Dan Richards

The conversation opens with a small Smithsonian publication on artificially elongated skulls. The diagrams are first assumed to be Peruvian, but the speaker who brought the pamphlet corrects this: they come from the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington. The speaker then makes a sweeping claim that the majority of elongated skulls in recorded history come from Washington State, which the other participant meets with open surprise.

The two agree that these skulls were deliberately shaped by people, not produced by some unknown population. The speaker says that when Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia River and passed the Cascade Mountains, all of the Native Americans west of the Cascades practiced artificial cranial modification. The pamphlet's title, rendered as "The Chinook Sign of Freedom," is offered as evidence of how the practice was understood, and the speaker says one individual credited his intellect to his own artificially elongated skull. The other participant objects that nobody could really know that, since the shaping was done in infancy. The reply is that this was simply what people believed.

Later the topic returns with a direct question: were these groups shaping their heads to look like people who were already there, as with the Peruvian skulls? The speaker says they once thought so, noting that skulls in China were first mistaken for Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal remains and are now said to have been artificially modified. But they have since moved to a different explanation, set out in a later section.

The discussion turns to how Neanderthal and human brain cases differ. A shared image shows the Neanderthal skull as much wider at the back. The participants link that region to motor skills and to smell, sight and hearing. They also say the Neanderthal frontal lobe was not as big as ours, and they associate the frontal lobe with thought processing and decision making. From this they speculate that Neanderthals "probably had insane athletic ability," along with strong motor skills and vision, and that the open question is how smart they were.

The participants distinguish this speculation from a more extreme picture. One recalls a single proponent who described Neanderthals as gorilla-like "super predators" with larger eyes for night vision that preyed on humans. This is dismissed as "Very sensationalist nonsense," and the genetic evidence is mentioned as running against it. The participants still admit the image is entertaining: a primate living in the woods that is "infinitely stronger than us" but not someone you can reason with.

A complication follows: the Neanderthal skull, one participant notes, "has a skull that has a larger capacity than us." That raises the question of whether the extra volume was devoted only to motor skills. The question is left open rather than answered.

Brain size leads to dolphins. One participant gives a figure with explicit hedging, saying "I think their cerebral cortex, I think, is like 40% larger than a person's," and the other answers "something like that." They suggest dolphins might be more intelligent than humans in some sense but unable to manipulate their environment. Fire is impossible underwater, so dolphin intellect would go into social life and hunting rather than technology.

The peaceful image of dolphins is then undercut. The participants describe infanticide: female dolphins are said to be promiscuous so that males cannot be sure whether offspring are theirs and will therefore not kill them. A male encountering a female with young is said to kill them so she will breed again. Chimpanzees and bears are named as doing similar things. For bears, two explanations are offered: forcing the female back into breeding, and simply feeding.

After trying several times to find the word for anthropomorphism, the participants argue that bears are the strangest case of humans humanizing animals. Bears can be trained and appear in circuses, but in the wild they are described as "some of the fucking most brutal and ruthless creatures," eating prey alive and pulling cubs out of dens. One participant calls this "a different set of morality I guess you could say or lack thereof."

The participants call ancient humans an emerging topic. Neanderthals have long been known, but Denisovans and Homo floresiensis, the "Hobbit people" of the island of Flores, now show at least two other distinct human types that lived alongside our species. Denisovans are described as large, taller than us, with bigger heads "almost like Neanderthal."

Polydactyly, meaning more than five fingers or toes, is raised next, with a passing reference to biblical giants. One participant cites a paper, shown on screen and dated 2023, saying Neanderthals and Denisovans carried a gene variant that increases polydactyly and also increases cranial deformations, among other effects. The point is framed as new research rather than settled knowledge. The episode does not give the paper's details beyond what is said aloud.

A family in Brazil is discussed in which most members have six fingers and six toes and reportedly say it helps them. The participants joke about the advantages for guitarists, goalies and fighters. They pass on the guitarists' own account that the benefit is "not the extra finger as much as it is the extra stretch, the extra reach." One participant compares seeing such hands to an AI image glitch, because the people look entirely ordinary otherwise.

One participant moves the topic to South America, saying that genetic differences were honored there: "They honored genetic deformation." They add, as a personal view, "I honestly believe that they were actively breeding different bloodlines together in South America." This idea returns later in the episode.

The six-fingered guitar riff leads into Jimi Hendrix playing a flipped guitar left-handed and Stevie Ray Vaughan. One participant describes a live performance where Vaughan stands on his Stratocaster and rocks the neck. The other says the club has photos of Vaughan on its stage from around 1983. They then praise Antone's in Austin and Gary Clark Jr.'s performances there.

This prompts a story about a concert during the lockdown period. One participant says everyone backstage caught COVID after a member of another group had it, with one exception: "Yeah, except me. I didn't get it." The other uses this to open a subject they had planned to raise.

One participant argues that public health messaging "weaponized scientific literacy" by telling people to trust the science on the vaccine. They reject being called a science denier and redefine their position:

I'm a science gatekeeper. You don't get to call it science if it ain't science. You stop at the door. Science is a method. It's a way we get somewhere. it's not the end result.

They support this by paraphrasing Carl Sagan on science as "a way of skeptically interrogating the universe." They then claim that "The average time for a peer review for a test on a vaccine is about 10 years," against a vaccine produced in about a year and a half. They conclude that proper steps were not followed. No source for the ten-year figure is given in the conversation. The participants add that large sums of money were involved and argue that alternative treatments were dismissed, which they call untrue.

The discussion then turns to the public response to the other participant's own illness and recovery. They describe frustration that few people asked what was actually done, and that they were instead labeled anti-science, accused of promoting vaccine hesitancy, and described as using "a horse dewormer," which they call "proof of propaganda." They acknowledge, though, that people were frightened and that their anxiety was understandable. One speaker also says they cannot know the personal physicians' motives and could be wrong in their guess.

The central argument is framed as a hypothetical. Even assuming the vaccine worked, the speaker says, some people could not take it, for example because of allergies to ingredients; Aaron Rodgers is named as one case. For such people, they argue, a publicly visible example of someone who exercises, takes vitamins and uses cold plunges and hyperbaric chambers, and who recovered, should have been discussed instead of suppressed. Inside the same hypothetical, the speaker also states without supporting evidence that the vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission and was not free of side effects. These are the speakers' assertions. The episode does not present studies for them.

The participants describe demonetization and channels being taken down as part of the response. Looking back, they say supporters of Anthony Fauci they know personally had not heard of the Fauci hearings. They argue that "nobody wants to think that they were completely wrong." This leads to a general principle stated as essential, especially in science: "when you were wrong about something, you got to say, well, I was wrong about that for sure."

That principle is turned on archaeologist Flint Dibble, described by the participants as "your favorite archaeologist who's not a scientist." The speaker who was criticized says they had mentioned that Easter Island's earliest habitation layer contains foodstuffs from both South America and Asia, pointing to contact with both continents about a thousand years ago. According to this account, Dibble clipped the claim and called it confidently wrong. Five minutes later in the same livestream he acknowledged evidence of contact but did not mention Easter Island, which the speaker describes as saving face. The account is one-sided, and Dibble's own framing is not presented beyond these paraphrases.

After a sponsor segment for Armora colostrum, the conversation returns to the relationship between archaeologists and interested amateurs. One participant argues that such amateurs "should be an asset to the archaeologists," and that disagreements should be handled by talking. They describe Dibble's debate with Graham Hancock as the right format, while doubting that it was conducted in good faith.

The most troubling part, for the participants, was the attempt to label Hancock's proposal of an advanced pre-existing civilization as racist. Their counterargument is that the builders of monuments such as the pyramids were in any case the ancestors of the people who live there, "whether they were the people of 2,500 BC or whether it was even earlier than that." They add that alternative researchers question sites associated with white builders too:

It has nothing to do with color. It has everything to do with written records.

The Colosseum and the Parthenon are offered as contrasts because they have written records. Baalbek, supposedly Roman, is held up as the counterexample: the participants say there are no written records of its largest stones, the trilithon, which they find strange for a culture that employed scribes to document everything. Jimmy Corsetti's view that Atlantis lay in sub-Saharan Africa is mentioned. One participant prefers to treat "Atlantis" as a catch-all label for a lost globe-spanning civilization, comparing it to how people in the far future might lump our era together as "the electronic civilization."

A joke about the French leads to warm praise for Georges St-Pierre. He is described as curious, kind, open-minded and intelligent. One participant ranks him "in the conversation of one of the greatest that's ever done it," while still naming Jon Jones as an all-time great. An Instagram exchange is recounted in which St-Pierre replied that he would trade his legs for the other person's brain. That person also says St-Pierre will host them on his podcast on the 17th.

The event is then promoted: the Quest for Ancient Civilizations Conference, October 16th through 18th at ACL Live in Austin, Texas. The named speakers include Randall Carlson and Bass Forge, along with others. St-Pierre's appearance was described as having been confirmed about an hour earlier. Tickets are said to be available online. One participant jokingly calls the lineup "the Rogan Trinity": pyramids, comedy and fighting.

Along the way there is some confusion over who released a rap song. A name mix-up is corrected, and the story settles on Randall Carlson having written rap verses in the late 1980s, which he performed over breakfast at a shared Airbnb in Sedona, Arizona.

Back on cranial modification, the speaker offers their revised explanation. They point to Chiari malformation, in which the brain descends into the opening at the base of the skull. They say researchers believe this problem stems from Neanderthal and/or Denisovan interbreeding with modern humans, and sum it up as "Skull too small, brain too big."