Dr. James Fitzsimmons

And so in the 90s, I was a student.

I was at Tulane University.

Uh, in new Orleans.

Uh, I'm actually, I grew up on long Island, but I, uh, yeah, but I, I went to Tulane, um, because I was pre-med and we see how that worked out.

Uh, it had a, it had a, uh, a really good, um, pre-med program.

It was like an early acceptance.

Right.

And so I went there and I didn't know any, I didn't know anything about Maya stuff or any, I wasn't like, I was like a lot of little kids, uh,

If you meet somebody that's my age and they tell you that they weren't like into Indiana Jones and that's not why they became an archaeologist, they're lying.

Of course we were.

We all were, right?

And so, you know, yeah, whatever.

I'm like in second grade or something like that.

Yeah, like that was my thing.

I do this pre-med thing and I get to Tulane and it just so happened they had a really good Latin American studies program, Latin American archeology and anthropology there.

And it just so happened they had one of the experts on hieroglyphs there.

And so I took a class and I was like one of those nerdy kids that like,

with a blackboard or something, like practice glyphs in the basement of a building somewhere.

That was me in my dorm.

I was just doing that, sort of learning this stuff.