#0016 Graham Hancock

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience, episode number 2051, with guest Graham Hancock.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is the show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

It's the show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as for just anyone who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Michael Marshall, and I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello.

And today, we're going to be covering Joe's October 2023 interview with Graham Hancock.

So, Cecil, how did Joe introduce Graham in the show notes?

He says Graham Hancock is a researcher, journalist, and author of over a dozen books, including Magicians of the Gods and Visionary.

He can also be seen.

on the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse.

Wow, he got a Netflix series.

Interesting.

Is there anything else we should know about Graham Hancock?

Funny you should ask.

Well, Graham started out his career as a journalist, and he wrote a few books on economical and social development.

And then, since 1990, he's been focused on lost civilizations as a pseudo-scientific writer.

He's written over a dozen books, as Joe suggests.

And one of the most famous ones, like Joe suggests, is Fingerprints of the Gods, Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization.

That's something he covers quite a bit.

He also has a show on Netflix, like Joe suggests, called Ancient Apocalypse.

Now, there's an interesting tidbit here.

Netflix senior manager of unscripted originals is Mr.

Sean Hancock, Graham's son.

So,

yeah, so there's a layer.

I don't know.

Might be repetitive.

It might just be that he has such an amazing show that they decided to do it.

Could also be that he has an in.

I don't know.

Yeah, absolutely.

I was genuinely surprised, not just that his son was a commissioning editor there at Netflix.

I was surprised that Graham himself isn't an archaeologist or historian by training, that he came from a purely journalistic background.

He's no more qualified in archaeology than I am.

That's a real surprise to me.

It really is too.

I thought for sure he was an archaeologist, but he's really just a writer.

He's someone who writes books and he's a journalist, someone who I don't think has spent a lot of time really dealing with the rigors of actual science of archaeology.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so what did Joe and Graham talk about in this episode?

They talked about getting canceled, doing drugs, how it's possible that psychedelics are a link to another dimension, lost civilizations.

And there's there's a pitch to raise funds for DMT research.

They talk about racism, how the Sphinx has a tiny little head, and they spend some time body shaming giants lost.

They do.

They do, do a little bit, just a little bit of time.

So before we get to our main event, which is going to be all about the pseudo-archaeology, pseudo-history of the

ancient civilizations hypotheses, before all that, though, we want to thank our Area 51 all Access Past patrons.

Those are Martin Fidel, Fred R.

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They all subscribed at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan.

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If you do that, you'll join our patrons who get early access to every single episode and they get a special patron-only bonus segment every single week.

And for this this week, we'll be talking about DMT, atheism, and why Joe's eyesight definitely isn't getting worse.

You can check that out at patreon.com forward slash no rogan.

But for now, our main event.

So a huge thank you to this week's Veteran Voice of the Podcast.

That was Emile hailing from the beautiful Gulf Island of Canada, announcing our main event there.

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So to preface this main event segment, we will be talking a lot about pseudo-archaeology.

Much of what Graham talks about are these lost civilizations.

He spends much of his time talking about those and giant cataclysmic events that happen in our past.

And he starts out, we're going to start out with a clip about one of those cataclysms.

It's called the Younger Dryaz event.

And that's why it's ancient apocalypse, because we know that there was a global cataclysm, a slow one, 1,200 years long between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, called the Younger Dryas.

There's still arguments about what caused it, but the fact that it was cataclysmic is not really

not really disputed.

so he's right that it's not disputed but he is right that there are arguments about what caused it and grain is on a very specific side of those arguments Junger Dreyes I don't know if you recognized this when Graeme first said it but we've heard this on several shows I actually checked because Joe mentions this on a lot of his uh his other interviews he talked about it with Ian Carroll on the show that we did in March he brought it up when uh when he talked to Woody Harrelson which we didn't cover but he did that in February um he talked to John Reeves about it in February he talked to Dan Richard about it in February.

He mentioned it in the Lex Friedman interview that we also heard.

So, just in the last couple of months, Younger Dryas as a theory keeps coming up with Joe.

This is something that's been really impactful as to how Joe sees the world and history.

And he's got this from Graeme Hancock here.

So, what is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis?

This is one that Graeme is putting forward.

So, the Younger Dryas event is a real period.

It was a cooling period at the end of the last glacial ice, the last glacial period, which is about 12,900 years ago.

But rather than believing this was just naturally occurring phenomena around kind of changes in the climate or anything like that, or a catastrophic event that was caused by something earthbound, Graham's specific version of this, his specific belief is in the impact hypothesis, which postulates that there was some kind of cosmic event, essentially that comets.

that comets came into the Earth's atmosphere and exploded and caused impacts.

And that's what caused all of this.

The tail of a comet, maybe, is what he said.

Was it the tail of a comet came in or something?

I think he explained it a little bit in this.

Yeah, there's a few kind of things in this area.

So there's an article on Skeptic magazine, so not the one that I run, but

the American magazine, which explained it by saying the apocalypse in Graham Hancock's ancient apocalypse is a hypothetical global catastrophe of biblical floods and continent-wide conflagrations, supposedly triggered by the impact of tens of thousands of fragments of a broken comet that burst in the air like bombs or exploded when they slammed it the ground.

Hancock serves up a not-so-subtle animated shower of descending comets that graces the open title sequence of every single episode.

And the story's narrative art puts it on a trajectory that makes an impact hypothesis inevitable, even though Hancock actually avoids saying the word comet until the final episode teaser.

So he's saying this is all about the comets.

It is worth pointing out, this is not a hypothesis that a number of people who are experts in this field sign on to.

It is a hypothesis that the editor of Skeptic Magazine in America, Michael Shermer, has subsequently indicated that he accepts as a valid hypothesis.

But he is doing that

to agree with Graeme Hancock, but that is in conflict with what the consensus is.

So in 2007, the first Younger Dryas impact hypothesis paper actually speculated that a comet airburst over North America created a Junger Dryas boundary layer.

However, inconsistencies have been identified in other published results.

Some proponents have also proposed that the event triggered extensive biomass burning, a brief impact winter that destabilized the Atlantic conveyor and triggered the Junger-Dryas instance of abrupt climate change.

So this is what they're putting forward.

But when this has been looked at by experts, they've come to different conclusions.

So in 2023, there was a paper from 11 researchers across multiple different disciplines who concluded thus, evidence and arguments purported to support the Junger-Dryas impact hypothesis involve flawed methodologies, inappropriate assumptions, questionable conclusions, misstatements of fact, misleading information, unsupported claims, irreproducible observations, logical fallacies, and selected omission of contrary information.

That feels like a lot.

It is a lot.

There's a lot of problems here.

Now, this isn't, this is just their conclusion, but they actually explain this in great deal.

They even say, in this comprehensive review of the available evidence, researchers address and draw attention to these critical failings and demonstrate that research in numerous fields has shown the Junger Dryas impact hypothesis should be

rejected.

So that's one particular paper.

We'll link that in the show notes.

I'll just cover another couple of bits that I think illustrate what the standing of this thesis, this idea is in the academic kind of literature.

So in 2011, there was a review of the evidence that led researchers to state: quote, the Junger Dreyer impact hypothesis provides a cautionary tale for researchers, the scientific community, the press, and the broader public, as none of the original Junger Dreyer's impact signatures have been subsequently corroborated by independent tests.

Of the 12 original lines of evidence, seven have so far proven to be non-reproducible.

The remaining signatures instead seem to represent either non-catastrophic mechanisms and or terrestrial rather than extraterrestrial impact-related sources.

And in all of these cases, sparse but ubiquitous material seem to have been misreported or misinterpreted as single peaks at the onset of the Junger Dreis period.

Throughout the arc of the Junger Dreis impact hypothesis, recognized and expected impact markers were not found, leading to proposed impactors and impact processes that were novel, self-contradictory, rapidly changing, and sometimes defying the laws of physics.

And one last little tidbit on this, because I think this is a really important, this is kind of the crucial linchpin of Graham's entire argument in many ways.

In 2016, the Comet Research Group, the CRG, which is dedicated to investigating this particular hypothesis, and their stated mission is to find evidence about comet impacts and raise awareness about them before your city is is next.

Well, they published a 2021 paper suggesting that a Tunguska-sized or larger airburst destroyed a middle Bronze Age city located in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea around 1650 BCE.

But image forensic expert Elizabeth Bick discovered evidence for digital alteration of images used as evidence for that claim in that particular paper.

And the researchers in the CRG initially denied tampering with any of their photos, but eventually published a correction in which they admitted to inappropriate image manipulation.

So the evidence they were putting forward in 2016 to prove this hypothesis,

they later revealed, yeah, okay, we did manipulate those images and faked a few things in order to make this work.

So this is not a well-accepted hypothesis, essentially.

And I think why we're spending so much time in this very beginning part is that if you build your argument on faulty foundations like this, then none of it really holds up.

And so he is spending much of the time of this entire podcast using this, like Marsh suggested just a few seconds ago, as a linchpin to the rest of the things he's talking about.

So if this thing doesn't appear to be true by many, many researchers out there, and there's very few people putting out papers that actually, there's no real papers that

indicate that it actually happened the way Graham said, then I think

we need to really pay attention to the rest of the things Graham's saying because he's building off this.

Yeah, this is his starting assumption.

And from here, he's moved on to everything else.

But this starting assumption has been examined and has been shown to be faulty.

All right.

So now we're going to talk about how many stories from indigenous peoples in America are similar.

Well, the other side of the argument that it's inconceivable that the Spaniards made up these stories.

These stories were reported to the first Spanish visitors in Mexico and in Peru.

They were reported to them by indigenous peoples as indigenous myths.

And the fact that they're right spread across the Americas makes it very unlikely.

I mean, if it was one story, but if it's a dozen stories and they're told over a huge geographical region, the notion that this is a Spanish conspiracy, it's an ultimate conspiracy theory.

I don't think we should take away these traditions from the indigenous people who reported them.

But it gave a very useful handle for people to attack this series on.

So Hancock is saying all of this in order to suggest that all of the different peoples, they couldn't all have had the same story unless it was true.

And therefore, it is a case that there was this prior civilization, this ancient civilization that visited Mexico and Peru and then was responsible for the buildings that Hancock says have been found there and all the complexity that he says has been found there.

That is meant to be kind of outside of what we'd expect.

But the argument is essentially these indigenous people, they couldn't possibly have been so advanced.

So it must have been this secret, forgotten civilization who travel around the world, giving all this like technology away in order to warn civilizations about cosmic catastrophes and say you shouldn't let yours be next.

But the key question to all of this, this idea that all of them are reporting the same story, the question is reported, reporting to who and these stories are reported by who?

Who told us that these indigenous people have all reported these tales of encounters?

Well, the answer to that is the Spanish conquerors, who kind of had a motivation to paint sophistication as uniquely European, and therefore it's totally fine if we subjugate these indigenous peoples because they're not sophisticated like us.

They can't do these remarkable things that we can do.

So it isn't the case that every one of these

different peoples are independently coming to the Spanish with that story.

It's that the Spanish are coming to the rest of the world with the story that that's what everybody told them.

Yeah, that's a great point, Marsha.

And I think, you know, one thing that they're talking about is that there's this sort of god figure in these different places around the world that comes and teaches knowledge to the people of that society and teaches them how to do, you know, all these different types of things.

And by extension, we presume that means taught them how to do, you know, those types of pyramids they have in the middle of Central America or the pyramids in Egypt, et cetera, et cetera.

And the thing is, is that lots of different cultures have gods that teach them something or goddesses and goddesses, gods of wisdom.

You know, what they're doing is they're saying all the rest of those instances across other cultures don't matter as much.

We're focusing on these because these people couldn't have done this without outside knowledge.

That's the real underlying theme here.

There's plenty of different cultures that have gods of wisdom and other things, but they never point those out as another culture coming in and teaching them something.

All right, so now we're going to circle back to that cataclysm.

And therefore, it seems very unhunter-gatherer-like activity to completely destroy the megafauna.

And the other thing is the simultaneous extinction of large numbers of creatures that is happening very, very, very quickly suggests to me that we're looking at a disaster of some sort.

And that's why the Junger-Dryas impact hypothesis, which is solid science, although undoubtedly disputed, which suggests that multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet hit the the Earth 12,800 years ago.

Many of them didn't hit the Earth.

Many of them exploded in the sky.

They were not that big, maybe 100 meters in diameter.

So they were air bursts, but they leave these characteristic signatures in the ground.

Like Tunguska.

Exactly like Tunguska.

The Tunguska event is a recent example of that.

30th of June, 1908, happens to be at the peak of the beta torrids, and the torrid meteor stream is identified as the likely culprit for what happened in the Younger Dryas.

Wildfires burning, you get these impacts

smashing into the Earth, bursting in the air over forests.

They cause huge fires and huge, and that's why you get enormous amounts of charcoal as a result.

And then the larger objects, it's thought, hit the North American ice cap and caused a very large amount of melt water to flow into the world ocean.

And that's what brought temperatures down at the beginning of the Younger Dryers.

Can I just say pretty impressive tape memorization there of the Tunguska?

What an interesting little tidbit of knowledge just to throw off the top of your head.

That's kind of impressive, actually.

Well, I think that's true.

But if you bear in mind that Graham's kind of career for the last 30 years has been based around explaining the

potential impact of comet events like Tunguska,

I don't think this is something that's just like a tidbit for him.

This is like a central point.

Like this, what he's saying is Younger Dryas was just like another Tunguska.

Tunguska is evidence that this could happen.

But he's got the recall for it.

So absolutely, yeah.

What he's missing here is that nobody is disputing that this mass species die off and various other things that happen around the start of that kind of

that period, that younger dryers period.

No one's disputing that that was a disaster.

It just, that disaster doesn't have to be caused by a comet impact.

This is another quote here from even just the Wikipedia page for younger dryers as a starting point for seeing.

You can see this is all kind of cited on the Wikipedia page to other sources.

They say here that the scientific consensus links the younger dryers with a significant reduction or shutdown of the thermohaline circulation, which circulates warm tropical waters northward through the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, AMOC.

This is consistent with the climate model stimulations, as well as a range of proxy evidence, such as decreased ventilation, which exposure to oxygen from the surface, of the lowest layers of North Atlantic water.

The otherwise anomalous warning of the southeastern United States matches the hypothesis that as the AMOC weakened and transported less heat from the Caribbean towards Europe through the North Atlantic Gaia, most of it would have stayed trapped in the coastal waters.

So there is a climate model for what went on here that doesn't require an explosion of a comet.

And I think the fact that Graeme is pointing out that some of these large parts of the comet just exploded in the air.

It was like an airburst.

They didn't actually

make like contact with the ground.

That also kind of conveniently avoids having to find a load of impact craters.

Because part of this hypothesis is saying there was an impact.

So if there's an impact, you've got to find craters.

But if you say, well, you know, this was like a Tunguska event where it all exploded in the air.

okay those events can happen we've seen that with tunguska but you need to actually find some evidence that that was uh put forward some evidence that that is what was happening here it's like the assassin with the uh the the icicle instead of the dagger or something yeah exactly exactly uh and finally there was another paper from marlon et l that's going to be linked in the show notes that suggests that the wildfires that graham is pointing out all the charcoal of evidence of the uh of the the comet explosion the air burst actually those wildfires were a consequence of rapid climate change uh the paper says quote quote, the changes in woody biomass, fire frequency and biomass burning are not coincidence with changes in CO2, although increasing CO2 may have contributed to woody biomass production during this period.

So there is actually a good model in this paper for how those fires were happening.

And climate change can contribute to and even like accelerate climate-like wildfires.

And we know that because we've been talking about it quite a lot over the last few months.

So you don't need an impact of a comet in California to have started those wildfires.

That can be done sort of largely from just the climate change happening alone, really.

And just two mastodons rubbing their tusks together can cause a whole...

All right.

This is now we're going to start talking about the criticism of his show, Ancient Apocalypse by a group of archaeologists.

Same goes for the submerged continental shelves.

27 million square kilometers of the best real estate on earth that were above water during the ice age are underwater now.

Yes, there's been some marine archaeology, but not enough to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.

And the same with the Sahara Desert, 9 million square kilometers, a little bit of archaeology done, but before archaeologists say there was no lost civilization.

This is what the Society for American Archaeology said in their open letter to Netflix, complaining about my show.

They said, we know that there was no lost civilization during the ice age.

And my question to them is, how can they possibly know that when they've looked at relatively small areas of the Earth?

earth the picture is not complete they should be saying we don't think there was a lost civilization during the ice age fine but to say we know there wasn't that's that's completely wrong well it's silly and it's also it becomes more and more of a problem the more things get discovered and the more they push back harder and more emotionally and more religiously yeah it's really kind of crazy the way they behave that is as if they have like an accurate map yeah so they're saying the archaeological archaeologists all said there is we know there is no lost civilization that isn't what the letter to netflix actually said.

I know that because I've got the letter.

I'm going to link it in the show notes here.

Sure.

So here is a quote that kind of reflects what they were actually saying here.

Quote, after more than a century of professional archaeological investigations, we find no archaeological evidence to support the existence of an advanced global ice age civilization of the kind Hancock suggests.

Archaeologists have instigated, have investigated hundreds of ice age sites and published the results in rigorously reviewed journals.

So they're not just saying we just know there's nothing there.

They're saying that after a century of investigation and research, there is no evidence to suggest that this is true.

That's a completely different thing to be saying.

Yeah.

And

this, I think, is

done in a way to sort of get Joe on his side.

Because if you reframe it as someone, you know, just someone who giving scientific critique to Graham,

but instead frame it as someone trying to suppress knowledge out there.

Someone's trying to trick you.

Someone out there is just trying to suppress some sort of investigation into this.

Joe's all in, if you frame it that way.

But if you just said, well,

I published something and then people responded with

traditional scientific critique of the thing

I published,

that's not as damning to Joe because Joe doesn't understand how that works.

Joe thinks it's an attack because the way Graham frames it.

Graham says, they said there's no civilization.

Well, I'm sure if you got LiDAR out there and, you know, did the whole, you scanned the whole desert or all these other sites that he's talking about and you found something, they would accept it.

There just isn't any proof right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you can't accept something until you've got good evidence.

And what they're saying is.

People who've put forward Ice Age sites as being kind of evidence of this ancient civilization, we've looked at that evidence and it is not compelling for lots and lots of reasons, like including some of the reasons that I highlighted earlier.

The letter goes on to say, this is the critique of the Netflix show, quote, this series publicly disparages archaeologists and devalues the archaeological profession on the basis of false claims and disinformation.

I write to encourage you to correctly classify the genre of show, to provide disclaimers about the unfounded suppositions in the show, and ideally to balance the deleterious content in the show with scientifically accurate information about our human past.

It seems like what they're asking for is pretty reasonable here.

This isn't them just attacking.

This isn't them

doubling down, pushing back more and more emotionally and more and more religiously, as Graham is portraying and as Joe seems to believe is happening.

These are actually pretty reasonable requests from the archaeological expert community.

Yeah.

And what Graham is arguing here is essentially an argument from ignorance.

He's saying, since we haven't scoured the entire world for lost civilizations, one must have existed.

And that's not how science works.

That's not, you find the evidence for the thing you're looking for.

Don't presume it exists because there's space for it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll give you two more quotes from this letter because this letter is actually really useful because Graham will constantly throughout this interview, and we'll cover this as well in the toolbox segment, talk about how attacked he is by the mainstream, how attacked he is by the conservative

expertise, the consensus who just want to keep him.

And this, I think, reflects pretty well what's going on here.

So, quote from the letter.

Popular television series such as Ancient Aliens on the history channel have promoted false claims about the ancient past for many years.

These claims frequently rob indigenous people of credit for their cultural heritage.

However, ancient apocalypse is more harmful than ancient aliens.

It not only disparages the cultures of indigenous peoples, but also carries the harm a step further by disparaging archaeologists.

The combative tone of Graham Hancock damages the public's perception of archaeology.

And a final quote here, if there were any credible evidence for a globalized age civilization of the kind Hancock suggests, archaeologists would investigate it and report their findings with rigor according to scientific methods, practices, and the theories of our discipline.

If the evidence warranted scientific peer review, we would acquire funding to test it, publish our results and promote it in our own outreach materials.

Contrary to Hancock's claims, archaeology does not willfully ignore credible evidence, nor does it seek to suppress it in a conspiratorial fashion.

I think it's a very good response to and a very measured response to what Hancock is suggesting, and then also outlining exactly what archaeologists would actually do if they found good evidence for the things that Hancock are saying are true.

Now, we're going to move on to the lost city or continent of Atlantis.

Zahir is an excellent example.

He does not want to even entertain the notion that there's some sort of a gap in the knowledge of history.

If you just say the word Atlantis to Zahir was, he goes Brazil.

Absolutely goes nuts.

And that's irrational too,

since we know that the Atlantis story comes from Plato.

We know that Plato said the source of that story was in ancient Egypt, in the temple of Neith at Sis in the Delta.

An ancestor, Solon, visited that temple and was told the story, which he put into the word.

Atlantis is not an ancient Egyptian word.

That's one of the problems.

But he called it Atlantis.

But at Edfu in Upper Egypt, there's a whole story of a homeland of the primeval ones that was destroyed in a great cataclysm and flooded by the sea, leaving only a few survivors who traveled around the world seeking to restart civilization.

It's told very clearly in the Edfu Building text, which fortunately have now been completely translated, sadly only into German.

I hope we'll see the full English translation in due course, but the translations I was working from when I first studied them are very good and they've been reinforced and supported by this new Fuller translation.

So I think the Atlantis story does have an ancient Egyptian origin and I think the ancient Egyptians, Egyptians should be proud of it rather than throwing it away.

Right at the start there, you'll notice when he's talking about researchers who reject his theories, he's using terms like, oh, they go nuts if you talk about this.

They're very irrational when they talk about this.

Joe's talk about things like they're getting emotional.

So it's this idea of castigating any opposition as being irrationally, emotionally led rather than led by any kind of evidence at all.

But when you look at what Graham's saying here, well, we know that Atlantis is real because Plato talked about it.

Well, Plato was using Atlantis as an allegory.

He didn't mean it literally.

He wasn't talking about a literal place.

He was talking specifically about a nation that was lost to hubris.

So in the story in Plato, Atlantis is described as a naval empire that ruled all the western parts of the known world, making it the literary counterimage of

the empire.

But after an ill-fated attempt to conquer Athens, Atlantis falls out of favor with the gods and is sunk into the Atlantic Ocean.

It's kind of like this incredible, incredible civilization that kind of pushed too far and angered the gods and was sunk.

But the other question to ask is, why are we using Plato as an expert on what happened in ancient Egypt?

Great question.

We could say, well, Plato was in the past as well, but he wasn't contemporary of some of the things we're talking about.

And he didn't have the archaeological tools.

He wasn't looking to do that.

That's not what Plato is for.

It's not what Plato is about.

We've got better lines of evidence than Plato.

Yeah, and Plato literally wrote fan fiction about his favorite teacher.

So let's not pretend that he's an accurate historical record.

And also just want to mention,

just because you mention something in your writings doesn't make it real.

There's many things that Plato mentions that are not real.

Like there's not a, there's not a real cave that people were in either.

That were, you know, so this idea is he, just because he finds something that agrees with the things he wants to believe, he will choose that as one of the supporting pieces to say his argument has merit.

But just because you find it somewhere doesn't mean they necessarily believed it or thought it was a real thing.

Well, you say that, Cecil, but I think we should try and find that cave and rescue those people who've been kept in the dark.

they've been there for so long marsh so long also he talks about there being like flood myths and things and again there are lots of stories of flood myths from around the world but that's not because there was this one particular big flood or atlantis was sank and flooded in these kind of ways it's not because they're trying to echo a specific catastrophe that happened it's because when it comes to natural disasters you've really only got a handful of things that could happen and floods are really the only ones that can happen pretty much everywhere because everywhere is either near the sea or the river or subject to rain.

Not everywhere is earthquake, is on an earthquake fault line.

Not everywhere is near a volcano, but anywhere potentially could flood.

So of course we see catastrophic floods happening throughout cultures throughout history.

Okay, now they're going to move on to a different site.

This is Golbeki Tepe.

This is an ancient site in Turkey.

And what Gobeklitepe looks like to me is a transfer of technology, that people who already knew how to work megalithic architecture and align it precisely to the risings of particular stars, for example Sirius,

came to Gobekli Tepe at a time of chaos and cataclysm in the world.

And they sought to introduce a new way of thinking.

I think Gobekli Tepe was created as a project to mobilize the local community, to give them something to work on, to bring them together.

And it's not an accident that during that thousand years they transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture.

I don't

see massive technical complications in creating Gobekli Tepe, except those very precise alignments.

But what I do see is a sudden appearance of something that shouldn't have been there.

And that requires explanation.

See, this is why people will accuse some of these ideas as being racially dicey, as stripping indigenous peoples of their history.

Because these ideas posit that civilizations didn't naturally progress, weren't capable of culturally evolving into these more complicated and more technologically advanced

civilizations.

Instead, all of their achievements were the result of outside intervention.

They were just these hunter-gatherers who were just knocking together sticks until the magic people came along and showed them how to do these wondrous things.

That's the reason they became more sophisticated, not because they were inherently capable of that themselves.

That's a great point.

Also, let's not take on his face that this site, Golbeki Tepe, is aligned with the stars.

I'm going to include a link in the show notes.

Here's a quote.

Quote, those claims of Golbeki Tepe's connection to the night sky have been largely rejected by the main team actually

excavating the temple.

According to them, while the archaeological site is remarkably well preserved, the forces of time have changed the location of certain features.

One of the pillars have appeared to be repurposed or moved.

And here's another piece, quote, There is significant possibility that we're dealing with roof structures.

That fact alone would pose limitations to a function as sky observatories, end quote.

All right, so now we're going to talk about constellations and the Greeks.

We're looking at Lasco.

Hang on on the yeah, we're looking at Lasco there.

The bull painting there is interesting.

Better artists.

I have to confess they're quite a bit of artistic art.

This art is very good.

If you go, Jamie, if you go to the NPR, the painting of a bull, one step left from where you are, that one.

This is very interesting.

There has been an argument made by a couple of astronomers that what is depicted there is the constellation of Taurus.

And that in itself is heresy, because archaeologists who want to give everything to the Greeks say that it was the Greeks who invented the constellations of the zodiac.

And not showing.

Why do they think that that represents the constellation?

Because of the six little dots, which are not, I think, on the head.

I think they're somewhere behind, not in this picture, which is often how the Pleiades are seen.

Actually, there are seven Pleiades, but often...

to the naked eye, you see six.

And the positioning of the Pleiades in relation to the constellation of Taurus is

the basis for that argument.

So, Graham's standard here is this image of a bull has six dots that you can see here, and that's reminiscent of the Pleiades, which has seven dots.

Therefore, this is an astronomical chart.

Rather than what you could suggest is that people saw bulls and drew bulls or bison, like people were drawing the things that were around them.

This is a great depiction of a bull or a bison or something in that kind of family, but it's not enough to just accept that this is an artistic rendition, like rendering of the things

that were around them, that were influencing their lives.

This has to be a sign that someone came along and told them about how the stars work and

this kind of thing.

That's because he is so invested in this ancient knowledge as a hypothesis that everything has to become a clue to this.

And we know that that bias is affecting him significantly because if you look at the cave painting or the lascale painting rather of the bull, you can see there's a bull, there's six dots above the bull's head.

I think

I found an image that'll link in the show notes and things that I've got a circle around the dots.

If you compare that to how the stars actually are in the Taurus constellation, they're not in any way in the same formation.

They don't line up at all.

This isn't a very good, even if you were just drawing the dots you could see in the sky, this isn't a good rendition of how those dots relate to one another.

This is just six dots.

But because it's a bull and it's six dots, well, the dots must be stars, The stars must be Taurus.

This must be a sign that they knew the constellations

before they were ever

kind of named by the Greeks.

But yeah, this is just motivated reasoning to get to this point.

And when you see the two images side by side, they absolutely don't look like that to me.

Okay, so now we're going to shift and we're going to start talking about the Great Pyramid at Giza.

African culture, incredibly sophisticated, incredibly advanced, doing stuff that we just don't know how to do today.

Archaeologists will tell you they could build a Great Pyramid, but I defy them to do that.

The Great Pyramid is literally impossible.

It's something that doesn't make any sense.

It certainly doesn't make sense as the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh, which is what we're told it was.

And this might be a small kind of detail, but I think it's worth kind of picking out for what Graeme's saying here, because he just says in an offhand way, you know, they might say that

it was built, but I defy them to do that.

Well, if archaeologists can't personally recreate the building of one of the wonders of the world, an enterprise that took a huge number of people, that took decades to do.

So if they can't do that, you can just

like write off the fact that that's not what happened.

That's not going to be the way that you can do this.

That's a very ludicrous standard of evidence.

For example, we could say, well, how do we know that the Statue of Liberty was built?

Well, sure, we've got the accounts from the time and the plans and it's all perfectly explainable, understanding how long it took and the materials that were available.

But until an archaeologist is able to remake the Statue of Liberty from scratch, we'll just never know know how it was built.

No, we use other lines of evidence rather than having to recreate the thing.

So it's a sort of a silly point here.

All right.

So

this is a two-part conversation where they're having a conversation about the Sphinx in Egypt.

The headdress that's worn by the Sphinx, best looked at in the picture top left or the quora picture,

that headdress is called the Nemes headdress.

It's the classic headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh.

Not, in my view, khafre, but the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh.

But it's on a head that is way too small by comparison with the body.

And both Shock and I and John Anthony West, Manus Seifzada, who's another excellent researcher in this field, we all feel that the Sphinx was almost certainly a complete lion at one point.

It was a lion with a huge mane, and that that head sticking up above the plateau got very heavily eroded.

And by the time the ancient Egyptians inherited it, they decided to improve it a little bit, to cut down that heavily eroded head and put the head of a pharaoh on it.

So again, now we're at a point where the Egyptians couldn't have built the pyramids.

They inherited the Sphinx now.

So we're just every single bit of the thing that we see is quintessentially evidentiary of the ancient Egyptians.

No, those were inheritances from the people who came before them, who gave them those things.

They couldn't have done those things themselves.

Well, I mean,

in fairness, he could be saying that they inherited it from a previous Egyptian group of people.

He's not necessarily saying that it's someone from the outside, but I think there's enough evidence of his other, the other things that he's suggesting, that there is this sort of group of people that traveled around the world to give information, that there's enough evidence here to say that maybe what he's suggesting instead is that they didn't know how to do it, but they were instructed by someone outside.

Is that maybe a better way to do that?

That's a big part of his broader argument.

He believes that there was this civilization that was incredibly advanced, that was largely wiped out by that comet impact of the Junger Dry impact hypothesis.

And so they use their advanced knowledge to go to other more primitive cultures around the world and show them technologies to essentially help them try to culturally evolve in order to avoid being wiped out by the next impact.

And that's why he's moving from

Peru and Mexico to Egypt.

He's going to lots of different parts of the world.

Interestingly, he's not going to nowhere.

He's not going to Greece.

He's not going to Italy or Rome.

He's going to Egypt.

He's going to Mexico.

He's going to Peru.

He's going to other parts of the world.

And that feels like it's not an accident.

Well, his defense of that is that those places did not have as big as...

advanced cultures at the time.

And so his defense is, well, those places they didn't visit because they didn't have advanced cultures.

But then again, it's like, well, you seem to only be focusing on these races, these groups of people that are inherently brown.

And I think like one of the things that you've got to, I realize you're trying to hedge your bets, Graham, but you also have to recognize who you're talking about constantly in all of your hypothesis.

Now, one thing I think he does miss, though, Marsh, what if the Egyptians did have tiny heads?

If they had tiny heads, then maybe this is just an accurate depiction of what they thought a Sphinx would look like.

I'm just throwing it out there.

I'm just throwing it out.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Well, until we find evidence, until we scour every single part of Egypt and every skull that was ever buried in Egypt

and can prove that none of them were tiny, we can't rule out that they had.

We can't rule it out.

Can't rule it out.

You're absolutely right.

We're doing science the right way.

Okay, so next up is the second part of that Sphinx conversation.

But the other thing is the astronomy, the fact that the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker.

You know, if you stand looking due east, at Giza or anywhere in the northern hemisphere on the spring equinox,

there's three key moments of the year, four actually.

There's the winter and summer solstice, and there's the equinoxes, the spring and fall equinoxes.

On the summer solstice, the sun rises far to the north of east.

On the winter solstice, it rises far to the south of east.

But on the equinoxes, it aligns perfectly due east.

And that's what the Sphinx is.

It's aligned perfectly to due east, and it's gazing at the horizon.

And then we come to this contentious issue of who discovered the zodiacal constellations.

Because the Sphinx, 12,500 years ago, was gazing at dawn on the spring equinox at the constellation of Leo.

In other words, this lion monument on the ground was looking at its own celestial counterpart in the sky.

Egyptologists dismiss that.

They say nobody had any idea of the constellations until the Greeks.

I just think they're, I think they're wrong.

So astronomy and geology together combine to invite us to consider the possibility that the Sphinx may be much older than 4,500 years old.

So this idea has come up in several different places.

This is known as the Orion correlation theory, that this particular pyramid is aligned to Orion's belt and that the stars around it are referenced in certain parts of the pyramid or certain parts of the alignment of the pyramid.

So two astronomers, Ed Krupp of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and Tony Farrell of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, they used planetarium equipment to independently investigate the angle between the alignment of Orion's belt and what was north during the era that was sighted by Hancock in his work, which actually differs from the angle today because of the precession of the equinoxes.

So north is slightly changed and the lie of the stars would have slightly changed.

And what they found is the angle is actually pretty different from the perfect match that Hancock puts forward in this theory about kind of Leo and the Orion's belt and those kind of alignments.

By about between 47 to 50 degrees by the planetarian measurements compared to the 38 degree angle formed by the pyramids.

And Krupp also points out that the slightly bent line formed by the three pyramids, which is kind of said to mimic Orion's belt, that was deviated towards the north where the slight kink in the line of Orion's belt actually goes towards the south.

And so to match them up in Hancock's work, when he's talking about this stuff, one or both had to be turned upside down.

So he says the way that the pyramids are lined up, they line up with this particular star here in this particular constellation, and across the three pyramids, it mimics Orion's belt, but Orion's belt bends in the opposite direction to the pyramids.

And so in the work, they flip one of the images in order to make that work.

There's also other images, including noting that if the Sphinx is meant to to represent the constellation of Leo, it should have been on the opposite side of the Nile, because that's where it would have been at the time in 10,500 BC.

The pyramids would have been in Virgo, not Leo, depending because of the procession of the stars.

So when actual astronomers have taken these claims seriously about the links between the Sphinx and the pyramids and how these represent Leo and the Ryan's belt and things, you actually do take it seriously.

But when you do that, you find that they're misinterpreting some of the evidence and even flipping some of the images to make them uh make them fit i also i just want to presume let's presume he's right that it it's decidedly that the the sphinx looks east and it looks due east it looks due east where this during the solstice very specifically Why are we so surprised that an ancient civilization that relied heavily on the seasons knew exactly when those seasons started and when they ended?

It is much more important for an agrarian civilization to look up at the sky and know things were going to change rather than today.

These people would have really been, you know, they are literally banking their lives on when these things start and stop.

And so the idea that it's facing due west isn't that big a deal if it happens to be, you know, they're looking at the sky constantly.

So I just, I feel like the way he's presenting it seems like they couldn't have known this stuff.

They wouldn't have looked up the sky.

Look at these people.

They were unsophisticated.

They didn't bother to look at this stuff.

I think that it's pretty obvious that they did look at that stuff.

Okay, now we're going to talk about carbon dating and Easter Island.

What isn't speculation is the dating.

I have grave doubts about carbon dating in many cases, because carbon dating doesn't date stone.

It dates organic materials.

So the notion that you can date a megalithic site with carbon dating is questionable right away.

But what tends to be done is that you look for a piece of organic material that is so associated with the megalith you want to date that you you can say or propose that they come from the same period of time.

I have that problem with the huge Moai statues in Easter Island.

They're not carbon dated.

What's carbon dated is the platforms they stand on and there's a lot to suggest that those platforms are much later than the original statues and the statues were re-erected on those on those platforms.

So he's not actually wrong about carbon dating stones.

You can't do it.

You've got to find organic matter from nearby it.

But it's interesting now that he's talking about Easter Island or Rapanui is the other name for Eastern Island.

And now he's sort of pointing out or alluding to the idea that the people of Rapanui didn't build the Easter Island statues.

It was some ancient civilization before them that built them and moved them onto some platforms later.

So it seems like the ancient bunch of folk liked to leave their monuments in places where brown people tended to live.

It seems like that's what they're about.

Because, like I say, there's not a lot of talk of these ancients building monuments of white majority countries.

No one's talking about how the Acropolis was built, the Acropolis was built by these people.

And I want to point you you to an article from the Skeptic magazine, the one I edit, about Rapanui.

It kind of expands on this point.

It was written by Sarah Hearn.

It's a really great article.

But she writes that Europeans couldn't conceive that people living on such a small and remote island could have produced such stunning works of art or that they could live comfortably in such seemingly

barren environs.

The European eye has repeatedly disparaged the islanders' ingenuity and resourcefulness.

And this is another example of people doing exactly that.

All right.

So now we're going to talk about,

they're going to bring up a screen image here from ancient Sumeria.

And this is of, it's like a, it's like a relief carving that they're showing.

This image has always been wild to me

because it kind of shows a sun in the center, and then it shows all of the planets in our solar system in relatively the correct sizes, relatively.

I wouldn't be surprised by that.

In terms of what's the bigger one, what's the smaller one?

I think the ancients had,

certain peoples amongst the ancients, did have a very good idea about our solar system and about the dimensions of the Earth and about the other planets in our solar system.

Again, this is something that archaeology has dismissed, but I think it's a possibility that's worthy of inquiry.

No, it's not that one.

That's a different one.

It's the...

Yeah, that's it.

There we go.

There we go.

So there's the sun, and it's surrounded by the planets that we're aware of.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to interpret that any other way, isn't it?

I mean,

it seems like that's what it is.

It seems like the solar system.

I mean, even the way the sun is depicted is the way a little kid depicts the sun.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's also depicted as a star, as well as the sun, the circuit's disk of the sun, and the sun is a star.

So

the suggestion is much greater knowledge of the universe than is supposed to have existed at that time.

Yeah, I'm not suggesting, I'm not really convinced that this is evidence of greater knowledge of the solar system.

Joe is right in pointing out that it looks like the sun, but it's not remarkable that they knew the sun was there.

They're pretty well-versed in the sun.

They're very aware of the sun.

They'll have seen the sun.

So depicting the sun isn't a great surprise.

But Joe is then saying, well, this image also shows all of the planets of the solar system in relatively

the right sizes.

And he says the word relatively quite hesitantly.

And I think there's a lot being pinned on

that word relatively, because it isn't true.

What we're seeing is different size circles, but it's not a relative scale.

They're sort of completely out of whack.

For it to be relative, we should see a huge Jupiter and a tiny Mercury, and we don't see that.

Jupiter has a diameter of 89,000 miles.

Mercury has

a diameter of 3,000 miles.

So for this to be relatively right in terms of sizes, one of those dots should be 30 times bigger than the other dot.

And the sun should be much bigger than that.

That isn't what we're seeing here.

Also, what we're seeing is something between nine and 11 circles outside the sun, depending on which ones you count.

And so you can discount the ones that you don't want it to be in order to get to the number of planets that we think is a bad planet.

So all of this is just a case of Joe seeing what he wants to see, and he's being led in that direction by Graham, who is also seeing and finding what he wants to see and find.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I wonder if the ancient Sumerians are as pissed as us that we stopped calling Pluto a planet because they had nine there, right?

I wonder if they're very upset.

Also, the naked eye, by the way, just want to point this out.

The naked eye can only see five planets.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Can also see the moon.

So that's another celestial body that can see.

So Joe's suggesting that there's an ancient culture that had a way to see planets that we didn't even detect until almost

the year 1800 for Uranus and almost the year 1900 for Neptune and 1930 for Pluto.

So, you know, the idea that

these are so far distant into the future.

the future where we need totally different ways in which to look into the sky than what they had available to to them.

I know that this also opens up the idea of ancient peoples being visited by aliens or something and them telling them that something like this is in the sky.

But I just want to point out, like, if we just believe that this was like an ancient civilization like Graham is suggesting that just happens to be really smart and traveling around the world and showing people things, we can't presume that they have 1900 technology to find Neptune.

Yeah, exactly.

Because you can't see Pluto with the naked eye.

What you can see with the naked eye is a lot of stars.

And it's just as plausible that what we're looking at here are stars.

You know, it's not surprising in reality that people would draw or carve these circles that they see in the sky because we've always known there are stars and there is a moon.

So this doesn't have to be relating to the planets.

This could just be some of the prominent stars or the idea of stars.

This is a sun in the sky and there are stars beyond them.

It could just be as simple as that.

And we don't need to diminish the

creativity it takes to do that kind of endeavor as an indigenous kind of

early civilization.

We don't need to diminish that by saying, no, this has to be led by someone super advanced who told them how to do this.

Yeah.

I also want to point out too, just to just to mention, without any real tools, people in 300 BCE thought that our solar system was heliocentric.

We know about this as early as 300 BCE because they actually wrote it down.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I think that also,

what that misses, what Graham and what Joe is missing,

and what they're ignoring as a baseline is that we are no smarter on average than the people who were around in those days.

We are just starting from a further point in knowledge.

It's not that they were intellectually less capable.

Our brains haven't evolved to get significantly smarter over the relatively short period of time that we're talking about, the thousands of years rather than tens of thousands of years that we're talking about.

So there were people people who were incredibly smart, who just didn't have a great deal of, you know, didn't have centuries of knowledge, millennia of knowledge to work from.

So they were capable of figuring out a decent amount of stuff.

You know, they were no more stupid than we are, really.

All right.

So this is the last bit in the main event.

We're going to finish with a very quick clip about the pyramids.

So the Great Pyramid is gradually, bit by bit, revealing its secrets.

And it's almost as though it was waiting for a time when human beings were ready to receive those secrets and had the ability to decode them.

I think this is a really important clip for understanding Graeme Hancock because it really shows how motivated he is to believe that this mystical advanced civilization was even more advanced than we are.

And it was just, we're only now approaching a time when we are smart enough and advanced enough to understand what they were doing.

It's this idea of projecting onto this past civilization a phenomenal amount of not just technological advancement, but an almost spiritual level of advancement of like they are they hid these secrets until we were ready to receive them.

All right,

that's gonna take us to our next segment.

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So that's the tool bag and something just fell out of the tool bag?

So this week, uh we're going to be talking about a galileo fallacy can you explain that to us yeah absolutely so the galileo gambit or the galileo fallacy is where you argue that because your work or your ideas provoke opposition or criticism that means you're correct and it's it's used to suggest that someone who is so that someone might be so groundbreaking or so revolutionary that the mainstream feels so challenged by their truths that they've got no choice but to shut them down and they can't they can't handle the truth of these uh these new ideas you can basically paraphrase the arguments to

everybody else who studied this thinks i'm wrong therefore i must be right

but you know when nine out of ten dentists recommend using toothpaste it doesn't mean that the tenth guy is more likely to be right and as carl sagan put it they laughed at galileo but they also laughed at bozo the clown great point okay well we're gonna start out with how hancock describes how science controls the narrative

this is part of the problem I have with archaeology as a discipline.

It likes to think of itself as scientific, but what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past.

Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates?

Yeah,

I think it's

a complicated mixture of things.

First of all, because archaeology is is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo.

You know, anything out on the edge archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with.

And then it takes the next step and really seeks to attack out-on-the-edge ideas.

Now, I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out-on-the-edge idea.

We've had lost civilizations before.

The Indusvali civilization

today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s.

It was found by accident.

And every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal new information.

But

the reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995.

But with Ancient Apocalypse much bigger platform reaching a much wider audience, the reaction was just hysterical.

So yeah, Galileo fallacy here.

People who disagree with Graham, they're just trying to control the narrative.

It can't possibly be that they've looked at his work and think that it's wrong, that they've actually done the studies and come to different conclusions.

And Graham loves, and he does it throughout this entire interview, he loves to paint himself as the outsider rebel who's discovering things that the establishment can't possibly handle.

And that's why they're coming for him.

That has to be his narrative at all times.

And this is a classic poi used by people often to deceive, to present themselves as the underdog.

People often align emotionally with the underdog because they don't like the idea of people getting bullied.

And so this is an easy way to get people emotionally on his side.

Yeah, but if we examine what he's actually suggesting, ultimately, if your evidence is good, you're going to get accepted by your discipline.

It's not that they're going to profit from silencing you.

In fact, the people who've written those books with timelines and dates, well, now they'll find new books to write because they've got new discoveries to update things.

Timelines can be updated.

You know, dates can be adjusted to fit with the new idea.

And so this reaction that Graham, again, tellingly describes as hysterical, that reaction wasn't because he was telling radical new truths.

It's because the work that

he's been doing, that he's been talking about, has been looked at and then rejected for three decades.

Yes.

And because it wasn't based on anything.

And then the reason that the archaeology, you know, the whole field is upset is that that work, which isn't proven to be true, is now being given a massive global platform.

And that's a bad thing if it's wrong.

We shouldn't platform and give a load of attention to ideas that have been disproven, that have been shown to be faulty.

This feels reminiscent of Thiel's argument to me about climate change when we covered Peter Thiel in the previous episode.

You know, Graham isn't taking the extra step.

to say archaeology isn't a science, but he paints it as desperate to sort of distance itself because it wants to be taken seriously.

And thus, it's going to dismiss anyone that disagrees with it with the mainstream ideas that it has, right?

And so it's not as forceful as Peter's argument saying that it's not actually a science, but it still has the same effect that.

traditional archaeology cannot be trusted.

So you have to trust me because I'm the one who's actually doing sort of the discovery work here.

And also, I just want to point this out.

This is something that he does throughout the entire episode, but just because we discovered things in the past that were undiscovered doesn't mean the things that you're claiming are true.

That's he's connecting these things as saying, oh, well, we've discovered stuff.

We've discovered these ancient civilizations multiple times.

Therefore, the ancient civilizations I'm purporting are actually, they exist.

Well, no, they might exist, but you haven't proven, you haven't given enough evidence for,

I think, any real archaeologist to agree.

Yeah, absolutely.

The fact that he's bringing up those other ones that were accepted is in itself an illustration of the fact that if you've got good evidence, it'll get accepted.

Great point.

That's a great point.

All right, so next piece is where Hancock disputes that he is racist.

The accusations that were put against me and the show of being, the accusations included the words

racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic.

They give you the full hand.

They didn't even give you one question.

The show doesn't touch on any of these issues.

Race is not mentioned in the show.

So what the archaeologists were doing there, they were going back to Fingerprints of the Gods that I wrote in 1995, in I reported indigenous traditions about the appearance of bearded foreigners bringing knowledge after a cataclysm to the shattered survivors of that cataclysm.

And in some cases, in those traditions, those knowledge bringers are described as white-skinned.

And

that is why the show is accused of racism, because archaeology has since taken the view that all of those stories were made up by the Spanish.

And that seems to me completely ridiculous.

Both in Mexico and in Peru and Bolivia, we have traditions.

We have them Viracocha, we have Cuetzalcoatl, we have Bochica.

This is a pan-American myth.

And actually, I think it's racist of archaeology to imagine that the magic powers of the Spaniards could impose a myth upon indigenous peoples all over the Americas, that they'd just be so stupid that they would fall for this story told by the Spaniards.

Of course, these are indigenous myths and traditions.

And I was reporting them in that book, and I stand by them.

And it turns out that there's actually a huge argument within academia about this.

And my critics were just giving one side of that argument.

So, there's a couple of quotes that I want to bring forward from other places that kind of balance things out.

I'll show the other side of this.

And I'll start actually with the letter that was written by the archaeologists to Hancock, the one we've referenced already.

So, here's another quote from that letter: The assertions Hancock makes have a history of promoting dangerous racist thinking.

His claim for an advanced global civilization that existed during the ice age and was destroyed by comets is not new.

This theory has been presented, debated, and refuted for at least 140 years.

It dates to the publication of Atlantis, The Antediluvian World, in 1882, and Ragnarok, The Age of Ice and Gravel in 1883 by Minnesota Congressman Ignatius Donnelly.

This theory steals credit for indigenous accomplishments from indigenous peoples and reinforces white supremacy.

From Donnelly to Hancock, proponents of this theory have suggested that white survivors of these advanced civilization were responsible for the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples in the Americas and around the world.

However, the narratives on which claims of white saviors are based have been demonstrated to be ones modified by Spanish conquistadors and colonial authorities for their own benefit.

These were subsequently used to promote violent white supremacy.

Hancock's narratives emboldens extreme voices that misrepresent archaeological knowledge in order to spread false historical narratives that are overtly misogynistic, chauvinistic, racist, and anti-Semitic.

So there's the full hand that he's talking about.

No, they aren't saying Hancock is misogynistic, chauvinistic, racist, anti-Semitic.

They're saying his work is spreading historical narratives that are those things.

So whether he means to or not, he's feeding into that tradition of these ideas that have got these conclusions.

But we should also understand what else Graham Hancock has written and what context that comes in.

So here's an article from The Skeptic Magazine written by Aaron Rabinowitz.

I'm just going to quote this.

Things go from outlandish to disturbing when you get to Hancock's book, The Master Game, Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World, co-authored by Robert Boval and originally released under the name Talisman, Sacred City's Secret Faith.

Hancock's website claims the book reveals a secret religion that has shaped the world, and if you're a regular reader, you know exactly where this is going.

As David Abarret puts it in his review of the book, the incoherent mess of an argument culminates in the authors promoting the old Jewish Masonic plot so beloved by ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists.

There it is.

Yeah.

The authors might object that they are only talking about Zionist connections to the Freemasons and not all Jews, but this seems no different than David Icke's response to accusations of anti-Semitism, nor to Bill Cooper's absurd reprinting of the Protocols of Zion with the caveat that it's not really about Jews.

I have a lot of Jewish friends is basically what they're saying.

Yeah, some of the Jews are okay is what

narratives that are coming forth in Graham Hancock's book there.

And if we, that, that last quote mentioned a review of the book.

So I'll go to that review by

David Barrett in The Independent, and I'll finish with this one.

On that book, The Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World, it's a mishmash of badly connected, half-argued theories.

Only in the last chapter and the misleadingly titled appendix does the author's purpose become clear.

They suddenly start promulgating a version of the old Jewish Masonic plot so beloved by ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists.

This is a deeply troubling end to a mess of a book.

With luck, most readers won't get that far.

All right, now we're going to talk about an ancient site in New Mexico.

We've recently had these footprints in white sands in New Mexico, 23,000 years old or so.

That's largely being accepted now.

But there are much earlier dates.

There's 130,000 years ago from the Ceruti Mastodon site near San Diego.

That's the one that's being disputed because they say it could have been rocks that crushed the bones and made them that way.

Yeah, what I see again is an unfortunate mindset where a new and interesting idea is proposed, supported by masses of evidence and published in Nature.

You know, nature has a pretty high bar to what it accepts.

And then the critics look for any way to get rid of it.

So he's talking about the Ceruti Mastodon site, which is a paleoontological and possible archaeological site in San Diego.

In 2017, broken Mastodon bones were found at the site and were dated to around 130,000 years ago, something in that kind of region.

The researchers who found the site claim that the stones that were found near the bones were evidence of tool usage to break the bones, which would actually put it much earlier than hominids were known to be in the Americas.

That's why they think it could be archaeological, that these stones that were found were responsible for breaking the bones.

But then, other researchers point out that there's no other signs of people there at all.

And it's quite possible that the site's layers and strata were kind of disturbed during the discovery because this was all dug up by a mechanical digger that was there not to try and find an archaeological site, but to create drainage.

So it's quite possible that some of the damage and some of the other stuff that's around there have been kind of mixed up as this tanner digger was

digging.

But as it stands, you've got a group of researchers saying that we need stronger evidence before we move back the date of human occupation by 100,000 years.

That's not cancellation.

That's not a refusal to accept.

That's not looking for any kind of possible way to get rid of it.

It's a call for more information and a call for some caution.

Because the alternative is that we overturn everything we think we knew on the strength of evidence that is at best currently equivocal.

That's not how science progresses.

It's not how history or archaeology progresses either yeah science is cautious yeah uh the the framing of this is sort of hostile right he's framing it as hostile instead of just warmly accepting every hypothesis is true and that this is like a really interesting thing joe isn't sort of used to these scientific rigors he's not he's not used to the rigors of scientific discovery and it's easy to convince him that everyone here is closed-minded and they're out to get graham since he really doesn't understand the level of evidence needed to change the entirety of the human historical record.

So in order to like overturn all of those years, you need a lot of evidence, not just, hey, this might have happened.

And Graham is willing to say,

let's just go with that and we'll speculate away on exactly how...

how much that changes everything instead of saying, well, let's just make sure our foundations are correct.

This is, again, harkening back to the very beginning of the podcast.

You got to make sure your foundations are correct with science before you move on.

And they want to do all the moving on part because that's the fun part.

Yes.

They don't want to do the, they don't want to do the, the, the hard part of proving that it's actually right.

And I wanted to point this out to you, Marsh.

Are we sure that there isn't actually one set of footprints there and Jesus was carrying the mastodon?

Are we 100% sure?

It's impossible to rule that out.

Absolutely.

We don't know.

We don't know.

Yeah.

Okay, so

next up is they're going to be talking about how someone thinks the Sphinx is older than researchers suggest.

We can argue there are alternative theories.

Maybe solar activity was involved.

Robert Schock prefers a change in solar activity.

And, you know, kudos to Robert.

He's a brilliant scientist and he's put his neck on the line by advocating a much older Sphinx.

Any scientist these days in the field of archaeology who sticks his neck out and says that the archaeological narrative is wrong immediately gets massively attacked.

And

I think that's most unfortunate.

So again, he paints anyone who disagrees with the mainstream narratives as a victim of a huge attack.

If you're on Graham's side, whenever you criticize mainstream archaeology, that's scholarship.

That's reasonable.

But if you're against him, criticism is an attack every single time.

It's an attack.

It's interesting because

he characterizes this as an attack, but it reminds me of a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about how he was given a paper by Terrence Howard.

This was years ago, eight years ago at the time of the video.

It was shot.

I'm not exactly sure how long ago it was, but he got a paper from Terrence Howard essentially saying the entirety of mathematics is wrong.

And here's my thesis.

And here's this, you know, 37-page paper on how the entirety of mathematics is wrong.

And so Neil deGrasse Tyson looks through it and red pens it goes through and marks up where he thinks it's incorrect and where he thinks these things are wrong.

And Terrence Howard goes on Joe Rogan's show and says that he was trashed by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I was trashed by him.

But all Tyson did was just correct it and give frank feedback on what he thought was somebody's passionate project about mathematics.

And so you're seeing someone who's not in the realm of science, who doesn't understand the rigors necessary to prove the things they're suggesting.

And they are being told.

you're basing your ideas on faulty knowledge or you haven't proven any of the things that you're suggesting and they see it as an attack when literally just the parts that we're talking about here these these uh you know when you have to when they say prove it that's not an attack that's literally the next step in science yeah all right so so now we're going to discuss some of the discoveries in the amazon

now the amazon rainforest up until very recently had very little archaeology done you're talking about six million square kilometers of the earth's surface which has hardly been touched by archaeology and now it is being touched by archaeology thanks to lidar which is identifying enormous structures under the canopy we're finding that we have to to rewrite the whole story of the Amazon, that there were potentially populations of millions living in the Amazon, that there were cities, they were joined by roads hundreds of kilometers in length.

All of these things are recent discoveries, which says we should be thinking again about the Amazon.

So this does actually appear to be true.

I found a link for this.

We'll put it in the show notes.

That there is this huge sort of structure, this huge city, an interconnected kind of series of roads and things in the Amazon.

But this was in the mainstream news in late 2023 and early 2024 so again doesn't this completely undermine graham's entire narrative that any new discoveries are automatically hidden by the archaeological establishment great this was a major discovery and accepted it's accepted just fine because the evidence is strong that's all this is sure that's all you need all right so next up we're going to talk about uh how archaeologists think he's a kook i repeat i a lot of archaeologists have accused me of accusing them of a conspiracy against me and trying to So they're just trying to make you look very a kook.

Yeah, I don't see any conspiracy.

I see people who do believe what they're saying and who think I'm wrong, but who feel that I'm such a threat to the narrative that they present that I must be neutralized in any way possible.

And that's a sad state of affairs.

Science should embrace and explore new and different ideas, and particularly when it comes to the human past.

So once again, Hancock is being attacked.

He's a threat to the narrative.

He has to be neutralized.

We have to be sympathetic to him for just speaking his incredible truths that he's discovered.

Just to be clear, from the SAA letters, the archaeologist letter to Netflix, once again here, try and figure out who's doing the attacking in this situation.

Quote, when Hancock refers in the show to professionals as so-called experts and accuses them of being patronizing and arrogant, this disparages our public reputation.

Our archaeological community is not monolithic, but extremely diverse.

Our membership represents a wide range of nationalities, ethnicities, genders, and beliefs.

We don't always agree with each other.

However, Netflix and ITN productions are actively assaulting our expert knowledge, fostering distrust of our scientific community,

diminishing the credibility of our members in the public eye, and undermining our extensive and ongoing efforts at outreach and public education.

It's Hancock doing the attacking of the establishment with the way he's talking about them here.

And what we're seeing from the archaeologists is a reasoned call for evidence.

Yeah, yeah.

And just asking for evidence isn't an attack.

That's just how science works.

I think what we're seeing constantly throughout is a man who's not a scientist, never bothered to study the science of these things and is a journalist and is used to a much lower level.

of evidence than other places.

And he's upset that they're not just automatically accepting his theories when he hasn't produced any of the things that would be necessary to prove to other archaeologists that these things are true.

All right.

So now we're going to go back to zodiac signs.

It's an argument, it's not accepted by mainstream archaeology because of their narrative, which is that these, that the discovery of the constellations of the zodiac is given to the Greeks or perhaps to the Mesopotamians before the Greeks.

It's not thought that any human culture could have noticed the constellations of the zodiac before that, and that's really absurd because the constellations of the zodiac are on the path of the sun.

The sun rises against the background of a different constellation every month.

And how would the ancients have missed that?

Especially since the skies were an ever-present phenomenon to them in a way that they are not to us.

We are cut off from the skies by light pollution, but the ancients were not.

What a fascinating concept that they knew about the constellations 30 plus thousand years ago.

Yeah, and I believe they did.

Yeah, and so Graeme is talking here about arguments that aren't accepted by mainstream archaeology because of their narrative.

And he can't accept that maybe this fringe idea isn't believed because it's niche and not well evidenced.

Instead, he has to have the couple of niche researchers on this as being the ones who are correct.

And then all of the other other archaeologists as being like unwilling to accept it because they have to protect their narrative.

All right, so let's talk about, he's going to move on here.

He's going to talk about his preferred method to publish discoveries.

As you discussed with Brian, we won't go over it again, but he found evidence of deliberate burial in a very complicated, difficult cave system, which you can hardly access.

And of course, immediately this was published, and it was published in a Netflix documentary, the archaeological establishment descended on him like a ton of bricks and tried to find all kinds of reasons why it couldn't possibly be deliberate burial.

Whereas I think it would be much more interesting if archaeology tried to, first of all, look at all kinds of reasons why it could be deliberate burial, because that opens many doors.

Whereas saying, no, it's impossible, just

closes all the doors.

Well, what are the alternative explanations for why they had mass burial sites inside of a cave?

They fell there.

Something like that.

All of them?

Yeah, all of them.

Over many, many, many years.

And somehow buried themselves under the topsoil uh and and then left engravings on the cave walls which are which are very very similar to engravings that we find in in the caves of france for example so yeah it was published in a netflix documentary that is not how science works you don't publish in netflix you publish in journals the way science works is you look for the weaknesses in a theory that's the other important part of uh of science what they're talking about is saying well why isn't it that we just like instead of closing the doors we should look at this and say well what are the alternative explanations for this let's explore let's go in this kind of area.

Science works by looking for the weakness in a theory and then looking for explanations that don't involve overturning the model of how things work in order to fit the facts that we can actually see.

If your theory can withstand that level of scrutiny, that level of scrutiny, it will be tentatively accepted.

That's the way that science has to work.

What Graham is suggesting and what Joe is suggesting is the complete opposite of that.

How about we assume that this is true and then speculate as to why it's true and what that means?

But all of that effort is completely wasted if it's not true so check if it's true first and then you can start building on that foundation makes sense i i now they they talk about this briefly throughout like in in this section here and i wasn't uh able to find out exactly but i think i found the story that it was they were talking about it's uh from cbs scientists claim remarkable evidence that ancient human relatives buried their dead 240 000 years ago i'll leave a link to it but here's a quote quote from the article: quote, the scientist, Berger, said he expected his team to be accused of rushing to publish their research before a peer review was completed.

He argued that in the age of modern technology and social media, it was worth making all their findings available immediately to be built upon by the scientist of tomorrow.

End quote.

But like, look, when you publish a peer rev, when you publish before a peer review, expect a peer review of what you publish.

So if he, even if they didn't publish it in a journal and they published it on Netflix, if they're they're giving critique afterwards, that's what scientists do to things.

It's kind of what they sign up to do.

When they get their PhD, when they go into this field, they say, you know what, when something comes across my desk, I'm going to do my best to see if it's true because that's the field that they're in.

Don't get mad if people are asking questions about your research after you've published it and you think it's out of their realm.

If you publish it on Netflix, they're going to give you their feedback, just like what happens with Graham here, where you should be publishing it as a journal first, but I think the scientists just wanted to make sure that they could get a Netflix series out of it.

And to get out ahead of the discovery so no one else could publish on it first.

Now they're going to talk about the tragedy of such compelling evidence out there and no one is believing it.

Well, it seems like there's so much compelling evidence that that's the case.

I just, I get so puzzled and baffled by the resistance to it because it's just interesting.

Well, if it's right, it pulls the rug out completely from under the feet of archaeology, and that's why there's resistance to it.

All human beings are territorial in their own way, and archaeologists are no exception.

They're territorial, they've defined their territory.

They see a gradual, slow, steady evolution of human society.

And they think that we were at a relatively simple stage during the so-called Stone Age, and we just gradually got more and more sophisticated.

And it's an appealing idea, and it makes sense in lots of ways.

But there isn't room in that for an earlier civilization to have emerged and been destroyed.

And that's why the idea is attacked, because if that idea were true, then the foundations on which archaeology has built the house of history would collapse.

That's so unfortunate.

So unfortunate that they just don't jump in and enjoy these new discoveries.

It is very unfortunate, Joe.

I don't really have to go through and explain why.

I mean, I think I've explained multiple reasons why I think

this clip sort of encapsulates everything that's wrong with the way in which Graham is thinking.

You know, extraordinary claims require require extraordinary evidence.

They don't bother to present any good evidence.

If they did, people in the archaeological community would agree.

Marsh has pointed out multiple times that they have changed.

Literally, they had the rug pulled as

Graham is suggesting.

They've had the rug pulled out on multiple different things, different civilizations existing farther in the past than we thought, different civilizations existing in places that we thought they didn't exist.

And they have changed their entire paradigm based on these new discoveries.

So what he's saying just isn't true.

When they find things that have evidence, they change their mind.

When you suggest things that are supposed to be there and you're sort of filling up these gaps with, well, it could have happened, people have every right to be skeptical of that.

All right.

So last clip here.

This is talking about getting canceled.

In a way, redefine things.

In a way,

I've been glad to have received the vituperative level of attack from archaeology that I did, because it shows I've pressed their buttons.

It shows there's something they feel they need to cancel here.

There's something they feel they need to get rid of.

It's the most dangerous show on television.

The most dangerous show on Netflix.

An absurd idea.

Really crazy.

But that's cancel language.

That's the language you use.

Also, you call somebody anti-Semitic or racist or white supremacist or misogynist.

All of those are easy labels, which these days just need to be applied to a person.

Nobody even investigates or goes, look, goes to the correct way.

That works less and less now than it ever has before.

So again, we're talking about how

he must be right because they're coming for him.

It shows that there's something there to cancel.

It's the perfect encapsulation here of the Galileo Gambit.

I must be on to something because otherwise, why would they be attacking me so?

But

when he's talking about how they tried to cancel him, it's worth reminding ourselves of what remedial action the archaeologists were calling for Netflix to put in place in their letter.

So again, quote, we call call upon Netflix and ITM Productions to remove any labels that state or imply that this series is a factual documentary or docuseries and reclassify the series as science fiction.

We urge both Netflix and ITM Productions to add disclaimers to the series to say that its content is unfounded.

We also request that Netflix develop a policy that balances such false narratives with the presentation of scientific documentaries and accurate reporting on the knowledge that archaeologists have generated and continue to generate every day.

So their cancellation here was, please stop calling this a documentary and please include some facts.

That is the cancellation that they were doing.

That's a massive, massive impact.

This is a great way to get Joe on your side, though.

If you say you're canceled, Joe immediately becomes sort of your champion.

And this is also indicative of what happens when people are canceled.

There's very little side effects.

Nothing really happened to them.

So we hear, oh my gosh, that person's been canceled.

And Graham Hancock has a hit series on Netflix.

He's on Joe's show.

He's continuing to write books.

He's continuing to tour.

He's got a second series with Keanu Reeves in it.

Yeah.

So

nothing happened to him.

So this idea that he was canceled is just silly.

He wasn't canceled.

I also want to point out, too, they do this a lot.

Well, they'll bring up,

they call this crazy cancel language of anti-Semitic or racist or white supremacist or misogynist.

When they say that type of thing,

they are sort of inserting into Joe's viewers and listeners that when you hear those terms, those are crazy kooks who are using those terms to devalue, to basically devalue this argument instead of saying there are real problems with anti-Semitism, racism, white supremacy, and misogyny in our culture.

They are devaluing those problems by saying that only kooks say that sort of thing.

That's a real damaging message.

And I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

all right marsh here we are at the end of the show did you find anything good about this show so i i didn't dislike this as much as i've disliked some of the other conversations that uh that joe's had i found this a bit easier to listen to even though it was as we've pointed out filled with misinformation there's one bit where joe is talking about having um online conversations and getting into conflict and he talks about how if you get into conflict it's bad for the person you're talking to it's also really bad for you when you're mean and you're shitty to people that'll never make you feel good.

It'll only make them feel good.

So, always just try to find a better way to deal with people and a better way to be nice to people and try to recontextualize that.

I thought that's pretty good advice.

I think that's the kind of advice that I like to try and follow as well.

And I think a lot of the time it probably is advice that Joe is following.

I mean, we see Joe avoiding conflict even on his show.

I think he is a conflict-averse kind of guy.

He wants to get on with people.

I take that as genuine.

And I think his advice to especially his audience

to

try to avoid being shitty in those conflict kind of spaces, I think that's pretty good advice and could actually help if people listen to that.

Yeah, I think there's another part of this too, where they both seem very concerned about another person's health.

So there's a person by the name of Flint Dibble, who was supposed to be on this particular episode

with Graham Hancock to debate him.

And that actually got moved forward in the future.

So Graham was able to show up.

Flint was not because Flint was dealing with cancer at the time.

And they both sounded really concerned about him.

And it was actually kind of a really sweet moment.

They're like, man, we really hope this guy gets better.

You know, even though we have like viciously opposing views on this stuff, I really hope the best for him and his family, et cetera.

And I thought it was really sweet.

Like I was like, oh, you know, here's two people who would, you know, sort of.

I guess rhetorically have it out for each other if they were to meet, but instead they're just like they just genuinely care about each other.

And I thought that was nice.

There's also a long, long part of this talks about drugs.

So they talk, much of the first half of this is talking very specifically about archaeology stuff, but then they move on from that and they start talking about DMT and ayahuasca and all kinds of psychedelics.

And they have this long conversation about it.

And it seems like they've both really partaken in it.

And it's kind of interesting, to be honest with you.

I'm not into psychedelics.

I did.

a bunch of psychedelics when I was a kid, but I don't, I haven't done them in many years.

And it's interesting to hear their sort of theories.

I would definitely not consider this advice on anything you should do with your life, but I think it's interesting to hear their discussions of what they think those psychedelics did in their lives.

You know, just take it as anecdote.

I would not take it as like, this is medical advice I would follow.

But I think like the stories that they tell are somewhat interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, Graham Hancock even talks about how psychedelics were a big part of why he's studying this kind of field.

at all in the first place, how this kind of, how psychedelics plays into his, what he would see as scholarship in this area.

And I think it's really interesting.

I don't know that I've seen him

talk openly about the

involvement of drugs in his research into these areas.

So yeah.

Yeah.

The last thing I want to mention, though, that I really liked was that all the coughing.

So there's a cough button.

Most radio stations will have one.

It's a little button you can press to mute your mic.

Now, it doesn't mute every mic in the studio, but it'll mute your mic and it'll soften the cough for the listener.

So it'll still come through on Joe's mic because he's across the room and they're still recording him, but it'll be much quieter.

And

he tells Graham about this cough button four or five times.

He does.

And Graham uses it

a total of one time the entire time

recording.

All right.

So that's the show for this week.

Remember, you can access more than a half hour of bonus content every week for as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at patreon.com slash no rogan.

Meanwhile, you can hear more from me at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed.

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