know, and he doesn't have any sympathy. It's like he doesn't...

11:09Wild Ideas Worth Living:He sounds gnarly. He doesn't care if you're hurting. Like he just has no sympathy whatsoever. He's just no bullshit. and it's kind of exactly what I needed you know and he he's like well let's just go let's just go on and we'll just hike we won't do any excavations we'll just go for a hike and the minute we get into the jungle all of a sudden we're going off trail and we realize that the gps that we were using to try to find these coordinates doesn't work because you have no line of sight to the sky right you can't see through the trees so now we're just dead reckoning with a compass old school style with this map that had just been created with lasers in the sky.

11:50And we're hiking around and we're crawling up this escarpment. And I distinctly remember the moment where I had to put my walking sticks into my backpack and pull out my machete. And it was like, oh, all the inabilities are sort of falling away. It kind of felt like that moment in Forrest Gump where he's running and all of a sudden all the braces fall off and everything.

12:11Wild Ideas Worth Living:And it was like, oh, I got to go. I got to get the machete. We're going and I'm following this guy with this map and we're going to go find this thing. And eventually, up this giant escarpment, there we are standing in front of a pyramid that had been sitting there for a thousand years that had never been seen since the time of its use. How crazy. What was the pyramid like? Well, pyramids in the jungle look like big mountains covered in trees because the jungle takes over very quickly. But then you look around and you see the bricks there. And then you see little bits of pottery lying on the ground.

12:49And you pick up a piece of pottery. And you look at it. And it still has the fingerprint of the person who made it on the inside. And you put your thumb against that fingerprint. And you are there. And it's like. and I can't describe the feeling of being superimposed into the presence of somebody from 800 years ago in this sacred landscape that they had basically left to nature. But it's profound. You know, it's profound. And all my physical stuff, my prosthetic, everything else like that, it all just sort of melted away.

13:34Wild Ideas Worth Living:In the jungles of Guatemala, Albert and his team found a sacred altar, undiscovered cave systems, and even a seven-story pyramid that dated back all the way to 562 CE. While Albert was on this expedition, he was so immersed in his work that he barely thought about his injury. The discomfort from his amputation seemed to fade into the background. Once the adrenaline wore off and Albert was back in the States, though, he began experiencing intense pain in part of his leg that was no longer there. Eventually, doctors diagnosed him with a condition known as phantom limb pain.

14:12For a lot of folks that have their limb amputated, the brain still is saying there's something wrong. And it's wrong in a part of your body that no longer exists. So imagine feeling something really intense and then trying to go grab for it and all you get is air. And at first it was all-consuming to the point in which it felt like you're gasping for air below the surface of the water, but you can't get up to the top of it. It feels like your foot's being lit on fire or like there's electrodes being shot through it. And there's no pain meds that can approach it, right? Like you can't take a pain med to cure something in your brain.

14:56And so there was at UCSD, this neuroscientist, and he discovered this process called mirror box therapy, where you could use a mirror to trick your mind into seeing two limbs again when you lose one limb. It's like when, have you ever done that thing when you were a kid where you'd sit next to maybe your large sliding door mirror in their closet or something, and you'd stick one leg and arm out the side and you can like fly in the reflection of the mirror. Do you know what I'm talking about?

15:22Wild Ideas Worth Living:Totally know what you're doing, yes. Yeah, so it's like that. But now you're trying to create two arms again or two legs again. And then your brain is like, oh, it's no longer in pain. It'll release the pain. And I remember walking into his room, his office. It looks like you're walking into Darwin's office. There's brains in jars. There's dinosaurs everywhere. There's weird mandalas on the walls. There's everything, right? and he's lighting my foot on fire with a fake Halloween blowtorch, but it's not my foot anymore and I'm feeling it. I'm like, oh my God. And then I remember it was around Halloween and he went to a Halloween store and got a severed leg from the Halloween store and attached it to my body so I'd see two legs again and then remove it over and over again so I could see it being removed.

16:10And it was really gruesome because it was a Halloween leg I was covered in blood and gore and everything like that, but he was doing what he had. It was pretty funny. But every time those images would be removed, the pain would come rushing back in. It's almost like I was seeing a story, but I wasn't truly believing the story. And this was a very, very awe-inspiring realization to me that reality is a matter of deep neuroplastic belief making and manifesting what's all around us. So what ended up happening was with him, I looked towards all the research and they're showing that people in deep states of depression were using psychedelics to let go of their traumas in a heightened moment of neuroplasticity.

17:11So that's what we did. We combined the mirror with a heavy dose of psilocybin, and boom, the pain went away and it was gone. It was really gone. And I'm happy to say that now we are past the first clinical trial at UCSD in the new Center for Psychedelic Research that was born out of this, and it's super, super, super successful. So it is really, really remarkable to think that these tools can help us change our reality. But what really got me going was realizing that these are not modern tools. This isn't some discovery of the 1960s. This goes back to the Mexica, back to the time before Maria Sabina in the states of Mexico, Oaxaca, before then, all the way back to the ancient Mayans and before that.

17:58These uses of entheogens, these uses of tools to get to neuroplasticity, they have been a part of our culture since the dawn of our humanity. And not just drugs from plants, but other tools, chanting, dance, architecture, climbing a mountain, being in awe. And the other part of this, what is the source of imagination? Where does new knowledge come from? You know, when we began our humanity, we had a very basic amount of information. And now we have this wild world of knowledge around us. We've lost a lot of knowledge too. But everything was imagined first and then became reality, right? Where did all that stuff come from?

18:39Where's the birth of imagination? And when I saw my leg and my reality in my leg coming through in this moment where it was like, I can literally imagine a new reality, but I have to get to this neuroplastic state first. I started thinking that actually all culture has these tools, almost like these portals towards neuroplasticity, and they are our vehicles to imagine the cultures that then emerge from them. In order to get to a place where you can create a new reality, you have to be in a neuroplastic state. You have to get to that origin source of imagination itself. self.

19:20Wild Ideas Worth Living:Albert launched the first case study using psilocybin to treat phantom limb pain. His experience with neuroplasticity not only changed the way he relates to his own body, but it led to the creation of the Center for Psychedelic Research at UCSD and a multi-million dollar clinical trial based on that case study. It also shifted his understanding of how we adapt, survive, and make meaning across time. Albert describes it as a search for what it means to be human, both individually and collectively.

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20:45Wild Ideas Worth Living:That's rei.com slash MasterCard dash podcast. Terms apply.

20:59Wild Ideas Worth Living:Albert Lin is an explorer, scientist, and storyteller. With a background in science and engineering, he's helped make incredible discoveries while searching for ancient civilizations around the world. He's also learned a lot about culture and psychology through deeply transformative experiences in his own life. These moments have changed the way he thinks about humanity.

21:25Wild Ideas Worth Living:What have you discovered about what it means to be human? Well, one is we are both incredibly unique from culture to culture, but also really, really, really similar. I'm trying to make a film now about this kid. My friend discovered a couple of years ago, this kid in a cave in Borneo who had his leg amputated 31 ,000 years ago. And this kid survived for up to a decade afterwards and had this very beautiful, intentional burial that survived time for 31 ,000 years. And we're talking about like, just, I know that number kind of throws, it's like, what? 31 ,000 years ago is a very long time ago. We're talking about before all the civilizations, Egypt, everything, before everything into our like pre-human civilization dawn.

22:21We're talking about Stone Age. In the earliest days of our existence, this kid had a major accident. And instead of being left, which at a time of hunter gatherers, you'd think it'd be more convenient to leave somebody who can't move behind, a community got around this person, figured out how to amputate their leg, figured out how to keep them from infection, figured out how to get them to survive. There's even wear on the bones that suggest a prosthetic. But then when you look at that cave and where the burial is, there's all these handprints on the walls. And those handprints are from the people who cared for that kid.

22:57So what that tells me, and what I've experienced in my own life, is that we have an instinct to care about each other. Despite what you see in the news all day long, and all the negativity that's out in the world, and all that, I've noticed time and time again, that when it really comes down to what I experience in humanity is that we have an innate desire to care for each other. So that's one. The second thing is, is that something happens when you feel the power of collective thought. When we put our minds towards something collectively, it actually, I think shifts things. And I've had moments in my life where I was at the center of a room where a community around the world was focusing their prayers and thoughts.

23:49When I lost my leg, when my friend Jamie died, and more recently when my son had a traumatic brain injury. And I know this is not a very science-y way to describe it, but I've seen that moment three different times, and I've literally felt the light in the room change. It becomes shinier almost. I don't know. This is anecdotal, but these are the most intimate moments of my life. and these intimate moments, I have felt the power of collective thought. And I think that that tells me that we are a collaborative set of beings and that we have a lot more power in our collective thought than we give credence to.