Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, it can melt soft stones around in those, like, copper, gold, silver mines. Right. So that's not the same thing, like, my dad totally schooled me. My dad's a chemist, and, like, none of those acids could burn through andesite. Really? So I kind of dropped that. But now I think maybe... Maybe it's hydrofluoric acid because there's a lot of fluorite. And the other part is sulfuric acid.
Hydrofluoric acid is sulfuric acid plus fluorite. And Peru has a ton of fluorite. In fact, the Inca were making jewelry out of it. And so you can take those two things in earth. You can carry sulfuric acid in a vessel without it burning through or hurting yourself. But if you take that and fluorite and put them together, you make hydrofluoric acid. And that will burn through anything.
Isn't that from Breaking Bad? You remember that? They could carry it in plastic, right? It was weird. All the way through the floor. That's it. Floor. Yep. It was Breaking Bad that made me think, like...
In Breaking Bad, there's something weird about plastic, which is, I guess, a petroleum product, that it won't burn through. But it'll burn through andesite like nobody's business. I have geologists who are trying to get them a sample from a seam in between... Inca walls. I've asked a couple of times and the Peruvians are like, no, you can't cut into our walls, weird gringo.
But I got to find myself a Peruvian partner who can approach them instead of me. But the geologists, I was like, well, hey, can I come into your lab and can we burn a chunk of vandecite with hydrofluoric acid? They were like, no. Everybody knows that could be done. That's just a fact. What you've got to prove is that they were doing it.
I still want them to burn a rock for me, but I see their point. Just because I can burn a rock doesn't mean that that's how the Inca did it. That's fascinating. But they do say that if I get a sample – that they can do neutron activation on that sample and figure out what elements are there and that if a strong acid was used, they can detect it. Wow. So I've got to get that sample.
Yeah, hopefully we can make that happen soon.
Yeah, we'll send Luke down on the mission. Luke and I have a great symbiosis here. You know, I... Luke wants to adventure. I have a ticket to adventure. I've given Luke a ticket to ride. He's going all over the place, bringing groups that I used to bring for years. Now Luke's going to go to South America. He's going to go to Central America. He's even going to go to Cambodia this year. Are you?
All for my exploration center. And he... He has this whole social media thing that I'm totally ignorant in. So we have a great partnership like this. And I see a lot of myself in Luke. He's passionate about these subjects and fearless and smart. And he's a good communicator. And it's funny, you know, now... I'm an older guy. I'm a dad.
Part of me is like, want to chide Luke, like, you know, it's the jungle's not a game, son. But the other half is like, you know, I remember when I was 20 and I skipped off deep into the woods, not knowing jack or shit. I had great adventures. And yeah, I did get hurt. I loved every minute of it. So, you know, I'm given... Watch out for those cartels.
Luke gets an opportunity to go to all these places while still paying his rent. And I, number one... get to be in this kind of world, I would have never met you without Luke. But also, you know, I feel like the things that I've done and the company I've built isn't just going to crumble when I'm gone.
I could hand it off to the next generation and Luke is that next generation along with Zach Lindsay and Vanessa Christman. I've got a new dynamic group of people that I'm super excited about and Luke is the spearhead of it.
Dream team. Big shoes. Big shoes.
Well, our trips that Luke's leading, you know, people are going to be just like I was a kid. I started this thing and said, well, what if people want to come with me to these sites that I don't know much about? But we'll go explore them together. That's kind of what Luke is doing now. He's going to bring people and they're going to go with some of these places. He's there at the first time, too.
But he has what I don't have, which is me as the Spider-Man-like man in the chair. I'll be watching the whole way by WhatsApp and going, hey, buddy, go rescue them. Hopefully that'll never happen. But anyway, it's Maya Exploration Center is our website, and it's mayaexploration.org.
Yeah, yeah, just my name, Luke Caverns. You know, I am heavily influenced and inspired by Dr. Barnhart. I mean, I read Lost City of Z, 2016, and then, you know, wanted to learn more about the ancient Americas, so I hopped on the Great Courses.
I read – or I listened to the lecture series Lost Worlds of South America, and then I watched it, fell in love with him as a lecturer, and then found out that we don't live that far apart from each other. Then I reached out to him. We met up for breakfast a little while ago now, and now we've become very close friends. And being close friends with this guy is like –
one of the coolest things, uh, in my life. So I'm, I'm very blessed and I'm lucky to be here. And it's very surreal to be here to be speaking with you again for the second time. And, and, um, I'm just very lucky to be sitting in this chair right now.
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