Randall Carlson
全文文稿 · 按对话顺序保留完整内容，深入理解上下文。
本篇目录39 章节
§01Transcript · 00:00–05:12§02Transcript · 05:12–10:43§03Transcript · 10:43–15:52§04Transcript · 15:52–20:41§05Transcript · 20:41–25:59§06Transcript · 25:59–32:09§07Transcript · 32:09–36:46§08Transcript · 36:46–41:27§09Transcript · 41:27–46:16§10Transcript · 46:16–52:19§11Transcript · 52:19–56:05§12Transcript · 56:05–59:59§13Transcript · 59:59–1:06:31§14Transcript · 1:06:31–1:11:53§15Transcript · 1:11:53–1:15:52§16Transcript · 1:15:52–1:20:18§17Transcript · 1:20:18–1:24:29§18Transcript · 1:24:29–1:28:56§19Transcript · 1:28:56–1:34:25§20Transcript · 1:34:25–1:39:15§21Transcript · 1:39:15–1:43:03§22Transcript · 1:43:03–1:46:44§23Transcript · 1:46:44–1:52:01§24Transcript · 1:52:01–1:57:31§25Transcript · 1:57:31–2:02:01§26Transcript · 2:02:01–2:06:15§27Transcript · 2:06:15–2:10:24§28Transcript · 2:10:24–2:14:36§29Transcript · 2:14:36–2:20:11§30Transcript · 2:20:11–2:25:19§31Transcript · 2:25:19–2:30:26§32Transcript · 2:30:26–2:35:11§33Transcript · 2:35:11–2:39:14§34Transcript · 2:39:14–2:43:23§35Transcript · 2:43:23–2:48:03§36Transcript · 2:48:03–2:53:52§37Transcript · 2:53:52–2:59:01§38Transcript · 2:59:02–3:03:57§39Transcript · 3:03:57–3:05:44§01Transcript · 00:00–05:12
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Randall Carlson, how are you, sir?
I'm doing well, Joe.
It's great to see you, it really is.
It's even greater to see you.
I was so looking forward to this podcast.
I was, I'm just, I'm so excited about this subject, so whenever you're in town,
I'm happy.
Well, you know, Joe, I drove 1,000 miles to get here.
That's how much I'm...
That's a long drive.
How long did that take?
We did two days.
It's a 14 and a half hour drive, but we got slowed down because of the weather.
Yeah, I was worried about that.
Yeah.
We've had some ice storms out here for people that don't know.
Yeah, right.
It was nasty for a while, but...
And you're going to be out here, you're doing some exploring, you're doing some
cave exploring as well?
Well, we were going to go to see Hall's Cave, which is a...
Pull that microphone up to you.
Hall's Cave...
Get the arm.
There you go.
How's this?
Perfect.
Good.
Yeah, Hall's Cave is near here, and this was a site that has extinct megafauna
remains in it,
and it also has some Clovis tools, and it has the Younger Dryas black mat stuff
in it.
So basically...
Black mat stuff, meaning whatever the impact was, what was settled?
So, right.
So when you had the impact, or I think impacts, plural, you had this dusting of
stuff, and a lot of fires.
So the fires produce soot, charcoal.
So at that layer, you have this black mat layer, and below it, you have megafauna,
and above it, they're mostly gone.
Below it, you have the Clovis culture.
Above it, they're mostly gone.
So Hall's Cave was a repository, and we were going to go in it.
It belongs to an elderly couple that's on private property, but then when the
COVID hit, they got worried about letting people in there, so it's been
postponed.
Thomas Stafford was the lead archaeologist on the job, on the project, and he
had agreed to set it up for us, but then they got, like I said, the elderly
couple that owns the cave, they got cold feet.
So was this because of the recent strains of COVID?
Is this like...
No, this would have been...
So two years ago, they were...
We were going to go, let's see, well, two years, was it last summer?
We were planning to go a year ago last summer.
So it's been on hold, and I suspect that at some point we'll get to do it.
But while I'm out here, we are going to check out a few things.
Canyon Lake Gorge, which is down towards San Antonio, is a site that, in 2002,
there was a heavy, heavy rain, and Canyon Lake is a reservoir.
It overflowed, and it cut this canyon and reproduced all these features, like
recessional cataracts and plunge pools and all these kind of things that geologists
assumed were kind of slow to form.
But are very similar to some of the things that are on a much grander scale
that we'll look at here today.
But what it is, is it's kind of almost forced a revision in thinking because
basically they're seeing this duplication of these forms, although on a smaller
scale, but formed in two days and not thousands of years.
So for people that are not familiar with your work, I think we should probably
give them a real quick refresher.
When you're referring to the Younger Dryas, you're referring to the Younger Dryas
impact theory.
And this impact theory, you believe, probably ended the Ice Age, caused the
extinction of many mammals and many species of life all over the earth.
All over the earth.
And reset civilization.
Pretty much, yeah.
In a nutshell, that's going to be it.
And that is somewhere around 11,000, 12,000 years ago?
Well, the dating of it, the Younger Dryas itself is about a 1,300-year interval.
So to put this in perspective, go back 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, we're in the
middle of the late glacial maximum.
When more than doubled the amount of glacial ice on the planet now.
We had North America, half of North America is buried under an ice sheet bigger
than the one that now covers the South Pole.
So all of Canada up to the Arctic Circle, northern United States, you know, New
York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Twin Cities, Seattle.
All of that area was completely buried under this massive ice sheet.
Around 15,000 years ago, 14,500 to 15,000 years ago, the climate began to warm.
And this is probably because the changing geometries between the Earth and the
Sun has this, it's called the Milankovitch cycles.
And it basically is just the geometric relation between the Earth and the Sun,
the orbit, the tilt of the Earth's axis, and so on, brings about gradual
warming and gradual cooling.
So what has been documented now is that the gradual warming began between 14,500
and 15,000 years ago.
And so the great ice sheets began to shrink back, and they lost maybe 10 to 15
percent of their maximum mass.
§02Transcript · 05:12–10:43
And this is when that ice-free corridor opened up between the two, you had two
big ice sheets that were covering North America.
Laurentide centered on Hudson Bay, Cordy Aron centered over the Canadian Rockies.
Around 16,000 to 18,000 years ago, they coalesced, they grew together.
Then with that warming, they separated, and that's, you probably heard the term,
the ice-free corridor.
Yeah.
The old ideas that North America was exclusively populated by the Clovis people
coming across the Bering Land Bridge, which was exposed because of lowered sea
levels,
migrating down through Alaska and through that ice-free corridor down into unglaciated
North America,
and then eventually all the way down to Tierra del Fuego within a thousand
years.
So now you've got this gradual warming.
Now at about 12,850 to 12,900 years ago, that process is suddenly interrupted
by this massive spasm of cold, right,
that basically undoes 2,500 years of warming, just undoes it.
And now the planet is plunged back into full glacial cold, and it takes like 1,300
years for the planet to resume its upward arc of warming.
So at the beginning of that is when the spike of mass extinctions took place,
and that's also when the COVID culture in North America that had been very prolific.
You mean Clovis?
Clovis.
What did I say?
He said COVID.
We all have COVID on the brain.
God, I know.
No worries.
The Clovis culture, yeah.
The Clovis culture, they disappeared.
Maybe I heard, he did say COVID, right?
It might have been Clovis, I don't know.
Clovis?
I think he's thoroughly confused.
Either way, it's okay.
Maybe I'm hearing it.
Yeah, well, it could be, or maybe I,
I should take a little break here and take my afternoon nap, but my after lunch
nap.
You know, that's part of my religion now, is I take an afternoon nap every day.
It's a good religion.
It's a pretty good religion.
That's solid.
Yeah, that's my ritual nap every day.
So anyways, not to get off on that, but so it lasts about 1,300 years.
At about 11,600 years ago, it ended.
Now, what's interesting about this, about the Younger Dryas period,
is that it's almost bookmarked with two catastrophes.
The catastrophe at 11,600 years ago is still kind of undefined.
There's been no, to my knowledge, evidence of any kind of extraterrestrial
impact.
However, there was a massive pulse of melting that occurred.
And so it's referred to as Meltwater Pulse 1b.
Now, there was a Meltwater Pulse 1a that is now dated at 14,600.
And there's evidence now emerging that there was also a major melting event
at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
But it was so quick before the planet jumped back into full glacial cold,
it has kind of been overlooked.
So anyways, what's interesting about Meltwater Pulse 1b, that's 11,600 years
ago.
Now, that is now given as the definition between the Pleistocene,
which was two and a half million years,
which was differentiated from the previous Pliocene,
because in the Pleistocene epoch,
what characterizes this epoch is the planet started lurching back and forth
between the glacial and interglacial ages, right?
So at the end of the Pleistocene, we get into the Holocene.
Holocene is now, the onset of the Holocene is dated 11,600 years ago.
And shortly within a millennia to two millennia after that
is when we begin to see the rise of what eventually led to modern civilization.
We see the domestication of animals.
We see the major shift in lifestyles from mostly,
if not all, hunter-gatherers now into an agricultural-based lifestyle.
So we see really the rise of agriculture in those two millennia
after the beginning of the Holocene.
What else?
Oh, the dispersion of languages generally traces back
to around roughly 10,000 years ago.
What else?
Oh, the rise of urban areas.
The first Chatalhoyak and Jericho and other cities like that
are showing up between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago.
So basically all the accoutrements of civilization
that eventually led to, you know, what we think of as modern history,
4,500 to 5,000 years ago,
all sort of got launched in this post-Younger Dryas epoch, if you will.
So the question is, is what caused these tremendous sea level rise?
And I think in one of our previous interviews,
I actually pulled up a graph
where you could see that these two great spikes of meltwater.
Rather than it being tens of thousands of years in a smooth curve,
it was two major spikes of meltwater.
So in order to trigger that melting,
you had to have some kind of input of energy.
It takes energy to melt ice.
So one of the mysteries that actually began to be noticed in the early 70s
was what is called the energy paradox.
Now, with the advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s,
what happened is you accumulated a couple of decades of radiocarbon dating.
§03Transcript · 10:43–15:52
After a couple of decades,
the geologists and the climatologists and so on,
they're looking at that data and they're going,
wait a second, our old models of, you know, glacial,
the onset of a glaciation, glacial period,
the termination of a glacial period,
were tens of thousands of years, 50, 60, 70,000 years.
Radiocarbon dating is now showing it happened way, way faster than that.
For example, radiocarbon dating showed that in central area of Canada,
where it was assumed that there had been a mile, a mile and a half of ice,
forests were growing like 30,000, 35,000 years ago.
Well, clearly there was no ice there when the forests are growing there, right?
The other thing was the rapidity with which the whole thing came to an end.
Rather than 15, 20, 25,000 years, it was more like 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years.
So this is what introduced the concept of the energy paradox.
Like, where the hell did all the energy come from to melt that much ice?
And so there was a group of scientists that did, held a conference in 1973,
didn't resolve it, held another conference in 1975, still didn't resolve it.
What they were looking at, they go, okay, well, what is the greatest
concentration
of available thermal energy on the planet today to melt ice?
So they said, well, it looks like it's equatorial regions over equatorial
oceans.
Okay, so if we apply that much thermal energy to these ice sheets,
how long would it take to melt?
20,000 to 25,000 years to completely melt away.
So that was the energy paradox, and it really has not been resolved to this day.
And see, the assumption was that the energy would have applied in a uniform
manner
from the beginning of the start of the deglaciation to the end of the deglaciation.
But it didn't happen that way.
It happened in pulses.
So in other words, rather, even though you have a tremendously enlarged amount
of energy
to melt this ice, basically it didn't happen smoothly.
It was concentrated into several episodes, which means then that you have even
more thermal
energy to try to explain.
So it kind of got left there.
And, of course, then I encountered that.
I mean, I guess, you know, going way back into the late 70s, early 80s,
when I first got obsessed with the catastrophic history of this planet and
geology and all of that,
that's when I read these papers.
And I kind of thought, well, what's the possibility?
Either it's got to be impact or it's got to be the sun.
What else could it be?
You know, there's no intrinsic source of that much heat to melt the ice that
quick.
So I was very gratified when in 2007 the paper came out proposing that there
had been an impact
at the Younger Dryas, triggering the Younger Dryas.
And, you know, we talked about that with Graham on here.
And that's actually what inspired Graham to come back to his original idea that
he had
proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods back in 95 or 96 was the two things, the
discovery
of Gobekli Tepe, which, you know, is back 11,500 years old, right?
And the evidence that there had been this cometary impact.
So in his Fingerprints of the Gods, he was still thinking, he had documented a
tremendous
amount of evidence for a catastrophe.
But what he didn't really, wasn't thinking, he was thinking more in terms of
the scenario
or the models of Charles Hapgood, who was thinking in terms of pole shift.
Well, that idea kind of fell by the wayside because it wasn't making sense from
the geophysical
standpoint and a lot of reasons.
But then when 2007 came along and this paper came out, Graham was pretty much
electrified
when he saw that and said, well, there's the catastrophe.
It was an impact.
And why didn't I think of that?
He probably did.
But so that's what caused him to circle back.
When did they first start discovering nuclear glass?
The Tritonite?
Is that how you say it?
Trinitite.
When did they first start finding that stuff?
Well, the first discovery of that, you know, it comes from Trinity, New Mexico.
So summer of 19, July of 1945.
What I mean in core samples, when they were examining.
When would that have been?
Because that's one of the pieces of evidence that they point to, correct?
Yes.
So I think maybe, you know, the Tunguska event of 1908, I think maybe in 60s or
70s, they
may have found glass associated with that.
Certainly by the 50s and 60s, they were finding glass associated with impact craters.
And when they do core samples, they do find an associated supply of the stuff.
Yeah, yes, yes.
There's a variety of proxies that will indicate impacts.
The melt glass is one of them, right?
So that's Trinitite?
Yes.
You'll have microspherals, which form, when you have a hypervelocity impact,
you know,
you've got to think you're, you know, an object coming in, closing velocity at
10 to 20 times
§04Transcript · 15:52–20:41
the muzzle velocity of a high-powered rifle.
It's coming in, it slams into the Earth.
It has a whole suite of consequences, one of which, a lot of the material that's
directly
in the epicenter gets vaporized.
That vapor goes up into the stratosphere, it begins to circulate, as it cools,
it drops back
to Earth, and it will form both microspherals and microtectites.
And microtectites are small, little aerodynamically shaped forms that you, they're
called microtectites
because you really only see them under a microscope.
And likewise with the microspherals.
Then you have nanodiamonds.
Nanodiamonds are only produced under extraordinary regimes of heat and pressure.
So you've got microspherals, you've got the Trinitite and the melt glass, you've
got the
microspherals, you've got iridium, other platinum group metals.
Now associated with the Younger Dryas, they've found iridium spikes, osmium
spikes, and platinum
spikes, which are all part of the platinum group metals, all of which are
pretty much abundant
in cosmic things like asteroids, right?
So you had the finding of that, you know, I think in the Greenland ice cores,
platinum showed
up in iridium.
See, what else?
Charcoal, if there's, if, or soot, if there's, if there's fires.
So, you know, soot has been found in conjunction with that black matte layer.
That's one of the reasons it's black, is because of the amount of charcoal and
soot in it.
Meaning there was some sort of massive fires that were associated with the
impact.
Yes, yes, that's right.
So, you know, the critics came out, savaged it.
You know, the first group, I think, was 17 scientists that signed off on that
paper, 2007.
Actually, and they formed a group called the Comet Research Team, organized by
George Howard,
who runs the Cosmic Tusk website.
He'd be, he'd be a great guest, by the way.
He's really, he knows more about the Younger Dryas than I do.
He's, he's, and he, he has a good comprehension of it.
And so he does the Cosmic Tusk website and he helped to organize this Comet
Research Team.
Now, the Comet Research Team has grown to over 50 members since 2007.
And I have been out in the field with, oh, a couple of times with, with some
members of the group,
Chris Moore, for example, who originally was one of the skeptics.
So we were out, we can circle back to this too, the Carolina Bays, which are
these unique elliptical features
on the southeastern coastal plain of the United States.
So we were out in the field with me and him, George Howard.
Graham Hancock was with us on that one.
And Malcolm Lecomte, I don't know if you remember Malcolm, he was the scientist
that Graham brought
in on our side during the great debate, right?
During the phone call, right?
During the phone call.
That was Malcolm Lecomte.
He was there.
So Chris Moore, you know, I had a chance to have extensive conversations with
him.
And he basically said, well, yeah, I originally came on as a skeptic.
I was going to debunk this.
And then I began seeing the evidence.
And now I'm a believer.
Well, it ties neatly together, right?
It really does.
It seems like that it's the thing that makes the most sense when you look at
all the physical
evidence, when you look at how quickly things changed.
I did not know that the amount of melting would have taken that long, though.
That's pretty extraordinary.
Well, you see, you got to bear in mind, too, that what will happen under normal
circumstances
is you will have a melting season, summer, right, fall comes, things get cold
again, melting
stops, and then you have more ice accumulation because it's now snowing during
the winter.
So really, if you say 20,000 years or 15,000 years to melt, you've got to
actually cut that
in half or less because you're only going to have really, especially in the
northern latitudes,
you're going to only have probably three or four months out of each year where
actually
the ice diminishes in mass.
So that's one reason why it'll, it's not like a continuous process.
But yeah, I think I've got, let's see, if I've got it right here, I'll pull
this up.
But yeah, so that was the thing when I discovered that in the late 70s is when
I started thinking,
okay, so something unusual happened that we don't really have an explanation
for.
Didn't you come up with the idea why you're on acid?
Well, what a great idea.
Well, I would say that was a factor.
Yes, I would.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Nothing wrong with great ideas on acid, ladies and gentlemen.
§05Transcript · 20:41–25:59
Kerry Mullis, didn't he come up with partially the idea for the PCR test?
I think that's right.
I think I couldn't swear to it.
Is it a PCR test or some great discovery?
Uh-huh.
So this is, yeah, this was, this was the energy paradox research here.
This was one of the guys who was the John T. Andrews.
You can see, 1973, the Wisconsin Laurentide ice sheet.
The Laurentide was the big one, right?
Dispersal centers, and this is the key, problems of rates of retreat.
So this was when they began to say, hey, there's a problem here, guys, you know?
So let's see here.
And this was one of the bizarre things.
See, if you go, the average marginal recession, that's the ice shrinking back.
Between 12,000 and 7,000 years before present, BP is before present.
Is that a new phrase, before present?
I've seen it in the literature going back 20 or 30 years.
And geologists use that, whereas historians and archaeologists tend to use BC.
Right.
Right.
But if you're talking about something that happened 50 or 500,000 years ago,
saying BC doesn't make sense.
Right, it seems silly.
You have to do extra math.
Right.
Right.
So this is the first thing they noticed, that the rate of recession, you would
assume that it's going to be faster at the southern margin, right?
And it's much slower, because the northern margin is up by the Arctic circle,
right?
What they saw, that it varied little between the northwest and southern margins.
So that was the first mystery.
So then the second thing was, of primary concern, is the energy balance at the
margin of the ice sheet required to promote the rapid late Wisconsin retreat.
The growth and development of the Laurentide Ice Sheet Complex is still an enigma.
That was in 73.
It's still an enigma in 2002.
Which is why I find it so interesting, is because there are mysteries out there,
and I love a good mystery.
Unexplained is the growth of the ice cap, and it's gathering grounds of Baffin
Island.
So they're saying, we don't even know how it started.
When you said 2002, did you mean 2022, or do you mean 2002?
I meant 2022.
Okay, okay.
Thank you, Joe, for keeping me on track.
Listen, you have so much information in your head, some of it's going to spill
out the sides.
Yeah, some of it does spill out the sides.
Yeah, so here was the question.
The average annual rate of marginal retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet,
calculated from the reduction area, was 260 meters per year, which is 853 feet.
So that means over the whole period of disappearance of the ice, it's on
average 853 feet.
Every year, the ice is receding, right?
And this high figure immediately raises the question of what energy sources are
available to cause such a rapid retreat.
A significant aspect of the Laurentide De-glacial history is the high energy
inputs required, which, you know, that was what came up in the 1970s.
They still haven't, yeah, the high energy inputs.
Let's see.
So this is kind of showing here, like imagine that this is the marginal profile
of the ice sheet.
And then as it recedes, it's also wasting vertically as well, because it's
retreating, but it's also shrinking this way.
So when it comes down to rates of ice retreat in meters per year for the
northwest, southwest, south, and northeast sectors of the Laurentide Ice Sheet,
and what they discovered was the rate of retreat up on the northern section was
just as fast as the southern.
So like, what the hell is going on here?
It's happening simultaneously.
It's happening simultaneously, yeah.
Is there a competing theory?
I've never seen it.
You've never seen any competing theory on the rapid recession of the ice caps?
I have not.
I have not.
Other than I've seen several attempts to try to explain it through gradualistic
processes,
but I think that it's been one of those things that has, it's so bizarre that
almost like, let's just stay away from that for the time being.
It's interesting that there's resistance to it, because we know that there are
asteroidal impacts and comet impacts.
We know all that stuff's real.
We know we're in the middle of space and it happens all the time.
We just look at the moon with its lack of atmosphere, and we know there's craters
all over it.
So we know things get hit constantly, and we're dealing with this immense
period of time.
It just seems logical.
It seems logical.
And, you know, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, they theorized way back,
I think, in the 70s, that there was an extraterrestrial cause to ice ages,
that the planet might get dusted with extraterrestrial, fine, including nanodiamonds
that are so small and very reflective of heat.
That that may be, was not accepted back in the 70s, just because it's pretty
much outside.
See, they were still looking for what the Milankovic, what I was mentioning
earlier, the changing geometry of the Earth to the Sun.
The problem with that, though, is the rates.
§06Transcript · 25:59–32:09
You know, those are slow, long, very gradualistic.
What we're seeing now is stuff is, like, happening like that.
How quick are we talking about, when you're talking about this recession of the
ice caps, from the time where there's a mile-high sheet of ice to what we see?
5,000 years.
5,000 years.
But within there, see, you can say 5,000 years, and you might think of a
uniform process.
It's diminishing in mass uniformly each year, but that's not how it happened.
Because even during the Younger Dryas, now, the evidence suggests that that
more or less gradualistic shrinking was interrupted, and then you had a regrowth
of the ice sheet.
So the process was interrupted, see?
So what that leads is, again, we don't really have gradualistic explanations
for it.
That's why I think we have to go to a more catastrophic scenario.
And this catastrophic scenario, we're not talking about one individual event.
We're talking about possibly multiple impacts.
That's what I would definitely lean towards.
And this is over a course of how many years?
Well, I think that if we look at the work of, and I've mentioned this on your
show before, the work of, in fact, in one of our conversations we had,
it was William Napier, who was a British astronomer, commented that we had...he
was pleased that we had talked about it.
And I mentioned that Victor Klub and William Napier and several of these others
that were sort of called them neocatastrophists, if you will.
And they really began proposing, in the late 70s and early 80s, things like, I
say, you know, impacts may be responsible for a lot of things.
They may be responsible for increased amounts of volcanic eruptions, because,
you know, hypervelocity impact can be very damaging.
You know, the analogy that I like to use, if you have like a .38 caliber bullet,
right?
And I was to throw that at you, even as hard as I could, and it hit you, might
sting a little bit, it's not going to do any damage at all.
But that same .38 caliber, accelerated to, you know, 2,500 feet per second, a
lot of damage.
Now, you take a half-mile space rock, accelerate it by a factor of 10 beyond
that, and slam it into the Earth, yeah, it's going to have consequences that
could take, you know, thousands of years, actually, to play out.
Is there an estimate of how many impacts there were?
Not yet.
Not yet?
Mm-mm.
I think there was probably in the range of about 10 impacts.
So 10 over the course of a few thousand years?
Yes, although they were probably concentrated.
I think that you had a concentrated series of impacts right around the
beginning of the Younger Dryas, because that's where the proxies are found.
We still don't have an explanation for the end of the Younger Dryas.
Something interesting, though, it's one of these coincidences that I should
bring up.
We talked a little bit at one point, maybe the first meeting we had, we talked
about Plato and the story of Atlantis.
And a lot of, I noticed some of the negative comments were like, oh, I heard
him mention Atlantis.
So I just immediately turned it off, because that's BS, you know.
Well, whether Atlantis really existed or not, that's a whole other interesting
question.
And as a matter of fact, I just a few weeks ago did a part one of a six-part
series, a live stream, where I'm like line by line dissecting what Plato
actually said, going through four or five different translations, going back to
some of the original Greek language that he used.
But the thing that really initially, I wasn't that interested in the Atlantis
thing until I realized that he's, if you go into his dialogue, Timaeus, just
before he begins the story of Atlantis, he prefaces it with the, by referencing
the myth of Phaeton.
And Phaeton, being the son of Halios, who tried to drive his father's chariot
in the path of the sun and completely failed, and the chariot deviated off the
path of the sun and it declined or deviated down to the earth and it set the
world on fire.
Now, in the story of Atlantis, Solon is hearing this story from these elderly
Egyptian priests who say that they have preserved that story in their sacred
registers for 9,000 years.
Is that possible?
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe not.
But this is what, this is what was related, that they, that they, it was
preserved in their sacred registers and in their temples for 9,000 years.
And this was prior to Solon's 10-year sojourn in Egypt, right?
Solon's sojourn in Egypt happens at 600, 400, 600 B.C.
Let me think of that.
Let me think of this.
Yes.
So, basically, if you add that to the 9,000, go back from now to 600 B.C., that's
2,600 years.
Yeah.
Add that to 9,000, what do you get?
11,600.
You get around the time of the Younger Dryas impact.
The end of the Younger Dryas, Meltwater Pulse 1B.
So, you have a rapid rise, what John Shaw, Canadian geologist, the late John
Shaw, called a CRE, which is Catastrophic Rise Event.
So, there was a catastrophic rise event at 11,600 years ago.
Plato gives that date based on the chronology from Solon down through Drapidus,
through Critias the Elder, through Critias the Younger, then finally to Socrates
and Plato.
Coincidence?
Perhaps that's what the skeptic would say.
It's just a coincidence.
I'm not quite so ready to dismiss things like that as coincidence, because it's
§07Transcript · 32:09–36:46
pretty amazing that he puts the demise of Atlantis, that it subsides beneath
the ocean as a result of an earthquake and a rapid rise of sea level, and there's
Meltwater Pulse 1B right there.
Who knows?
But what, to me, even makes it more interesting is because he prefaces the
whole story with this Phaeton myth.
And then he says, let's see, I bet you I have it right here.
Let's see.
There we go.
Let's see if we can open this up, and you can see exactly what Plato says.
And let's see here, if we zoom down to...
Have you seen that geological formation in, I believe it's Africa, the rings?
The recap structure, yes, yes.
What are your thoughts on that?
That it's natural.
You think it's natural?
I think it's natural.
I think it's very interesting.
I first discovered that maybe 20 years ago, because it was when it was first
discovered because of NASA photography.
They were looking at it and thinking, this might be a multi-ringed impact
structure.
So I thought, oh, add this to the ever-growing list of impact structures.
However, subsequent research showed that it was pretty much natural.
And I think, yeah, here we go right here.
So this is, since you brought it up and asked about it, you can see here there's
a magma body beneath the structure.
It's volcanic.
And let's see, yeah, an external basaltic ring dike is displaced by a north-northeast-south-southwest
fault system in the northeastern part of the structure and is cross-cut by
carbon-a-type dikes.
So you can see there's this whole magma chamber beneath the thing.
I see.
And how do they find that?
Oh, geophysical surveys.
And so what that would indicate was that this is probably the remnants of a
volcanic eruption, like some sort of a caldera, like the same way that we have
Yellowstone when they found that from space?
Well, that was probably pressure from below causing an up-doming, right?
Now, you've got multiple layers like this.
Now, you picture you've got a circular up-doming.
Now, you truncate that.
If you can picture that you've got these multiple stratigraphic layers, right,
it forces it into a circular sort of a dome-shaped uplift.
And then you truncate it, you slice the top of that off, what you're going to
have is multiple rings that are now exposed.
So that's—
So it makes sense if it's in that area where this volcanic activity takes place
and that this is a natural possibility.
Yeah.
Now, I know that Jimmy has looked at that.
Corsetti, yeah.
Yeah.
And I don't know Jimmy personally.
I like the guy without knowing him.
You interviewed him, right?
Yeah, very nice guy.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Yeah.
I'd like to get him out in the field with me and show him some stuff firsthand.
I think he—
I bet he would love that.
I think he would.
He's a giant fan of your work.
I'd like to hear that.
Well, I'm a fan of his work, but I don't happen to agree on this one.
Well, I mean, I don't even know if he agrees.
I think he's just speculating.
Yeah.
He's not dogmatic.
Like, he doesn't have, like, a rigid perspective on this.
Yeah, here you can see.
There's the re-cat structure.
What is interesting, though, is look at this.
You've got this structure up here, the terminate—
I forget how you pronounce that.
Can I say that?
I knew how to pronounce it.
But anyways, that's an impact crater there.
There's one here.
We can actually, if we go back, the Tenumer crater in Mauritania, that's impact.
And the Tememichat.
That's it.
So what's interesting, though, check this out.
There's one, there's two, and here's the re-cat structure.
They fall in a perfect alignment.
But what's the explanation there?
I don't know.
Could just be coincidence, right?
Could be coincidence, yeah.
It could be coincidence.
One of the things that he said about the re-cat structure was that around it,
the white appears
to be salt.
Which could be.
And, I mean, see, the rim rock of this is late Cretaceous, about 90 million
years old.
So at that point, it was below the ocean, right?
So it's been uplifted.
I think this thing is about 1,400 or 1,500 feet above sea level, if memory
§08Transcript · 36:46–41:27
serves me correct.
So it's been eroded.
You see, this whole thing here is like an erosion.
You had a massive amount of water that came down over this, and most likely is
what exposed
this thing to the surface.
It was probably buried.
Let's see here.
Oh, so right there is, you know, from Plato, that's the ringed city of Atlantis
to scale.
The concentric rings.
The concentric rings.
So this is the actual scale superimposed onto the re-cat structure.
So it's much smaller in scale.
Much smaller, yeah.
But Plato's scale was based on what?
The staid.
It was based on the staid, which is roughly 607 feet.
It's where we get the word stadium from.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, because that was the length of a stadium in ancient Greece.
So when you look at Plato's version of this, sorry to take you on this detour,
but I was just curious.
When you look at Plato's version of Atlantis, is there an area of the world
that seems likely?
Yeah?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You better watch my six-hour presentation, Joe.
Okay, I will.
Yeah.
No, but I look.
It's detailed.
That's why even in six hours, you know, I can't really spell it.
In the podcast I did, the first nine episodes, two hours each, were devoted to,
I thought, well, let's kick it off with Atlantis.
18 hours of Atlantis.
18 hours of Atlantis.
The last episode, nine, was devoted to the re-cat structure.
Wow.
So I had eight hours, so 16 hours.
But we had some chatter and things like that in there.
So maybe more like 12 or 14 hours.
So you know who Johanna James is?
No.
She is a British actress who started doing this podcast.
She's a really cool lady.
She's very interested in all this kind of stuff, very smart, extraordinarily
beautiful.
And she went on and did a, she does these like 20-minute, 30-minute little vignettes
of things that she's really interested in, having to do a lot with, you know,
ancient cultures, all the kind of things that, you know, Graham Hancock is, you
know, she reads Graham Hancock.
She became a fan of mine and she devoted one of her little 20- or 30-minute
segments to, she said, I watched all 10 hours or 12 hours of Randall Carlson's
programs on Atlantis.
And so she did this like 30-minute little synopsis of it.
Really did a great job.
So we reached out to her.
I invited her on.
She came on.
We did a live stream a couple of weeks ago with her as a guest.
And just really fun lady.
She's also does comedy.
Really?
Yeah.
And she's very intelligent, very gorgeous.
What can I say?
You know, and smart and interested in all this kind of stuff.
So, you know, there we go.
Anyways, so she was very interested in the whole Atlantis thing.
And so because of that, there was a lot of feedback and people wanting to know
more.
And so I thought, okay, now the 10 or 12 hours I did, what I'm going to do is I'm
going to try to condense that down.
So a couple of weeks ago, we did the first three-hour live stream where I
basically started breaking down Plato's account line by line.
What did he actually say?
Let's look at the geology.
Let's look at the geography, the oceanography, the astronomy, and see if it
lines up, if it matches up.
And so I think there's one place that pretty much is not all the details.
But when you look at all of the areas around the planet that have been proposed
for Atlantis, I think there's one place that fits the majority of his details,
and that's the sunken Azores Plateau.
And I say sunken because we know it's sunken, and it's right along the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge.
In fact, since we're on this subject, and I wasn't even thinking we'd get on
this subject, there's the Azores Plateau right there.
It straddles a triple plate junction, which you have the European plate, the
African plate, and the North American plate here.
It's up near Nova Scotia?
Yeah, it's far north.
It is.
But notice over here, it's really almost at the same latitude as Spain.
See?
And I would say that if there's any place on the planet that is most consistent
with Plato's account, that's it right there.
And why is that, without doing an 18-hour presentation?
Oh, come on, Joe!
§09Transcript · 41:27–46:16
Can't we have pizza brought in?
We can.
No.
That's why, in a nutshell, God, where do I even begin?
So, I was afraid you were going to ask that, but we can look very quickly, I
guess, like, give you the five-minute version, which is that there is evidence
that there was a massive subsidence along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
We actually talked about this a little bit, and I think in our very first
discussion we had, which was what, seven, eight years ago?
At least.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because, and so we talked about this a little bit.
Geophysics shows that there's horizontal movement, lateral movement of the
Earth's crust because of continental drift, but there's also vertical movement.
And that is the result of isostatic compensation.
That's called, isostasy is the vertical movement of the Earth's crust.
I can show you, like, I should have a slide right here that will help to really
illustrate what it is.
Let me back up to, let's see.
Should be right in here.
Ah, here we go.
Okay, so now this is the shore of Hudson Bay.
Now, this is where the ice sheet was the thickest, right?
Now, what are you seeing there?
Hudson Bay is up here.
These are shorelines, because when the ice was removed, the land started rising
back.
So here's sea level, land is rising back.
And the land is rising because of a lack of weight of the ice?
Yes.
Oh.
Right.
So you're sitting on a soft, cushiony chair right now, right?
Are you?
Yep.
Okay.
So your ass is causing isostatic depression of that cushion on your chair.
Right.
And if you sit up, you'll have isostatic compensation.
Right.
So that's what that is along many, many, many lines.
Yes.
Those are all shorelines.
Wow.
Here's another view of it.
Wow.
Here's another view.
Wow.
That's the land rebounding a couple of thousand feet after the ice was removed.
Now, the ice was removed and all of those trillions of tons of weight, where
did it go?
In the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, you look, the thinnest crust on the earth is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
And if you look at it, you'll see that there are transform faults, which should
show up right here.
The transform faults are these vertical fault lines that are, you would say,
orthogonal or right angles to the ridge itself.
Here you can see very clearly the triple plate junction and how the Azores
plateau.
Okay.
Well, since the 1940s, the first expedition in 1948, there was a, when they
started doing dredge samples from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, which coincidentally,
the name of the ship was the Atlantis.
So, they dredge core samples and they pull up the core samples from two miles
down, a mile to two miles down, and they look at those core samples.
And what you had was, for example, shallow water creatures living.
They weren't living.
They were now, you know, they had been drowned.
You had creatures like, that had, that typically lived under a hundred feet of
seawater.
And now they're a mile, mile and a half below.
And they're on the flanks of this, of this place right here.
So, these are fossils that they're finding?
Yes.
So, and they're finding fossils that ordinarily you would find in some place
that was very shallow.
Very shallow.
Very shallow.
Yes.
Or relatively shallow, a hundred feet.
A hundred feet.
Yes.
So, this is, this is the basic idea here.
This goes back to the 60s.
As it says right here, the possible tectonic implications of glacial eustatic.
Now, eustatic is the rise and fall of sea level correlated with the increase
and decrease of glacial ice.
So, if the ice is increasing, sea level is falling, and we call that eustatic
sea level fall.
If the ice is shrinking, melting, sea level is rising.
So, that's a eustatic rise.
So, that's the meaning of that.
When you see glacial eustatic, that means the rise and fall of the sea level as
a result of glacier growth or melting.
And it says here, sea level fluctuations have received only minor attention in
connection with such problems as ocean floor spreading.
The purpose of this report is to point out that late Pleistocene sea level data
suggests that the ocean basins have responded isostatically and by a
§10Transcript · 46:16–52:19
significant amount.
particularly concentrated along the mid-Atlantic ridge.
So, I mean, I've got so much here, I'm just going to grab a couple of these
things here.
So, they dug up these cobbles, which are – the cobbles are – so, a cobble
is basically a stone or anything that's lithified that's roughly between a pebble
and a boulder.
A boulder, when you get, I think, to 11 inches, about the size of a volleyball,
now you're in the realm of boulders.
A cobble is in between pebbles and boulders, you know, like you've heard of cobblestone
streets, you know, they're fist-sized rocks, basically.
So, they say here, the Atlantis Cruiser and Great Meteor Seamounts rise from a
broad ridger plateau, which extends from the mid-Atlantic ridge, blah, blah,
blah.
Let's see, so, about a ton of flat pteropod limestone cobbles was dredged from
the summit area of one of these sunken – what they're calling the seamounts
– and a seamount is like a flat-topped mountain, right?
Like the top of the mountain has been sheared off, okay?
So, they pulled up these limestones, right, these limestone cobbles, they dated
them.
One of the cobbles gave an apparent radiocarbon age of 12,000 years, plus or
minus 900 years.
The state of lithification, how much it is turned into rock, of the limestone
suggests that it may have been lithified under sub-aerial conditions, in other
words, in the atmosphere.
That's what that means.
It may have been lithified under sub-aerial conditions, and the seamount may
have been an island within the past 12,000 years.
Wow.
So, I mean, we could go through, again, hours of this kind of research, and why
it's been pushed off to the side is anybody's guess.
But it just doesn't fit the paradigm.
But, yeah, basically – now, this doesn't prove that there was any
civilization there, but we can make a very strong case that a large section of
the Azores Plateau was above sea level during the late glacial maximum.
Does it coincide with Plato's account of trade and of travel and of the way –
well, we have no way of knowing.
See, now, there we have to make a leap of faith, which is this: if – and if
we look right here, you'll see – you can see it very clearly.
And you can see the Straits of Gibraltar here, which was anciently known as the
Pillars of Heracles.
You come here to a group of islands, and then you get to the Azores Plateau.
And here – these down here are those seamounts, those truncated seamounts.
So, really, all you have to do – here's the leap of faith you have to make
– you have to go – now, we don't – I don't get into anything like, you
know, whatever, flying spaceships or crystal ray guns or anything like that.
No, I just go by what Plato says.
What he's describing is a maritime culture that had navigational abilities,
something along the lines of the Minoan or the Phoenician culture, maybe by an
order of magnitude, right?
So, now, all we have to do, really, is assume this – which, to me, is not so
pseudoscientific that we couldn't even consider it – which is that somebody,
some group in the Ice Age had enough navigational skills to sail from Europe to
islands right here.
And what would be the reason why they would go there?
Like, what was so exceptional, supposedly, about Atlantis?
Well, I'll show you one thing.
It was a hub of trade.
It was supposed to be a very advanced city, right?
Well, advanced in the standpoint that, yes, it was gauged in trade.
It was – it was – had – it was, you know, had a broad net of cultural
connections around the world.
But if you look at this, this is – if you go right here, let's see – the
position of the Gulf Stream during Quaternary Glaciations.
In the present-day North Atlantic Ocean, the boundary between the subtropical
and subpolar gyres runs southwest to northeast, from Hatteras to the northern
sea.
So we'll get down here, right here – in contrast, during the last glacial
maximum approximately 18,000 years ago, the gyre boundary and associated
currents were more zonal and located further to the south.
So here's a map showing basically what you would have had.
So this is the Gulf Stream, so it's bringing up the warm equatorial waters and
wrapping it right around the Azores.
So if you were going to try to, you know, theorize or hypothesize an ideal
climate during the Ice Age, there it is right there.
You see, that Gulf Stream, you know, it's the Gulf Stream now, this is why you
have, you know, warmth basically in the UK, right?
And is there any physical evidence other than the cobblestones or anything,
yeah?
Plant remains.
Plant remains.
Dredged up plant remains, yes.
Oh.
Yeah.
Plant remains that would have been growing, you know, in a climate, you know,
not consistent with the Ice Age.
What about anything that would indicate human settlement?
No, not yet.
Although I've heard some things, I haven't seen confirmation.
I think it's going to take submersible.
Yeah.
You know, we're just at the very beginnings of submarine archaeology.
And how deep is this area again?
Well, you see, right now, it is, the Azores are actually islands that are above
sea level, and the major part
of the plateau is a mile to mile and a half underwater.
So that's where all the action would be?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
§11Transcript · 52:19–56:05
And is there any sort of plan to do an excavation or some sort of an expedition
where they go
underwater and look at some of that stuff and try to find some physical
elements?
Well, not yet, but I was thinking, Joe, that you and I would see what...
Okay.
You ready to take a ride?
Do you know James Cameron?
Maybe we could borrow his submarine.
Well, I don't want to say this, but I've actually had somebody contact me who's
two steps removed.
I won't get into that.
Really?
Because I don't like to count chickens.
You know what I'm saying?
I get it.
Yeah.
James Cameron, if you're out there, I'm with you, brother.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When we're not...
Let's go find it.
When we're not recording.
That guy's a wild man.
I know.
Literally, I mean, he's...
First of all, he's one of the most successful movie producers in the history of
the human
race, right?
Yeah.
But yet he's so crazy, he gets in a submarine and goes to the bottom of the
fucking ocean.
Right.
See, and here's the thing.
You know, you gotta...
And a lot of what I'm documenting here is how catastrophic some of these events
were.
Yeah.
We would've had massive tsunamis that would've affected everything, you know?
And like Plato says, Atlantis subsided beneath the waves because of a great
earthquake.
And we can actually show now that there has evidence of massive traumatic seismic
events
along the mid-Atlantic ridge, coincident with the rapid rise of sea level.
So a lot of the pieces fit together.
It doesn't prove anything.
But to me, it makes the case that it might be worth it to go down and have a
look, close
a look.
All they would need is some pottery, right?
All they would need is something.
My guess is that whether it's to be taken literally or not, Plato's description
of the
infrastructure.
I would think that the infrastructure, the multi-ringed, if that was real and
not just metaphorical,
that's kind of what you would look for.
Some of it.
Yeah.
In other words, I mean, we do know that these ancient peoples, you know, just
from historical
times, were, you know, and this is what Graham documents from all over the
world, that these
people had extraordinary engineering skill.
Yeah.
The ability to, you know, organize on a huge scale, you know, quarry 50, 100,
200 ton and
larger stones, move them around with impunity all over the world.
And that to me has always struck me as a builder.
I've had a little bit of experience moving beams and things that weigh half a
ton to a ton.
And I know what's involved.
If you don't have a crane, you got to do it manually.
So I'm doing that.
And I'm often thinking, wait a second, what if I'm going to do 2.3 million
stones that weigh
this much?
Right.
Like the temple, like Giza.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a hell of a lot of work and social organization that's required.
And math.
Yeah.
And hey, does it make sense that you've got these kinds of undertakings, you
know, by people
that were just a generation or two before subsistence farmers or hunter gatherers?
I just have a hard time with that.
It's definitely interesting.
Yeah.
It's also interesting how some parts of the world were so sophisticated in
relationship
to other parts of the world, whereas some parts of Europe weren't that
sophisticated at
all.
Egypt was thriving and making construction on a scale that boggles the mind
today.
And we've seen even in recent times, you know, advanced technological cultures
living side
by side with basically Stone Age cultures.
And if we were to, if this planet was to be subjected to some of the kinds of
§12Transcript · 56:05–59:59
events like
the Younger Dryas event, there would be really no trace in 10,000 years of our
presence here
other than the Stone Age material.
Right.
Like all of our hard drives, all of our phones, all be deteriorated and
disappear.
Right.
All plastic is gone.
Yeah.
Gone.
Everything's gone.
Cars, gone.
And I told my kids about this.
We were talking about books and how even books are going away and books are
becoming hard drives.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I'm saying, do you know, like if something happened, everything we know
would be gone so
quickly.
Yeah.
It's a real problem because it's so convenient.
Like I have, my phone has a terabyte of data on it, which is astounding.
I know.
It's astounding that you could have that much data on your phone.
But if that phone dies, all that stuff's gone.
All that stuff is gone.
Yeah.
If we got hit, if something hit us, if we lost the power grid for a decade, if
we, you
know, if we got down to, like we were talking before this podcast about the Toba
volcano in
Indonesia.
Yeah.
And about how 74,000 years ago it knocked the human race down to a few thousand
people.
That's, we saw, I'm sure you saw it because I thought of you when it happened.
You saw that volcano that erupted in the middle of the ocean when you could see
it from space.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
Fascinating eruption.
And here's the thing, Joe.
I mean, if we were to have, like, if you go back to 18, you heard about the
year without
a summer, 1816?
No.
Tambora, plus several other unknown volcanoes erupted within about a five-year
span.
Tambora was the big one.
And it disgorged huge amounts of ash and fine sediment into the atmosphere,
which circled
the globe.
And basically, the summer of 18, this was in 1815.
The following summer, there was basically no summer.
They were having 4th of July commemoration in New England and it was snowing
out.
Wow.
4th of July.
And this has been referred to as the last great subsistence crisis of Western
civilization
because there was famine, because you had agricultural failures.
So you have this thing that you can begin to track now where you have primarily
cold that's
brought about by, I think, primarily volcanism is going to be the main instigator
of this.
But also, I think, hypervelocity impacts will also do.
And we'll pull up some data here shortly that shows that hypervelocity impacts
are way, way
more common than was even assumed a decade, two decades, certainly a generation
ago.
That these things are, we've actually been rather lucky in the last few
centuries that we've
not had any major impacts.
Tunguska of 1908 is considered the most recent great impact and we can talk
about that in a
minute.
You've heard of that, right?
Sure.
Yeah.
That's the one over Siberia.
It impacted in the sky above the forest and flattened massive amounts of trees.
Massive.
Yes, yes.
That was one that erroneously they associated with Tesla for some reason.
I thought that Tesla was doing something wacky.
Nah, I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, that's the tinfoil hat brigade.
No.
The evidence to me suggests very strongly that it was a piece of the torrid
meteor stream,
which was a byproduct of this integration of comet Anki, which was in turn —
and this
gets us back to the British neocatastrophists.
Is Anki named after the Sumerian Anki?
No.
I think it was named after an astronomer who discovered it.
Most comets are named after whoever discovers them.
§13Transcript · 59:59–1:06:31
And it's spelled a little different — E-N-C-K-E as opposed to E-N-K-I.
But, coincidence though, Anki.
Anyways, so comet Anki was probably part of a much bigger system, and it was
probably Earth's
encounter with the torrid meteor stream that triggered the Younger Dryas
impacts.
That's kind of — a lot of the pieces are sort of fitting together now.
And the torrid meteor stream was a much more prolific meteor stream in the past
than it is now.
The Earth crosses the torrid meteor stream twice each year.
Peaks late October, early November, when the stream — if you've got a picture
— I actually have a graphic I can pull up in a minute.
But you picture this stream circling the Sun and going out to Jupiter and then
circling back, coming around the Sun.
And it's laying into the plane of the ecliptic.
Earth's orbit crosses that stream twice.
So it crosses the stream when the stuff is coming in from out by Jupiter, and
that's around Halloween.
In fact, they've been called the Halloween meteors.
Circle around the Sun, and the second time the Earth crosses each year is late
June, early July.
But now that stream is coming right from the direction of the Sun.
So that makes it largely invisible, right?
Because you're looking right almost into the Sun, see?
Now, when you look at the Tunguska event, it was June 30th, peak of the torrid
meteor stream.
If you look at its position in the sky, where it came from, it was perfectly
positioned to be part of that torrid meteor stream.
So it was probably, most likely — nobody's proven it, but the circumstantial
case is very strong — that it was a part of that torrid meteor stream.
And the torrid meteor stream right now, the radium, the place in space where
the meteors appear to be emanating, is almost targeted right on the Pleiades,
which is the shoulder of the bull, the constellation of the bull, Taurus.
And there's a whole bunch of really interesting mythology associated with that
that we could dive into.
But it's particularly like, for example, have you ever heard of Mithraism?
Mithraism was the — like, first century AD, was the primary competitor to
Christianity throughout the whole Roman Empire.
And Christianity won out for a variety of reasons.
But Mithraism was loaded with some really potent symbolism.
And one of the things is that during the Mithraic ceremonies or rituals was
called the toroctony, the slaying of the celestial bull.
And when you look at these images, they would go underground, and they would
have a vault-shaped, like, temple with stars painted on the ceiling.
And at the end of that, they would have this carving of Mithras, stabbing his
sword into the — slaying the bull, the celestial bull, stabbing his sword
into the shoulder of the bull, and the blood flowing out.
And if you superimpose the constellation of the Taurus in the classical sense,
the shoulder of the bull is the Pleiades.
I look at that, and I go, I think what they're trying to symbolize here is that
on a yearly basis, they would see this meteor stream pouring out of the
shoulder of the bull.
And I could certainly pull up some stuff like that to look at.
I thought really quickly, since before we leave the Atlantis thing, a couple of
the things there is — so now Solon is in Egypt, Sias, Egypt.
He's talking to the ancient priests, right?
And he says, "Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said,
'Oh, Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children.'
And there is never an old man who is a Hellene."
Solon, hearing this, said, 'What do you mean?'
The old priest said, 'I mean to say that in mind you are all young.
There is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any
science which is hoary with age.
And I will tell you the reason for this.
There have been and will be again many destructions of mankind arising out of
many causes.
The greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water and
other lesser ones by innumerable causes.
There is a story which even you, Hellenes who don't know shit, you know, you're
like children with your knowledge.
There's a story which even you have preserved.
Once upon a time, Phaeton, the son of Helios, yoked his steeds of his father's
chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father,
burned up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt.'
Now, here's the key passage.
Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the
bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens,
and a great conflagration of things, all things upon the earth recurring at
long intervals of time."
So he's saying right there, he's saying, okay, this has a form of a myth, but
it's not really a myth.
Behind the myth is something real.
And it's the bodies circulating in the heavens, they decline or they descend to
earth and they set the earth on fire.
So he's describing right there, you see, this whole phenomenon, and making it
clear that there's more dimensions to what we think of as myths
than just some mere fanciful, superstitious concoction to try to explain the
unknown.
That there really is something going on behind there.
That's, to me, really significant.
It's really fascinating, too, when he's talking about how there's no old
science and that everyone is young.
And it's really interesting when you think about someone from that long ago
trying to make an account of what had happened to the earth with a relatively
simplistic view of a relatively simplistic understanding of the sky, of
asteroids, of volcanoes, of all these different things.
All these things, yeah.
But the way they're describing it coincides.
Once you have modern knowledge and understanding of these things, you go, I
think I see what they're trying to say.
§14Transcript · 1:06:31–1:11:53
That is so interesting.
Isn't it, though?
Yeah.
I mean, because Dorothy Vitaliano, who was a geologist back, I think she died
in the early 90s, she was one of the forerunners of looking at the Atlantis
thing and deciding that it was just a myth, that it was made up.
Of course, when she was looking at this back in the 70s, she didn't have access
to the data that we now have.
Okay?
She was the one who coined the term "geomythology" and said, "You know what?
We really need to be taking a closer look at some of the myths of old because
they actually may contain really valid information about things that happened
in the past."
And, of course, since then, yeah, it's emerged into like a whole discipline in
itself, looking at stories like the one we just looked at, Phaeton, is a story
about a great meteor or comet or asteroid something, you know, causing
destruction on the Earth.
And Plato was saying, "This is not just a myth.
It's literal."
Wow.
You know, it really represents.
Completely makes sense.
Yeah.
And then he goes on to say, "If any action which is noble or great or in any
other way remarkable has taken place, all that has been written down of old and
is preserved in our temples, whereas you and other nations are just being
provided with letters and other requisites of civilized life, and then, at the
usual period, the stream from heaven descends like a pestilence."
And I find the use of that term "stream" is interesting because we're talking
about a meteor stream, right?
And we're looking at events that may have been caused by the influx of enormous
amounts of cosmic material.
And I think that's the best way to explain what happened at the end of the last
ice age.
A lot of the critics have tried to oversimplify it and say, "Well, you had just
one object coming in.
That can't explain it," right?
But the ideas, the models that have evolved are not just a single event, but
multiple events, almost like, again, back to the British neocatastrophists.
The idea of sort of an impact epoch, which has to do with meteor streams will
precess.
They will move.
So there will be times when the earth is crossing the stream and other times
when the earth is more or less missing the stream.
It's just the analogy I use is you're out driving down a country road and, you
know, you're all by yourself.
You're listening to some tunes.
You're kicked back.
There's nobody else on the road.
So, you know, it's relaxed.
You're not paying a lot of attention, right?
Your probabilities of getting an impact are very low.
But now you come up to an intersection, right?
Now there's cars.
It's a major intersection.
There's cars going both ways.
So now your probabilities of getting into an accident are going to increase by
several orders of magnitude.
Now, to take the analogy further, you'll know that sometimes there might, if it's
3 a.m., maybe your probabilities are low.
If it's 5 p.m., your probabilities are high.
And if you just shut your eyes and you cross that intersection, boom, you might
get slammed.
Same way.
Think of that.
Think of a meteor stream.
And in that meteor stream, there are pockets where the material is denser and
other places where it's spread out much finer.
And there will be times of the year or times within, say, a millennia where you
may have the Earth intersecting that meteor stream in a much more denser part
than other centuries.
During that period, you're going to have an increased probability of something
happening.
And I think this is the model that's emerging now.
That we're realizing that the structure of space in Earth's vicinity is a whole
lot more complex than we had previously even imagined a generation ago.
It completely makes sense, but it is horrific to think that the history of the
human race and its survival is dependent upon, in a lot of ways, luck.
It is, yeah, yeah.
So I thought I would run through this.
I call this Close Encounters.
This is not by any means comprehensive.
But I've been tracking this shit for decades now.
So I call this Close Encounters.
And I'm just going to go through very fast just to give the impression of what
we're talking about here.
Okay.
We started out, yeah, this '88, that's when I started tracking this stuff.
1988?
Yeah.
March 23, 1988, Earth just dodged its big asteroid.
Now, we'll just go through and you can see.
1989, giant asteroid makes close pass by Earth.
1991, near miss of Earth by small asteroid.
Now, of course, the small asteroid can still do a hell of a lot of damage.
Tunguska was a small asteroid.
1994, asteroid comes within 65,000 miles of Earth.
1996, it was a close call for planet Earth.
2000, study raises number of dangerous asteroids.
Later in that year, asteroid estimates too low.
§15Transcript · 1:11:53–1:15:52
Asteroid makes close approach.
Scientists worry over asteroids.
Huge asteroid nearly misses Earth, January 7, 2002.
January 7th, large asteroid passes close to Earth.
Asteroid large enough to wipe out France.
Yes.
Earth will just pass Earth at a distance of a half a million miles.
So that's twice the distance to the moon.
Had it been on a collision course, it would have created one of the great, one
of the worst disasters in human history, said Steven Pravdo, the neat project
manager at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And this is just 2002.
Yep.
Had it hit.
Yeah.
It was March 8th, you know, an asteroid large enough to have flattened the city,
buzzed Earth earlier this month, and was not seen until after it flew harmlessly
by.
Oh my God.
That's the thing about the sun, right?
Like that it was coming from the sun, so it was coming from that same area?
In Tunguska, yes.
Now this, I just, unless you're looking in the right place for it, you're not
going to necessarily see it.
I like the article too, highlighting cosmic blind spot.
Yeah.
That's a terrifying thought.
Yeah.
And then the same year, June 14th, asteroid 2002 MN gives Earth its closest
shave in years.
An asteroid the size of a football pitch, well, that would be, you know, a
hundred yards in diameter, which is quite a bit bigger than the two years.
Quite a bit bigger than the Tunguska.
That one's close.
75,000 miles.
Yeah.
That's really close.
That's really close.
Well inside Earth's orbit, or the moon's orbit rather.
Yeah.
Same event.
Asteroid the size of a football field.
August 7th, near miss, asteroid whizzes past Earth.
This is 800 meters wide.
Now that's many times bigger than the Tunguska.
This, this, 800 meters could wipe out an area bigger than the state of Texas.
And it would have global effects.
So eight football fields.
Yeah.
And it can kill an entire state and probably put the entire Earth into some
sort of a nuclear winter.
Yes.
Yes.
2003, closest asteroid yet flies past Earth.
88,000 feet.
2004, January 13th, Earth almost put on impact alert.
Near miss raises rocky questions.
Yes, it does.
March 18th, asteroid soars past Earth oh so closely.
2005, February 4th, asteroid 2004, a really near miss.
Comet strikes surprisingly more likely.
So this is, we're just barely getting by.
We're like a guy in an action movie where they're shooting out of him and he
never gets hit.
He never gets hit, yeah.
Pretty much.
So you can see I'll just, just keep going here.
Well, for folks that are just listening, he's highlighting article after
article after article,
headline after headline, asteroid just buzzed Earth, came closer to the moon.
And then here we go in 2013.
Yeah.
Fly by Earth.
You see, we go from February 15th.
Now there's another one that year, September 16th.
That one, that one was 1300 feet in diameter.
So 10 times more diameter than Tunguska.
40,000 miles an hour.
Yeah.
Halloween asteroid resembling a skull.
Oh my God, it does.
Look at that.
Yeah, doesn't it?
That's terrifying.
We can kill by a flying skull.
So this is a very, very common thing.
Yes.
And we're just getting, oh my God, 27,000 miles?
Yeah.
One eighth the distance between the Earth and the moon.
Yeah.
So it's really common.
Yes.
And now we're just looking at when we could record it, when they can track it
and measure it,
which is within the last hundred years or so.
Less.
Less.
25 or 30 years.
Really.
§16Transcript · 1:15:52–1:20:18
So with this taken into consideration and then you go back, you know, 11,000,
12,000 plus years,
the amount of times that this has happened has probably been just off the
charts.
Hundreds of times.
Hundreds of times.
Yeah.
Here we go.
Snuck up on us.
Yeah.
Scientists stunned by city killer asteroid that just missed Earth.
City killer initially, but probably kill a whole lot more afterwards.
Yeah.
We were talking about Tonga earlier, the volcano that killed most people.
It got the human race down to a few thousand people.
Excuse me.
Toba.
Yeah.
74,000.
Right.
Well, 74,000 years ago.
Yeah.
They don't really know how many, but.
Right.
Genetic bottleneck.
But it's the same sort of effect, right?
Because of the volcano spraying ash into the sky.
Yes.
A volcanic winter would be very similar to an impact winter.
Very much so.
So this is, it's astonishingly, astonishingly common.
Yes.
600 miles in diameter.
Oh, Jesus.
Four asteroids are buzzing the Earth in flybys today.
Three of them were discovered within the last 24 hours.
This is 2019.
Yeah.
Wow.
So it's, it's actually possible that something is headed our way right now.
We don't even know about it.
Oh, there's no doubt something is headed our way right now.
I mean, yeah, because, see these things, you got to bear in mind, these things
are on orbits.
And those orbits, you can track those orbits.
And anything that's going to hit us in the future is on a trajectory right now
that if we could discover it, track it,
we'd go, okay, this thing's going to hit us in 2029 or whatever the case may be.
So, yeah, they're, yeah, so look at this.
2,000 feet wide whiz past our planet tomorrow and this is 2019.
Yeah.
NASA admits, we're not going to know when a space rock flies at Earth.
There's the other, there's a problem also with the gravity of the sun, correct?
Like, they don't quite see things that are headed our way just because of the
mass of the sun, the way it affects.
Yeah.
And what we're talking about with the Tunguska is that, you know, if stuff is
coming, what you would call the perihelion passage,
where it's past closest to the sun, and now it's coming from around the sun,
yeah, you'd have to basically look into the sun to see it.
So it's going to, it'd be very easy to...
Very easy to miss.
So here at June 2020, biggest asteroid to pass close and undetected this year.
Biggest asteroid of 2021 is going to zoom past Earth tonight flying as fast as
100,000 kilometers per hour.
That's 60,000 miles per hour.
60,000 miles per hour.
Huge asteroid to pass Earth and this is...
Look at the date, doesn't it?
2021, 12/8.
Yeah.
That was just not even two months ago.
Yeah.
One that's 850 feet wide.
NASA asteroid warning, Eiffel Tower sized asteroid narrowly missed Earth in
December.
Jeez.
Asteroids, this is January 11th, this is a couple weeks ago.
Yeah.
January 11th, an asteroid estimated to be a kilometer wide will pass Earth on
January 18th.
It will pass within 1.2 million miles of our planet.
Which is far enough that we're completely safe.
Sort of.
But see, in aggregate of all of this, what we're seeing is that unlike our
conceptions of near-Earth
space a couple of generations ago, we realized that there's all kinds of cosmic
beasts that live in the space that we inhabit.
Yeah, because that 1.2 million miles is far, but it's not if you think about
how vast space is.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
And there you can see from this graph.
Okay, look at this chart.
Now this chart's terrifying.
Near-Earth asteroid discoveries.
And then you look at the difference between 1980, where we had very little
§17Transcript · 1:20:18–1:24:29
understanding of this, and 2022.
Well, this goes to 2020, I guess?
What was the end of the chart?
Around 2020, yeah.
Around 2020, yeah.
So at the end of the chart.
Probably more like 2018, I think, when this chart was done.
And because of scientific discoveries and the ability to measure, it's off the
charts.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
It is.
A $5 billion asteroid.
So what is it in this asteroid?
Well, they got all kinds of precious metals in them.
Yeah.
Which is very interesting, because that opens up some possibilities for the
future, if we,
the human species, are up to it.
If we can figure out how to mine them.
Yeah.
And there's companies already forming around this idea.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon is thinking along these lines.
When you're thinking about something that's going 60,000 miles an hour, and it's
as big as,
you know, multiple football fields, how prepared are we to even deflect
something like that?
At this point, we're not.
We're just not.
We're not.
We're sitting ducks.
We're screwed.
Ugh.
We're screwed.
Do you have canned food in your house?
Yeah.
I got about six months worth.
Do you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whew.
That's not quite enough, is it?
Probably not.
It could, yeah.
Because really, we've got about six months worth of food before our food starts
running out.
For the world?
For the world.
Yeah.
So, you know, if we had a dusting, a cosmic winter, a volcanic winter, I mean,
that shut down
agriculture for a year or two, half the population of the earth is going to be
dead within the next year.
That's not an exaggeration.
So.
Well, also, you have to deal with the mammals dying as well, right?
Because they're going to be without food.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're going to have, see, now we get into a mass extinction level event.
We had that at the Younger Dryas.
If you think of all of the megafauna, megafauna is over 44 kilograms body
weight, or about 100 pounds, right?
The planet lost about half of all megafauna species during that Younger Dryas.
Now, there was already animals disappearing leading up to it, because I think
it could be attributed to whatever happened at 14,600 years ago,
where I talked about earlier Meltwater Pulse 1A, right?
That's when the shit really started to seem like it started coming down.
And then it peaked Younger Dryas, 12,850.
And then we had the impact winter for 1,300 years.
And at the end of that, it wasn't a gradual warming.
It was a catastrophic warming.
And by that time, I think whatever species had managed to survive some of the
earlier events may have succumbed at that point.
You know, the controversy has come down to was it nature?
Was it climate?
Was it human hunters?
I think it was all of that.
But I think hunters was probably a minor contributor to it.
Because for one thing, it now appears that the human population took a major
crash at the same time.
Like, we see that there's evidence that the Clovis culture in North America
pretty much completely disappeared right at that boundary.
Well, they weren't the only ones around the planet.
Now, if you go and you look at some of the archaeological evidence, one of the
things you see over and over again as well, there was this cultural group in
Japan or wherever.
I just read a paper on that recently.
And apparently there was some kind of social disruption and they got up and
they migrated and moved away.
Well, maybe they did, but maybe they didn't move away.
Maybe they didn't survive.
And there was a tendency to think, well, you have this evidence of cultural habitation
of this area for centuries or millennium and then suddenly you don't.
Well, people must have picked up and moved.
But maybe that's not the explanation.
Maybe that's not the explanation.
Maybe it's more a case of they got wiped out.
§18Transcript · 1:24:29–1:28:56
And one of the things you pointed out before is the evidence of there's certain
mammals that appear to have died instantaneously, particularly mammoths.
Yes.
Yeah.
Woolly rhinos.
Yeah.
A lot of there's been a lot of what you might call flash frozen animals found
in the tundra.
And they found large populations of them that seem to have died at the same
time.
Yeah.
Mass death, mass mortality events.
You know.
Yeah.
That's.
You showed some images also of what it looks like mammoths with broken legs.
Yeah.
That looked like they had just been blown away by impact.
Could have been.
Could have been.
Or the.
Something.
Like the Barisovka mammoth.
I think that's the one I showed, which was a mammoth that was frozen in the permafrost.
And it was a pretty.
I think 1901 was a particularly warm year that year in Siberia.
And there was a collapse of the ground that exposed this mammoth.
Right.
And he was sitting on his haunches and both of his hips were broken.
And he had food in his mouth and in his stomach.
He'd been eating flowering plants.
But now he was a six, six tons in weight.
And even the contents of his stomach had not putrefied, which meant that it got
frozen.
And the scientific study suggested that the entire carcass would have had to
have been frozen within about 10 hours to prevent putrefaction of the material
in the stomach.
So how do you freeze a six ton mammoth in 10 hours?
That's where it gets.
That's the conundrum.
And a six ton mammoth that had just been eating flowering plants.
Yes.
Which is crazy.
That's crazy.
So something had to happen.
Horrific.
Something had to happen.
Yeah.
Something happened.
And quickly.
And quickly.
And this poor woolly mammoth got buried and got frozen.
And we know he got buried quick because he had an erect penis.
Hi.
Well, because that's what happens when you suffocate.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Like suddenly entombed.
And his whole body is now under pressure.
See.
So, yeah, very interesting conundrum.
There's a lot of those conundrums that are not readily explained through
gradualistic scenarios.
Have you had a conversation with someone who's a blitzkrieg hypothesis who is
of the opinion that the vast number of these Native American
animals, North American animals, rather?
I have not.
But I'm pretty much familiar with most of the papers that they've written.
And obviously, I think, like I said, I think that perhaps in the aftermath
there was a role for humans.
However, when you see the assumption is, again, that, see, what we know now
about the lifeways of those late Ice Age peoples was that they hunted small
game.
They fished.
They foraged.
Mammoths would have been the largest, most dangerous animal to hunt.
And when you think about the fact that if you look at the estimates for total
global population back during the late Pleistocene,
range from 5 to 10 million, the estimates that I've seen for the number of mammoths
inhabiting the Earth was about 12 million.
So you've got at least one mammoth for every man, woman, and child, at least
one of the conventional interpretations on Earth.
Now, how do you exterminate not only the woolly mammoths, but the woolly rhinos,
the mastodons?
North American horses.
The ground sloths, the horses, the saber-toothed cats, the giant short-faced
bear, the cave bear, on and on and on and on and on.
North American lion.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So I just don't think it makes sense.
Now, what's that based upon?
It's based upon the fact that there have been a few sites that were assumed to
be kill sites.
Like, for example, at the Blackwater Draw, Clovis, New Mexico, they found a
mammoth skeleton with a Clovis point between the ribs, in the rib cage.
Then they did this major extrapolation from that, said that, and this goes back
to Paul Martin back in the '60s, did a major extrapolation from that and said,
"Well, oh, they were hunting mammoths."
Well, there we go.
§19Transcript · 1:28:56–1:34:25
There's the explanation.
So they came across in this Blitz Creek, like we were talking about earlier,
across the Bering Land Bridge connecting Alaska to Siberia,
came down through that ice-free corridor, slaughtering basically all these
animals in their pathway as they went.
Never mind that no indigenous group, culture that we've ever known in history
has done that, right?
They were able to slaughter, and I mean, we're talking about even the megafauna
of South America underwent as great a mass extinction as those in North America.
So within a thousand years from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, every megafauna
species was wiped out, or half of all megafauna species in North America was
three-quarters,
roughly the same in South America, were wiped out so completely that they
couldn't even viably replenish their species.
I think that that's really implausible.
And now, basically, with the evidence that there was catastrophic events that
coincided precisely with the major mass extinction episodes
and the fact that human populations seem to have crashed at the same time, well,
what that tells us is that, you know, probably, you know,
you don't have a catastrophe that's going to wipe out 12 million woolly mammoths
and then leave humans completely unscathed.
We see the Clovis culture basically disappearing at the Younger Dryas boundary.
So where were the people that were able to affect this great extermination
event?
If we have this estimate of Toba, of getting people down to a few thousand
people, what's the estimate of the Younger Dryas impact?
I have not seen estimates.
But I would speculate this.
One reason it's escaped our attention, particularly, is because there wasn't a
genetic bottleneck the same as Toba.
Because, basically, that indicates to me, and this, again, I think the
empirical data is consistent with this.
The stories that we've inherited would suggest that there were dispersed
survivors all over the Earth.
And so if you have dispersed survivors, we could miss a genetic bottleneck
entirely.
So, yeah.
So, dispersed survivors would mean that you have people that do stay alive if
they have some sort of access to resources.
Yeah.
There's something that they could survive off of, whereas people that had been
subsisting off of these animals that had gone extinct and, you know, also the
climate had changed radically.
It's definitely going to be based upon that, your access to resources.
And the habitat destruction is not going to be uniform.
So, there's going to be some places where, you know, the damage is less severe.
And there are going to be, you know, in ecology, when you have a major
environmental destruction.
Oh, a few years ago, I went to Mount St. Helens to study how the nature was
recovering in the aftermath.
Because you had a couple hundred square miles in the aftermath of Mount St. Helens
back in May of 1980 that was just basically turned into a completely decimated
lunar landscape.
Yeah.
But even within that, there were little pockets of ferns that survived.
And from those ferns, you see life gradually beginning to proliferate outwards.
And then with an increasing pace as the years go by.
And so now maybe a third of the area that was devastated is being reclaimed.
Forests are starting to encroach.
Another few centuries, the forest, the mountain will be pretty much reforested.
And so.
Which is a very small amount of time relatively for the earth.
Yes.
Yes.
Certainly by half a millennium, I think you're going to be seeing forests
completely recovering on the mountain.
It's such a fascinating subject.
Because I feel like we're so underprepared and under informed.
I feel so few people are even conscious of like just that close encounter slide
that you showed.
And so many different.
Yeah.
Asteroids have whizzed past us so closely.
And how we're so accustomed to our supply chain.
We're so accustomed to supermarkets.
Yeah.
And this is the most vulnerable the species has ever been in terms of our
ability to subsist.
Yeah.
We're almost completely dependent upon these large structures.
We're completely dependent upon supermarkets and supply chains that are coming
in on trucks and boats and airplanes.
Yeah.
And I got to say this though.
I think part of the problem is that what we've been looking at here has been
kind of pushed off the radar screen.
Because the whole emphasis for the last couple of decades now is, you know what?
Global warming.
Yeah.
That, you know, we're responsible for catastrophic climate change.
And, you know, what you don't want to really be talking about too much is that
there has been repeated episodes.
Too many to count episodes of catastrophic climate change that we had nothing
to do with.
We were not the perpetrators.
We were the victims.
I think people that would counter that would say that doesn't mean that we
should ignore the human impact on the climate.
Absolutely not.
Right.
§20Transcript · 1:34:25–1:39:15
I'm total agreement with that.
Right.
But I think that we need to have a realistic perspective.
Of what's really dangerous.
Yes.
And we're really dangerous in the short term.
Like in terms of possibilities.
Yes.
That would be my take on it.
And is there anything that we could have done differently to prepare ourselves
for impacts?
Like if we, say, if this knowledge that you're talking about right here, if
this had been widely distributed, say, two decades ago, could there have been
some methods put into place or something?
Well, if we had kept up the momentum of our space program from the 60s, we
could be there now.
You think they would be able to have something that could knock these things
off course?
Oh, yeah.
Because, I mean, you know, the DART, the mission that was just launched, that's
going to rendezvous with an asteroid, is to test the possibility of...
See, here's the thing.
If we can find an asteroid in orbit, right, we can trace its pathway into the
future, and we know, okay, we've got 10 years, 20 years, that asteroid is going
to be crossing Earth's orbit at the precise moment the Earth is there.
This is how they were able to predict, remember 1994, July, Shoemaker leaving 9,
right?
21 objects slammed into Jupiter in July of 1994.
That was predicted over a year in advance, right?
So we had basically 15 months.
It took from the discovery to the point where its trajectory could be predicted,
was about three or four months of observations.
Over those three or four months of observations, the scientists, the
astronomers were able to go, okay, it's tracing this arc of an ellipse at this
velocity.
Well, we can project that into the future, and we can recreate the entire ellipse,
and we can, by using gravitational perturbation theory and all of that, we can
predict that, you know, 15 or a year from now, this was after three months of
observation, a year from now, it's going to be back out and it's going to be
crossing the orbit of Jupiter.
Well, guess what?
It's crossing the orbit of Jupiter at that precise week that Jupiter is there.
So they were able to predict a year in advance right down, you know, to the day
when those impacts were going to occur.
Same thing with Earth.
If we had enough lead time, that's the key.
And then the technologies in place.
The technologies would be the simplest thing, I think, and the one that makes
the most sense to me, is that if you catch it early enough, a direct hit, a
little nudge could turn a direct hit into a wide miss.
And how difficult is it to calculate whether or not it's going to hit us from
distance?
If you've got enough observations, it's not that difficult.
Just like it was pretty much straightforward, you have what are called the
orbital elements.
And you can do some mathematical equations on those orbital elements, and that
will tell you when and where it's going to be.
And so then they would just shoot some sort of rocket at it and knock it off
course.
Probably the best thing would be you actually just go and attack.
And I think that what the DART mission is looking at is actually attaching an
object with booster rockets on it.
Attaching that to the asteroid.
And pushing it.
And pushing it.
And now a direct hit is a miss.
Right.
And is it the same thing like you would think about with a ship?
That if two ships are going in a parallel line, if you just knock one of them
slightly off course over time, it's far...
Yes.
Oh, okay.
That's exactly the idea, Joe.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Now, I'm...
Has anybody ever contacted you about this stuff from the government?
What's that?
Has anybody ever contacted you about this stuff?
Yes.
Really?
Now, this is a man that I would highly recommend you get sitting right here and
talk to him.
Lieutenant Colonel...no longer Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lohmeyer.
Matt Lohmeyer was the head of the Space Force until he wrote a book criticizing
the pandemic of wokeism infecting the military.
So now, he reached out to me several years ago.
He was a test pilot.
Highly decorated, highly accomplished test pilot in the Air Force.
He got chosen to be one of the leaders in the Air Force.
He actually did.
There's a video.
I bet you Jamie could pull it up.
If you put Matt Lohmeyer, Donald Trump...
You got my...we're connected to your computer today.
Pardon me?
We're on your computer.
Oh.
Okay.
So I can't.
§21Transcript · 1:39:15–1:43:03
Sorry.
Is that the HDMI?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could do it.
I guess I could do it.
Let's try it.
You're not on the internet?
Unless he connected.
So Matt has been on...you know, he's...well, he was on Tucker Carlson after
this happened.
So he got...
So he had a criticism about wokeism, right?
So, like, what particularly was bothering him about wokeism in the military?
Well, he wrote a book about it, which I read, like, a year and a half ago.
But basically, just the political correctness and what you were allowed to talk
about and
not talk about.
Irresistible Revolutions was the name of his book.
So he published the book.
He did a couple of interviews and they canned him.
He's a highly, highly skilled, you know, that we spent probably several hundred
million dollars
training this guy.
Jamie, will you text me this?
Text me this guy's name and his book?
I'll look it up and I'll...maybe I'll contact him after this.
Oh, he's already said that he would, you know...
Yeah.
He's now in private life living in Idaho.
But anyways, so he reached out to...
Why do they all go to Idaho?
Why?
A lot of them go to Idaho.
I think they know something.
Maybe so.
A lot of them.
A lot of those ex-CIA folks?
Yeah.
They go up there too.
Anyways, Matt is a great guy.
He's articulate.
He's well-educated.
He'd be a great interview.
Okay.
He would be a great interview.
So anyways, you asked me the question.
He reached out to me like two years ago when he was still heading up Space
Force and
came and actually visited me in Atlanta.
It was...I was building the restaurant that you...the T-shirt, the Wheelhouse
Craft Pub
and Kitchen.
We weren't finished yet.
He came there.
We went and had dinner together or something.
He wanted to know if I would be willing, if he organized all the base
commanders, if I
would be willing to come and address them and talk to them about planetary
defense.
And I said, "Absolutely, I would.
I'd jump at the chance to do that."
So he was in the process of organizing it when the COVID pandemic started.
And that just derailed the whole thing.
And then he was in the process of reorganizing it when they gave him the boot.
And so they gave him the boot specifically about his criticism of wokeism?
Yes.
Yes.
But it seems like he's got a good point.
Well, yeah.
Very much so.
Imagine you find a guy who's got a good point and instead of going, "Hey, man.
Thanks."
You fire him.
Right.
You fire him.
Not good.
Not good.
No.
No.
And he'd tell you the whole story.
Well, wokeism has accelerated at a very high rate.
I can't imagine being someone in the military that has to make pragmatic
decisions and decisions,
life or death decisions, that are often very uncomfortable.
Mm-hmm.
And you need some hard-nosed, realistic individuals implementing these.
You can't do that under the guise of wokeism.
That's right.
And Matt was highly, highly qualified to do.
I mean, top of his game.
I mean, his resume was very impressive.
And for the woke military, you know, this to just, "Sorry, you're not allowed
to say that."
And so, yeah, he got the boot.
It's a fucking strange time, Randall.
So that was the only person that's ever contacted you about doing something
about this, about putting something in play.
Yes, but that would, see, what he told me was that a lot of the younger base
commanders were really interested in this idea of planetary defense.
§22Transcript · 1:43:03–1:46:44
Mm-hmm.
And he said this was not our primary mission.
However, I think, and he believed that it was critically important.
And in fact, his connection may have been you and me.
Mm-hmm.
I think it was.
I think he first heard me, you and me, talking about one of these, about this
subject at some point.
I wouldn't have known which one.
I mean, this is number six that you and I have been together on this.
But yeah, he was, I think that's where he first, you know, heard me, you and I
talking about it.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Well, hopefully someone is going to reach out again and someone will pick up.
If you're interested, I can set this up.
I could call him.
Yeah.
I would love to talk to him.
He'd be a great guest.
Sounds like he would be.
He would be.
Very interested.
So what were we getting to before that?
We were talking about ways that we could possibly divert and whether or not it's
feasible and there's essentially no plan right now.
Correct.
That's not, that doesn't come from me.
It's not comforting.
No, it's not.
It is not comforting.
Sitting there waiting.
I mean, we make all these grand plans for the future of our cities and we're
worried about political, you know, problems and, you know, which party's going
to control the house.
I got to say, though, I suspect I would not be a bit surprised if Matt got
reinstated once the political climate changes.
The other thing is, you know, U.S. government has dropped the ball for the most
part.
And what we see now is the private space program stepping into the void.
Right.
So I'm very much a proponent and an advocate of that.
I believe that it's our destiny to move into space.
And I think that if we don't, we're going to go the way the dinosaurs
eventually and maybe maybe our species won't get extinct.
But the point is, and this is I think you're seeing this and the point of what
we're talking about is that our civilization is actually way more vulnerable
than we've assumed.
Well, I think this pandemic alerted people to that because something that had a
very high survival rate still completely disrupted the world economy,
completely disrupted us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In most ways.
Yeah.
So imagine a Tunguska type event times 100.
Right.
We're really screwed.
Yeah, we're really screwed.
And this is not some science fiction scenario at all.
No, not by any stretch of the imagination.
This is a science fact.
Science fact.
Yeah.
I'm looking here.
I'm not getting online.
Let's see.
You have to type in the, we didn't give you the, we didn't do that yet.
What's that?
You have to get on the wifi and stuff.
We didn't give you the password.
So you couldn't be online.
Can we do that?
Yeah.
Jamie.
I don't remember what it, okay.
Here.
Jamie will set it up for you.
Oh, super.
We'll pause here, folks.
And we're back.
All right.
Let me get up Google Maps here.
Does that thing, why does it have such a big base to it?
Is that all battery?
I guess.
Yeah.
I, pfft.
You don't know?
I'm not that much of a techie.
I just, I let people set these things up for me and I just, uh.
Well, you have so much information in your head, I don't know how you would
have time to be a techie.
When you're given 18 hour lectures on Atlantis.
Well, not all.
Not all at once.
I know.
Not all at once.
But where's the time for anything else?
There's no time to wonder about equipment in terms of computers and stuff.
§23Transcript · 1:46:44–1:52:01
Oh, yeah.
Here we go.
Let's see.
Layers, terrain.
There's terrain.
That's what I want right there.
Ah.
So, we were talking earlier about, you know, meltwater pulses and catastrophic
melting and so on.
Yeah.
We did talk previously about some of this research that I've been doing out in
the Pacific Northwest.
Mm-hmm.
And we're zooming in on here, Eastern Washington.
And what you see here is these, what is called the channeled scab land.
Now, you can see there's these darker areas and then there's the lighter areas.
Okay.
This whole area, this whole thing that I'm circling here is the Columbia Basalt
Plateau.
Basalt is a lava rock that extrudes from the earth and it solidifies.
This case, the lava rock is dark.
It's covered by one to two hundred feet of soil called LUS.
It's a type of unique, very fertile soil that it's accumulated on top of the
basalt rock.
Okay.
So, at the end of the last ice age, there were a series of meltwater pulses
that discharged off the ice sheet.
And it washed away the top soil and exposed this dark basalt underneath.
Right?
So, you got, this is called a scab land tract.
And I'll show you some photographs of it.
You got one big scab land tract here.
Another one here.
You've got this, what's called Grand Coulee over here, which is a huge canyon-like
feature that was cut by meltwater.
You've got another, what's called Moses Coulee.
Let's zoom in here.
You see this kind of arcuate form here?
Kind of looks like a half circle.
Okay.
That's terminal moraine.
Now, terminal moraine, if you picture this, Joe, you've got a glacier tongue
coming down.
And as it's coming down, oversimplified, but it gives the idea, it's bulldozing
up material.
It's pulverizing the ground underneath.
It's pulling up and then, so this moraine here is basically exactly defines the
end or the edge of this glacier lobe that reached all the way back up into here
over the Canadian Rockies.
Well, sometime between 12, say, and 14,000 years ago, there was a series of
massive meltwater pulses that discharged off the ice sheet.
And this thing here, for example, is called Moses Coulee.
And Moses Coulee is basically a giant scar in the earth that was cut within a
matter of probably a week or two.
It's 800 to 1,000 feet deep and up to a mile to two miles wide.
Right?
So I've been exploring this.
That was a week.
Yeah, about a week.
What makes you say that?
Well, a lot of things.
It's mostly the studies because we know the peak discharges.
And we're talking here, both Moses Coulee right here and Grand Coulee up here,
had peak discharges of about 300 to 400 million cubic feet per second.
Now, how much is that?
Well, you can't even begin to wrap your head around what 300 million cubic feet
per second means.
But if you were to take every single river on earth, every river, you know,
Mississippi, the Columbia, the Mackenzie, the Yukon, the Orinaco, the Amazon,
the Congo, the Nile, the Po, the Yellow River of China, all the rivers of earth,
add them all together,
you'd still have to multiply that by at least 10 to 20 to get a peak discharge
of 300 to 400 million cubic feet per second.
So.
All the rivers of the world.
All the rivers of the world.
Times 10.
Times at least 10.
At least 10.
And I'm going to show you here now.
We're going to pull up.
Now, of course, this is just one area.
Now, the reason I'm drawn to this particular area and, oh, by the way, I'll
mention this.
In April, I'll be out here with Graham Hancock.
Graham is doing a Netflix series.
Ah.
Now, when he was writing his book, Magicians of the Gods, I took him.
We guided for two weeks.
We started at Portland and ended in Minneapolis.
And what we did was we followed the margin of the great ice sheets.
So I basically was showing him all of this evidence for these catastrophic meltwater
discharges.
If you get the book, Magicians of the Gods, I think two or three chapters, he
talks about our journey together.
So the Netflix episode we're going to do is we're going to be going, we're
going to go to Grand Coulee.
We're going to go right here to this feature.
And this is a giant extinct cataract feature, like a gigantic version of
Niagara Falls, but many, many times larger.
§24Transcript · 1:52:01–1:57:31
And there's no flowing water here now because it was a temporary giant
discharge of meltwater.
When that meltwater finally passed over the landscape, drained off into the
Pacific Ocean, it left these giant fossil features here.
And you can see, I mean, here's a highway right here, right?
This building here, the Dry Falls Visitor Center, is this building right here.
And there's a picture of Graham and I.
We're standing.
Let's see if we can see it.
Ah.
Here we go.
Isn't modern technology amazing?
You just keep zooming and zooming on this map.
I know.
From space.
And you're just doing it on a laptop.
I know.
It's fantastic.
Wow.
Well, you can't see, but we're standing right down here overlooking this
feature.
Okay.
And so this feature is widely recognized as a dry waterfall.
This is not like a controversial thing?
No.
And what is the conventional reason for that existing?
Is there some sort of an explanation?
The conventional reason is that over here in western Montana, there was a giant
lake.
And that lake was held in by an ice dam right in the area of Lake Pandora.
And the water backed up 2,100 feet deep behind the ice dam.
The ice dam gave way and all this water spilled out and then spilled across the
basalt plateau.
That's the conventional explanation.
I have strong issues about that explanation for multiple reasons.
The main reason being is that ice is very unstable.
And if we look at modern ice dam lakes that we've seen in the last, say, 100
years, their peak discharges and their peak volumes are typically like only 1,000th
or less.
Even the big ones are only about 1,000th the volume of this.
I believe, and others I think are starting to believe, that we're actually
looking at some kind of an accelerated melting.
Because for one thing, the conventional explanations for this giant lake do not
ever explain how that lake got there.
Let me just go back to here and I'll show you, let's see, Cataclysmus 1, this
should give it to us right here.
And you'll see the configuration of...
Missoula, so this is Montana?
Yeah.
So here, here we go.
This would have been showing graphically kind of the configuration of the ice
at the late glacial maximum.
And...
So this is what time period?
How many years ago?
This would have been about 16,000 to 20,000 years ago.
And here you go.
Here you can see the two ice sheets, the Cordierin and the Laurentide.
And this is the area where the ice-free corridor would have been that we were
talking about.
This box right here shows the area of the Missoula floods, they're called.
Let's just go find us...
There we go.
So here, this would have been Lake Missoula.
And this would have been all of the area that we were just looking at where it's
eroded.
All that water would have come down, flowed through the Columbia Gorge here.
This...
Portland is right here.
It would have turned north and right here at Astoria would have drained into
the Pacific Ocean.
There was so much water coming down here that it backed all the way up through
Willamette Valley
and formed a temporary body of water 400 feet deep, where Portland now is.
Which would have completely submerged Portland, right?
So this is basically the configuration.
Now, there you can see this would have been the ice dam.
Let's see here.
So I could go back to the maps.
That's the lake.
So this was very controversial over...
Because J. Harland Bretts, who was the geologist who first theorized this...
Let's see.
Here he is right here.
He was considered a crackpot because he was talking about giant floods back in
the 1920s
and 30s, but of course he was proven right and ended up being the recipient of
the Penrose Medal in his 90s.
So he was the first one to speculate?
Yeah.
And what was his reasoning?
Like where did he see the evidence for some sort of a flooding?
He was doing research along the Columbia River and he kept seeing evidence like
these gigantic gravel bars and boulders and things that seemed out of place.
And he actually...
In fact, in 1910 is when he got interested in this and he saw...
In fact, I'll pull this up.
I'll go back to Google Maps and there was a newly released map that came out.
That was this feature right here.
And in a minute I'll show you some drone footage of this feature.
§25Transcript · 1:57:31–2:02:01
He was looking...
This new topographic map came out, 1910, and he was regularly getting maps.
He loved to look at maps.
And he was looking at this feature and he said, "What the hell is the
explanation for this?"
And this is what started him on this quest, this thing right here.
It's called potholes cataract.
And potholes cataract is a giant erosional feature in the basalt, the edge of
the basalt plateau.
And the water came from the right.
And what you have here...
We'll zoom in.
You see this kind of round hole right here?
Yes.
The round pool.
That is a result of what's called colking.
This is colking.
When the water gets so turbulent that it's doing this like a tornado.
And it literally can drill into the rock in a matter of days.
It can drill.
And what you see here is the evidence of gigantic turbulence.
And this is called a recessional cataract.
So as the water pours over this...
Picture you've got the rock.
Okay.
So the water is pouring over it.
And as it does, as it pours over, it's eroding the wall of the cataract back.
So it's receding.
And then it's going to keep receding until there's no more water.
And at the time the spigots, the flood spigots are turned off, you're now left
with this fossil feature.
Is there a geological formation, like a style of like what you're calling it,
colking?
Is that what you're saying?
K-O-L-K-I-N-G.
Is there something that it does to the walls of that particular lake that make
it evident that it was done that way?
Like does it leave like almost like a water drill?
Like, you know, a drill would leave markings?
K-O-L-K-I-N-G.
The evidence is the holes drilled into rock.
K-O-L-K-I-N-G.
Oh.
K-O-L-K-I-N-G.
That's the evidence.
And yeah.
And I mean, we can see turbulence in modern water flows.
But the thing is, to do something like this, you have to have extremely deep,
extremely
fast-moving, turbulent water and sustained for, maybe in this case, a few weeks.
K-O-L-K-I-N-G.
So a few weeks made that lake?
Just by water spinning and digging into the stone?
K-O-L-K-I-N-G.
Oh yeah.
A few weeks made this whole feature right here.
And what you have is you have two alcoves.
Here's the North Alcove and the South Alcove, separated by what's called a rock
blade.
And that rock blade, if that water had continued to pour over for another few
days, that rock
blade would have been gone.
Completely gone.
So it's just spinning at a furious pace, massive amounts of water, and it's
drilling into the
stone.
And how deep is it?
Well, we can kind of estimate.
Because the major discharge point of this water was right down here.
And look at this terrain.
That is a terrain that has been tortured by extreme shear forces of water.
Here, it would have been about 400 feet deep.
The width of this is about 9 miles.
So you've got a picture of a river, 400 feet deep, 9 miles wide, and it's
probably moving
at 50 miles an hour, the water.
And so we can go over here.
This is a ridge separating this basin area here from the Columbia River.
Another spillover point was right here.
It also has two alcoves with a rock blade.
If we go back to Dry Falls Cataract, which is up here, you will see two alcoves,
a rock blade.
And you'll see that there's now a separation here.
Because what's happening is this rock blade is being washed away.
And again, had the water flow continued for another week or two, this rock
blade would have been gone.
Now, is there a conventional explanation for these features?
Do they try to come up with some other alternative explanation?
No, it's gigantic floods.
Gigantic floods.
Yeah, that's pretty much accepted at this point.
What's controversial is what caused.
And the speed of it?
No, the speed of it's pretty much accepted.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Even the speed of that caulking, like the cause of that, that's accepted?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And what explanation would they give for something that is causing that much
§26Transcript · 2:02:01–2:06:15
water to pass through an area that quickly?
Well, the draining of this lake.
Right.
But that doesn't make any sense to you?
Doesn't make sense to me, no.
But this all coincides on the timeline of the Younger Dryas impact theory.
This is controversial, but yes.
I'm thinking that there was at least maybe three episodes of catastrophic
flooding imprinted in this landscape.
The first one I would speculate was at 14,600.
Second one would have been Younger Dryas.
And the third one would have been 11,600.
Now, I know that they've found evidence of human beings in North America that
predate 11,000 years.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Is there an understanding of like if this impact theory is correct and if it
did greatly diminish the population of people that are living in North America?
Where did they concentrate?
Where did the survivors primarily come from?
Do we know that?
No?
No, because it appears there was a hiatus of about a half a millennium.
Really?
And then you have really a different cultural group showing up called the Folsom
Culture.
And they came from somewhere else?
I don't know.
They don't know.
They don't know.
Somebody probably has ideas on it.
I don't know.
But, you know, I would like to be three people.
Then I might be able to research all of this.
Because I'm just thinking like where would be a safe place to survive?
Like with the melting of these ice caps at such a rapid rate.
You would not have wanted to have been in North America.
You don't want to be in Wisconsin?
No.
You don't want to be in Wisconsin.
No.
You don't want to be in North America period.
Even in Mexico?
Even all the way down there?
Mexico was, let's see here.
Oh my God.
So we're going to, I'm going to pull forward here.
Let's see if we can get, I'm going to show you some.
Oh, here we go.
Oh, here we go.
Potholes Cooley.
So, here we go.
This is drone footage of what we were just looking at.
Oh, wow.
There's the rock blade.
We're looking right at the rock blade.
Oh, God.
It looks like something that was destroyed by water.
Water is coming towards us.
It makes sense if you look at it from above.
It's so much different.
Topologically, when you're looking at a map and it shows the features, it makes
sense.
But this, you go, when you saw that one rock feature that you just showed, you
go, oh yeah, I could see that being from water.
I mean, just from what I know about erosion, it's not a lot, but it completely
makes sense.
It just looks like it.
And so this was all carved by water and this is all carved very rapidly.
By floods that are really way, way beyond anything experienced in historical
times.
And so the idea is that these impacts, is the idea that they slammed right into
the ice cap?
That's what I think.
That's what I would theorize, you know.
And because of the extreme heat and the extreme velocity?
It has the, I mean, you're looking at, you know, one impact could be the
equivalent of a million atomic bombs.
Holy shit.
Oh yeah.
So look at this rock blade here.
And here you can see, look, there's that round lake we were looking at.
Yeah.
And I don't know if you can even see people in this.
I've got one where some of us are standing on the rock blade and we look like
little specks.
When you're looking at it from this perspective, God, it does make sense.
It makes sense that this is water caused and that this is by massive amounts of
water.
Yeah.
But I just, my understanding of erosion is not enough to understand that this
was done quickly.
Well, as I have said, you can look at photos, you can look at stuff like this.
You don't really comprehend it though until you've been across those landscapes
and experienced them firsthand knowing what the story is.
Hmm.
You come away.
I mean, it's, it's like a, it's almost like an acid drip in a way.
It's so mind stretching when you begin to see this stuff firsthand that you
§27Transcript · 2:06:15–2:10:24
really realize, oh my God, there have been forces unleashed on this planet that
utterly dwarf anything that we humans have yet been able to do.
So is there any estimation at all about what size the comet was that impacted
the ice caps or how many of them?
Well, see, this is such a, a new idea and it's still at this point very
controversial.
Um, but I think, you know, some of the comet research group is looking at that
and see, this is a whole area of research that has been looked at by paleohydrologists
who have not been astronomers.
Right.
Now you've got astronomers who are looking at, let me pause this for just a
second.
It's like, we're, we're in this, this area now where we're starting to see the
overlap, this interdisciplinary overlap, because paleohydrologists have been
looking for purely terrestrial explanations for this.
Right.
Now, before 2007, nobody even was even thinking the possibility of, of a hypervelocity
impact into the ice sheet other than myself.
Wow.
Uh, you know, and of course, who am I?
I'm nobody.
Right.
You know, but that's pretty crazy.
Like what if you didn't exist?
What if I didn't exist?
Yeah, that's, that's one of the things that freaks me out about humanity is
that there's occasionally these figures and if they didn't exist, everything's
different.
Well, you know, this is, I've had this obsessive hobby for over 40 years.
Yeah.
What are the odds?
I've read 10,000 scientific papers.
I've covered, you met Brad, Brad and I alone have covered over 150,000 miles in
the field.
That's what I'm saying.
What are the odds that someone like you is even real?
Like if you were in a movie, I'd be like, what, what is he, what is he doing?
He's just, you know what I'm saying?
I know you're real.
But I mean, I remember meeting you at the punchline in Atlanta.
Yeah.
And you hitting me with all this information.
And I guess I had just started the podcast then.
Cause this was, you were saying, your friend Brad was saying 2009, right?
Yeah.
That's when we met.
Cause he was there as well.
That, that was the first year of the podcast.
I mean, it might not have even started or it might've just started.
So you in that one conversation that we had at the comedy club, you sparked
this interest in my mind.
But I remember talking to you thoroughly blown away and then leaving that club
with a completely different thought process when it comes to like the, the
history of life on North America and the world in general.
And this, this whole impact theory that you'd been working on for so long.
So I successfully corrupted you.
Instantaneously.
Yeah.
Good.
I mean, we probably talked for like an hour or so, right?
We did.
Yeah.
And I remember it was noisy in there, but we were like, yeah.
Locked in, man.
Locked in.
I wanted to hear about that.
Yeah.
And then how did I end up?
Well, it was Graham that suggested you should get me.
And you told Graham, yeah, I met that guy.
Yeah.
In Atlanta.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Blame it all on Graham.
Cause Graham was one of my first guests.
Graham, it was Duncan Trussell and I and Graham.
And that was early, early on in the podcast.
Cause I had, uh, read, uh, fingerprints of the gods.
Uh, I had read, uh, you know, his whole idea of this restarting of civilization
and this concept that we are.
A civilization with amnesia.
Yeah.
And that something had happened and it's really cool to see him.
Cause I remember back in the day, I'd bring that book up and people would call
me, you know, crazy fringe conspiracy loving.
People who hadn't read the book.
Yes.
Yeah.
Most of the, most of the people that hadn't read the book, but once Gobekli Tepe
emerged.
And then, uh, Dr. Robert Shock from Boston University who started examining the
water erosion of the Temple of the Sphinx.
Yup.
And all of these different pieces came into play where you have undeniable
evidence of an advanced civilization that's making massive, complex stone
structures, concentric circles.
Mm-hmm.
All these different structures like 11,000 plus years ago at a time where they
§28Transcript · 2:10:24–2:14:36
thought people were just primarily hunters and gatherers.
And then watching them try to take this hunter-gatherer theory and apply it to
these incredible stone structures.
It didn't make any sense at all.
Didn't make any sense.
No.
And it's, it's really interesting also.
It gave me, uh, an understanding of science and scientists in a, in an unflattering
way.
Uh, not that they're all like this, but there is a problem when someone
proclaims, uh, a very specific thing.
They, they have a thing that they've been teaching, they have a thing that they
learned, and they have a thing that they subscribe to in terms of a timeline,
in terms of a, and then any new evidence does not get treated like evidence.
Yeah.
It gets treated like an intruder.
It gets treated like a threat.
That's right.
And you watch them argue it with, like, I remember when, uh, Graham Hancock was
there with, uh, Zawi Hawass, and there was, uh, another man who was an Egyptologist.
Mark Lehner.
Yeah.
Mark Lehner.
Yeah.
Mocking this idea that there was an advanced civilization 9,000 years ago.
Yeah.
Well, now of course we know that's true.
Now there's no, there's no if, ands or buts.
So then you have to relook at the old, uh, old style, old kingdom construction
of Egypt and how different it was in the later years and the fact that it was
all under sand and that they had to excavate this stuff.
Mm-hmm.
And that these, these, these, you have two completely different styles of
construction and the old stuff is really complex.
Not just really complex, but insanely difficult to do.
Like, how are they, how are they having these massive stones that are cut so
beautifully and perfectly and they moved into place and they, what are they
doing?
Like, how are they, how are they getting the stones for the king's chamber from
500 miles and away?
Have you ever been to Egypt?
No, I have not.
Well, when you go there, which you will, I'm sure.
I have to go.
Yeah, you have to go.
It's number one on the bucket list.
Number one on the bucket list.
Maybe I'll be joining you.
I would love that.
That would be awesome.
That would be awesome.
But down near the Aswan Dam, there's a place called, uh, it's the unfinished obelisk
that you can see where they're cutting it out of.
Right.
It's still in the bedrock.
And this thing is massive.
And you go, okay, how the hell were they going to move this thing?
I mean, it's massive.
Um, so.
How did they move those things?
Well, that one wasn't moved because it looked like they never finished cutting
it loose from the bedrock.
Right.
But you see these massive stones.
I mean, you know, the, the Sphinx temple has massive stones.
Um, Mancare's temple, massive stones.
And then you go all these other places like Graham has documented.
Yeah.
You know, and this is kind of where Graham and I, where our work kind of
complimented.
And now I think how he and I first connected was, I'm not sure how he, I'm not
sure about the first connection.
But in any case, what he kind of focused on was the evidence for something in
terms of civilization.
And he was theorizing that there was a catastrophe, right?
I was focusing on the other hand on the evidence for catastrophic events.
So his research and my research sort of complimented each other.
Perfectly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The, the podcast that I did with you guys, the first one was one of my favorite
podcasts ever.
Cause it was such an aha, you know, like, Oh, I see, you know, with Graham's
upset.
And it also, it, it helped Graham's work so much because it gave a real, like a
context to like why this would have taken place.
Right.
Yeah.
And, and, you know, again, like you said, he was dismissed early on.
Yeah.
Mocked.
Mocked.
Yeah.
But it was not justified.
No.
Because, you know, we've gotten locked into, or mainstream academia has gotten
locked into these models of history.
And they don't want to let go because, for many reasons.
And I think one of the reasons gets into actually into politics, you know, it
has to do with our conception of who we are, where we're at now.
§29Transcript · 2:14:36–2:20:11
You know, we're supposedly in the midst of the sixth great mass extinction
right now that, that we're causing.
And like you said earlier, to recognize that there have been these gigantic
catastrophes and mass extinction events in earth history is not in any way to
say, well, we just should have a free hand in doing anything or whatever.
Of course.
Right.
Of course.
We'll interpret it that way, you know.
But the thing is, is that, that, that we now have to recognize the reality that
these events have happened.
And we have not been the perpetrators of them.
We have not been the perpetrators of these previous mass extinction events.
We've been the victims.
Right.
Yeah.
So right now, though, the whole thing, and it gets back to the global warming
thing and, and all of that is that, you know, and I don't really know if we
want to get into that whole discussion because it's a worthy of several hours
in itself.
But, you know, it's, it's control, you know, it's, and what we see now is with
the whole COVID thing and global warming, we're seeing proponents of global
warming saying that, oh, well, hey, if we lock people down into their homes,
they're not going to be driving cars.
If they're not driving cars, they're not putting carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
Hey, what a great thing.
Let's, you know, I mean, when you look at the, the net zero scenarios, I mean,
I don't even want to get into that right now.
But if you get into it and you begin to look at it, you realize, well, they,
you know, basically what they're going to do is they're going to essentially
render us impotent.
They're going to render modern civilization impotent.
We're going to be...
If they implement these sort of net zero policies.
Yes.
Someone of a...
Yeah.
Would it be a climate scientist or someone who would theorize that the way to
do it is to make sure that people don't go anywhere, that way they don't emit
any carbon?
Yes.
Yeah.
So when you look at these global cooling events, like ice ages, they seem far
more terrifying than warming events.
And again, this is not to justify driving around cars that spew black smoke out.
Absolutely not.
Right.
Doing whatever we want to the earth.
But what we should really be scared of more is a cooling event than a warming
event.
Absolutely.
Because again, in history basically testifies to the truth of what you just
said, because warming periods, again, I've written and actually lectured on
this quite extensively.
Warming periods are usually periods of prosperity because you have an extension
of the growing season.
You have periods like if you go back to the medieval warming period, which was
roughly from 1000 AD to 1300 AD.
This was the period where when you get to Europe and you go particularly to
France, take a tour and spend a week going and seeing some of the magnificent
cathedrals.
And realizing when you're looking at these unbelievably complex structures that
would have taken for the whole phenomena, you would have had to have hundreds
of thousands of trained people working.
Because you had stone cutters, you had stone cutters, you had sculptors, you
had glaziers, you had carpenters, you had astronomers, you had engineers.
They all had to be organized.
They all had to be fed and housed and clothed.
Well, you couldn't do that without surplus.
Right.
That surplus, we can now demonstrate, and this is something that's pretty much
for the most part pushed off the radar screen, that the medieval warm period
was a degree or two warmer than now.
And what you had was you had agricultural surpluses that made that period of
prosperity possible.
It was preceded by what is called the Dark Ages Cold Period.
During this time, it was very difficult because you had agricultural failures.
You had cold spells that would cause the—they say that 536 to 540 A.D. was
the coldest four or five years of the last 2,000 years.
And you had population decline.
You had increase of infant mortality.
You had decrease in lifespan.
When the warmth came back into the world, the sea ice retreated north.
Now the Vikings were able to sail across the northern seas.
Iceland became populated, became colonized.
Vikings came to Greenland and were able to farm on the west coast of Greenland
where it's now permafrost.
Right?
In Europe, you had agricultural surpluses, so you had a huge increase in
population between 1,000 A.D. and about 1130.
You had this ability to undertake this tremendous enterprise of this
magnificent, glorious enterprise of cathedral building.
The climate of the medieval warm period lasted until the late 1200s, early 1300s,
and then it began to shift and became cold.
And it was the first onset of what's called the Little Ice Age.
And between about 13—13 right in there and about 1340, you had a succession
of agricultural failures, which led to famine.
Right?
That famine led to people being malnourished, which made their immune systems
§30Transcript · 2:20:11–2:25:19
weak, and they now became susceptible to infectious diseases.
And it was around 1340 that the bubonic plague swept over Europe because it was
a result of the cold.
And, of course, right at that point, you see that between 1300 and 1340, that
was the end of the cathedral building era.
And you can find the same thing happened in the aftermath, like I said, 536 to
540 A.D.
So the bubonic plague was a result of cold?
I mean, it was—
It was a result of the fact that people were weak.
It was one of the factors.
Probably the main factor.
But there was also, like, these pathogen-ridden fleas that were on rats and—
Oh, yeah.
Exactly.
They got to people.
But here's the thing.
All of these kind of things are going to be more devastating if you have a
population that's susceptible.
And they're susceptible because they're malnourished because of the cold?
They're malnourished because they're not getting enough nourishment.
They're not getting enough to eat.
So they're already compromised.
They're already compromised.
So what's catastrophic during global warming periods is it's catastrophic for
people that
are living on the coasts.
On the coasts?
Because the coasts—the ocean levels rise.
Yeah.
I mean, the ocean level has risen about—since the late 1800s, the ocean level
has risen eight inches.
But, like, when people are talking about global warming, there's many things
that they're concerned with.
But one of the things they're concerned with is cities like Miami that are,
like, in porous ground that are right on the coast.
Like, that's going to go underwater in 20 years.
If the ocean levels keep rising, if they do.
Yeah.
However, I'm a bit skeptical because—I won't pull it up now, but I could pull
up and show you probably
500 articles on the importance of the sun in warming and cooling that have been
mostly ignored in the IPCC's
models and projections of climate change.
And if we go into another solar minimum, like the Maunder minimum or the Sporre
minimum, yeah, we're in for decades of cold weather.
And we're going to see ice growing again.
And what would cause those minimums?
Like, what causes those cold snaps?
Well, it's something internal to the sun.
It's the sun.
And the sun seems to have—see, when these global warming models were first
being developed in the late 80s and early 90s,
we were just at the very beginning of deploying solar-observing satellites.
And at that point, the model was the solar constant.
So if the sun's radiant output is not variable, we can just ignore it.
It's not a factor.
However, we now have like 30 years of in-hand evidence that the sun is way more
variable than was assumed 30 and 40 years ago.
That being the case, yeah, the sun would now have a much more important role to
play.
Because, you know, in the last 30 years, we've had massive amounts of new data
from solar satellites that have been observing the sun.
And so when the computer models were first being devised in the early 90s and
stuff, the assumption was that the sun was not playing a role.
And so we don't need to look at the sun.
You eliminate all the natural variables until only carbon dioxide is left.
And that's pretty much where we're still at because by the time you get into
the 2000s and it was becoming apparent that the sun was actually a much more
important factor in climate change and had been acknowledged.
By that point, the whole scenario had already become entrenched.
And you now had huge amounts of money being poured in to that whole scenario.
I was reading about how vulnerable we are to solar flares.
Yeah.
That's a terrifying thing because our grid, our satellite systems, our internet.
All of that, yes.
We're so vulnerable to just a weird but very common glitch of the sun.
We are, yeah.
That has been documented in history.
Like there have been times in history where the sun had a flare and it blew out
communication devices, right?
Yes.
Let's see here.
Wasn't there something like in the early 1800s?
Yeah.
The Carrington event.
Let's see here.
Rodney Carrington?
No.
Just kidding.
I don't remember his name.
We'll just go through this really quick here.
Let's see.
In 2003, a flare was measured at X-28 but was likely even more powerful.
The sensors became overloaded under the explosive energy being measured.
It was quite literally off the charts.
Solar flares are mostly harmless and don't pose much threat to humans on the
surface of the earth.
What could cause some problems, however, are coronal mass ejections, which are
sometimes conflated with solar flares in popular parlance.
§31Transcript · 2:25:19–2:30:26
We'll jump down here.
A big blast.
In September 1859, a solar storm known as the Carrington event, named for
astronomer Richard Carrington,
who observed the corresponding solar flare the day before, struck earth causing
widespread technological havoc.
Even considering the comparatively primitive technology of the time, the
magnetic effects were so substantial,
the aurora, normally seen at polar latitudes, could be seen in the tropics.
Whoa.
Electricity from the storm flowed through the electrical lines of telegraphs,
overloading the circuits,
starting fires around the world, and shocking nearby workers.
The global lines of communication were disrupted until the magnetic storm trickled
out hours later.
Interestingly, some telegraph operators reported being able to send messages
without the batteries attached,
using only the currents in the air.
Holy shit.
If a storm of that magnitude were to strike today, the impact to technology
could be catastrophic.
Power lines could receive energy from the storm and spread it out.
Because our power grid is interconnected, a spike in one region could impact
areas which might otherwise be less affected,
according to a NASA-funded National Academy of Sciences report from 2008.
Transformers would be damaged and the power artages would occur around the
world.
Radio and satellite communications could be knocked out, resulting in a massive
blackout without the benefit of being able to talk to one another.
Now that would be pretty catastrophic.
Catastrophic.
But now we have this.
A signature of a cosmic ray increase in AD 74-75 from tree rings in Japan.
This was likely the result of a giant solar storm.
And we don't need to go through all of this.
This is 774 to 775 AD?
Yes.
Yes.
So what we're interested in is the conclusion down here.
With our present knowledge, we cannot specify the cause of this event.
However, we can say that an extremely energetic event occurred around our space
environment in AD 775.
In the future, other high-resolution records, such as beryllium-10 and nitrate
data, together with careful research of historical documentation around AD 75,
and further surveys of undetected supernova remnants.
This was probably a solar event.
So, our sun?
Yes.
Causes.
So we get into another article here.
Causes of the AD 774-775 carbon-14 increase.
Talking about the Carrington event.
Such an event would cause great damage to modern technology.
And in view of recent confirmation of super flares on solar-type stars,
this issue merits attention.
A Carrington-level event would be disastrous for electromagnetic technology,
causing widespread damage to satellites and transformers linking the power grid.
No assessment has been made of the technological effects of an event 20 times
stronger,
which the 774 event was.
20 times stronger.
Than the Carrington event.
And then there's also the possibility of hypernovas, right?
Like outside of our galaxy.
Yes.
I think this is going to be more likely, but yes.
So what we're realizing, again, this is my point, is we've learned a whole lot
about the sun.
And that the sun is not necessarily the invariable star that it was assumed to
be.
Now, we just talked about the effects of a Carrington-level event.
Now, he's asking the question, "No assessment has been made of the
technological effects of an event 20 times stronger."
You know, it's so funny because we talk about Plato, and you talk about Plato's
description of what Atlantis must have been like,
and also this idea that they were trying to make sense of the catastrophic
forces of nature and comet impacts and all these different things.
And we look back on their limited understanding of the universe and the world
and all the natural forces.
But we're kind of in a similar boat in comparison to the way people are going
to look back at us.
We just don't think about it because we're wrapped up in this timeline.
We are.
And we do have all this amazing technology, like we talked about, your ability
to zoom in with your laptop
and show the topographic features of the landscape that indicates that it's
been hit with all this water damage.
But there's so much we don't know.
So much we don't know.
And so much we're not prepared for.
And this is why I think it's so important that we actually look at our own past
and realize that our ancestors weren't these primitive ignorant savages that we've
assumed they were.
And that their legacy that's been handed down to us may turn out to be
extremely valuable in trying to understand the big picture.
It also makes sense when you think about Graham's research, Graham Hancock's
work,
when it makes sense that these people were very advanced in terms of their
ability to grasp concepts and thoughts,
but they weren't as technologically advanced because they were the remnants of
§32Transcript · 2:30:26–2:35:11
a civilization that had to start over from scratch or close to it.
Yeah.
So really intelligent people that had to go without all of the knowledge and
all of the creations of people from the past
because most things had been wiped out.
Yeah.
And this is what I think of as the real great reset.
That when these kind of events happen and civilization basically has to start
over.
How many times do you think this has happened with human beings?
Well, I think if we look in the Holocene, this probably happened half a dozen
to ten times.
If we look at, you know, the Bronze Age collapse, what's the cause there?
It may have been volcanic and extraterrestrial.
It may have, you know, exogenic means from the outside, endogenic means from
within.
And I think there's times the perfect storm is when you get the simultaneous
effects of both.
There's some evidence now that would be suggesting that ET events, exogenic
events might actually be triggers for a terrestrial response.
If you have an impact, like we know, for example, that there was enormous
amounts of volcanism associated with the whole deglaciation phase, right?
There was also very large earthquakes as the ice masses being transferred from
the land back into the oceans.
You've got this tremendous mass transfer over the surface of the Earth.
That leads to a significant terrestrial response, which could be volcanism and
earthquakes.
It completely makes sense.
It completely makes sense.
And there's empirical evidence to support that.
I mean, just imagine what you're talking about.
Any of those enormous asteroids that are flying by Earth, if they slammed right
into Yellowstone.
In fact, David Ault, who is a geologist, theorized like at least 20 some years
ago that about 17 million years ago, the magma plume that's under Yellowstone
may have been caused by an impact of an iron asteroid punching through the
crust and causing an upwelling.
It's called pressure relief melting, that as long as you've got this overlying
cap, but if you remove it, like in the case of a hypervelocity impact, it
allows the upwelling.
And in fact, the whole Columbia basalt plateau that we were just looking at,
that is the outflow, the basalt outflow from the magma plume that's now under
Yellowstone.
Yeah.
So, and there's correlations.
The Deccan traps in India correlate in age with the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact
of 66 million years ago that caused the extermination of the dinosaurs.
The Siberian traps are associated with the Permian-Triassic event of 245
million, which may or may not have been caused by an impact.
I think it probably was.
But at that long ago, it's hard to find the evidence.
But that was the greatest mass extinction in Earth history.
Ninety to ninety-five percent of all species, terrestrial and marine, went
extinct very quickly.
What year was this?
About 245 million years ago.
The Permian-Triassic, and it was actually the transition from two of the great
eons in Earth history.
From the Paleozoic to the Mesozoic.
So the Mesozoic was the great period of middle life, which lasted from about 245
to 66 million.
And it was bookended by two of the great catastrophes in Earth history.
Now, if either one of those kind of things happened today...
That's a wrap.
That's a wrap.
No more people, unless we're living in space.
Well, I mean, we're the descendants of moles, right?
Something like that.
Lemures, something.
Some kind of shrew thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God, it's just like these conversations make you feel so vulnerable.
I mean, they're so fascinating and thrilling.
And I can see why you've been on this decades-long obsession with it.
But my God, it's so humbling.
It's humbling.
But you know what?
I have confidence in our species.
In fact, I think our species evolved out of the natural order of terrestrial
life.
Because we're the one species that can be sitting here having this conversation.
Dinosaurs couldn't.
Yeah, but we could easily get wiped out and start from scratch.
And then...
Yes, we could.
...a new species has to pick up the slack, some lizard people, you know...
You're right.
...45 million years from now.
But you see, I guess my optimism comes from the fact that you and I are sitting
here having
this conversation.
Ah.
Well, that's optimistic.
Mm-hmm.
For us, we came about at a very interesting time.
Yeah.
What's that famous Chinese proverb, "May you live in interesting times"?
Yeah.
§33Transcript · 2:35:11–2:39:14
Yeah.
It could be a curse.
Might be a curse.
Yeah.
But that is where we're at.
We live in interesting times.
I mean, it's also like the things that we took for granted that we thought we
were going
to be here forever are now in full upheaval.
Yeah.
Well, I think this is one of those times, you know, where things are shaking
out.
Very much so.
And I want to see us get back to being, you know, I'm of the mind.
I like the adventurous entrepreneurial spirit.
I can't abide by this, "Oh, we're going to get all offended because we're using
the wrong
pronouns or we're going to get triggered or whatever."
Look, we've got some huge things in front of us that we're going to have to
contend
with if we're going to have any kind of sustainable existence on this planet
for generations to
come.
And I think it's going to probably take a wake-up call.
But it's also the pressure that you're getting from these nonproductive people
that
are trying to enforce, like, woke talk and things along those lines.
They've chosen to try to control the thinking and behavior of other people
rather than controlling
their own personal creative output or their own personal success and their own
personal progress.
It's like, it's what you concentrate on.
If you're concentrating constantly on trying to diminish other people's ability
to express
themselves and to try to control the way they express themselves.
Like, it's just a poor management of resources and a lack of understanding
about your own issues
with discipline and self-reflection.
And we're in the middle of that now because it's easy to do because of social
media.
Yeah.
Because you can express yourself so readily and easily through social media.
It's very tempting for people.
Then they get wrapped up in these kind of social media exchanges with folks.
Yeah.
And it becomes an addictive part of your day and it leads you to be even less
productive.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, just, you know, you've been around long enough.
I've been around long enough to see how things have changed, you know, since I
was a kid growing
up.
You know, my upbringing was rural Minnesota.
Winters are very harsh.
You worked your butt off.
Everybody worked and nobody thought that that was exceptional.
Everybody worked.
Yeah, you have to in cold climates.
Yeah.
That's one thing about cold climates is people really value hard work and hard
work ethic.
Absolutely.
And I marveled at my dad and my grandfather.
I thought, "God, am I ever going to be able to work as hard as those guys did?"
Yeah.
You know, my grandfather, on my dad's side, he came over at 16 years old from
Sweden on a cattle boat.
Couldn't speak a word of English.
Came here, settled up in Minnesota, and started working.
And worked in a sash and door company 10 hours a day building window frames.
He would then get off work and he would go and he built a house.
Now, when you're in Minnesota, all houses have basements.
So he would get off work after 10 hours and he would work till dark hand
digging the basement.
Built this house, married my grandmother, moved her in, and then immediately
began building another house right next door by himself.
Now, I don't know.
I've done a lot of hard construction work.
So I know what's involved with that.
You know, it can be extremely hard.
You know, like my father, you know, he would go.
My father and my grandfather, when I'm a little kid, they're working together.
They'd be out there working.
It's 20 degrees out, 10 degrees out, so cold, and they're working outside.
Here's what they would do.
They would have a kettle, right?
They would build a fire, have a kettle, and they would put the nails in the
kettle and heat up the nails.
So that then when they're handling the nails, the nails were hot and would keep
their hands from freezing.
Now, you know, where are the men like that?
I mean, they're still around, but I think that, you know, that kind of an
attitude towards things seems to be diminishing.
Yeah.
You know?
Well, because it's easy to survive.
Yeah.
It's gotten too easy.
Well, I don't know if it's gotten too easy, but it's gotten easy enough so that
§34Transcript · 2:39:14–2:43:23
the path of least resistance becomes even more tempting to folks.
And by the path of least resistance, the problem is you create resistance all
around you, you know, and you create resistance for people that are trying to
do their own thing.
And you want to like control the way people view the world and define the world
and the language that they use and the way they behave and think.
Right.
And people are just, it's almost like you're looking to get offended.
Yeah.
Well, you remember, I mean, it's literally in the Bible, the meek shall inherit
the earth.
I mean, that's literally what's happening.
You think that's going to happen?
I don't know.
What's going to happen to the bold?
Well, I think the bold will be challenged to try to find new ways around this
situation.
And I think also the meek will one day recognize that they really wish to be
bold.
And that's where our best hope is.
Our best hope is that we can educate people on the value of discipline and
creativity and hard work and the satisfaction that comes with accomplishing
goals and projects.
And also that social media communication is terrible for real world
communication.
It's terrible for the human organism.
It's not the way we're supposed to communicate with each other.
We're supposed to communicate with each other eye to eye, looking at each other,
a shake of a hand, a hug.
Yeah.
We're supposed to be nice to each other.
Yeah.
That's very rewarding and it feels great.
Which brings me to something I'd like to bring up.
I have been really busy since we've last met.
And I've partnered with a new internet platform called HowTube that is growing
rapidly.
HowTube?
HowTube.
Yeah.
And it's basically very much First Amendment unfettered speech.
It'll be curated.
Nazis.
Bunch of Nazis.
Right?
Yeah.
Bunch of Nazis.
Nazi fascists.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Our plan is to take over and subjugate the entire planet.
Just kidding, folks.
But if you say that today, people are like, "Oh, First Amendment.
Free speech.
Oh, you're into free speech.
You're one of those."
Definitely into free speech.
Yeah.
Well, free speech is fucking dangerous.
Yeah.
And the other thing that's coming together sort of as a counterpart to that is
a group of
fellow people that I've been in, worked with over the years, business, you know,
I told you I built this restaurant.
Yes.
The restaurant's been wildly successful.
Some of the key people, the entrepreneurs and investors there, we've come
together.
We're looking at land.
We're going to build a center, an institute, a school, whatever you want to
call it.
But we're raising the funds right now, and we're laying out the plans, and
because of exactly
what you just said, I think that education is a massive...at this point, it's a
massive
failure in America.
I mean, it's gone down the toilet.
And it's gotten so politically correct that every year, the standards get lower
and lower.
I have worked in education.
That was one of the things I did just because I felt it was so important.
Back in the mid-90s, I started organizing classes for kids that were being
homeschooled.
And I ended up for 15 years organizing classes.
And over those 15 years, I developed ideas that were not really that original,
and they
were pretty obvious when you think about it.
But here's what I would do.
I was mostly mathematical-based and science.
So like one year, for example, I had three boys.
We were doing a...had a science class.
And we decided we wanted to do something really cool.
So we entered a science fair, a national science fair contest against, I think,
over 3,000 teams.
There was something like 13,000 students in this science fair.
We came up with a concept, one of the boys in the threesome there who were part
of my homeschool
class that I had organized, came up...he was a...he had a...what was his...he
had a physical problem.
§35Transcript · 2:43:23–2:48:03
He was...God, I don't remember what it was, but they had him on steroids that
stunted his growth.
And on several occasions, he had strokes, and he had to be taken to the
hospital emergency.
And in class one day, he said, "You know, the worst thing about..."he was 9
years old.
He said, "The worst thing about going to the hospital was the gurney ride."
I said, "Yeah, I can't believe that."
So he says, "I've been thinking..."he says, "I've been reading about how they
have these magnetically
elevated trains in Japan."
And he says, "Could we apply that to a technology for gurneys, hospital gurneys?"
He was 9 when he thought this up?
He was 9 years old.
And I said, "Let's see what we can do."
We built a model.
Me and three of...him and two other boys entered the science fair contest, and
we won second place
nationally.
So I had students that I took from very beginning-level geometry up through the
lower levels of calculus,
who then went on to do excellent academic achievement, have become doctors,
scientists.
You know, I just in fact ran into one of them just a few days ago while I was
in Atlanta.
Little boy had been in my class like 20 years ago.
And now he's launched...he's an entrepreneur of a tech company that he's just
launched, right?
Anyways, out of this, I realized that, you know, the way...the thing that I
came to believe
was that modern education has got so many things wrong with it: one, the stratification
of modern
education.
Like, this is, to me, artificial.
You know, if you look at traditional societies, when a kid, particularly I can
speak from the
boy's point of view, when a boy got to adolescent, at that point you were
thought of as a young
man and you start...you were integrated now into adult society and you were
expected to
start behaving as an adult, right?
Well, you know, we don't really do that anymore.
It's like what we see so much coming now, I think, out of even the college-age
kids is
this, like, extended infantilism.
You know, they come out and they're still, you know, look, you're supposed to
go to college
and be exposed to challenging ideas, exposed to different points of view, you
know?
Instead, they're coming out, you know, and they're like, "Uh, we don't want,
you know,
whoever to come onto campus."
We don't want Jordan Peterson to come onto campus because he's going to expose
us to ideas
that we don't...we're scared of, you know?
I think we need to...one of the first things we need to do is, like, move away
from that.
So what I would do is I would get a class...like, let's say we're going to have
a class in geometry.
I would take kids out to the building site and I would show them, here's how we're
using
geometry to lay out this building, this house.
And the exact things we just learned in the classroom, look at how we're
applying those.
We'd get to a lesson on trigonometry.
I would take them out to the job site and I would say, "Look, here's how we're
using
trigonometry to design this complicated roof."
We would go back to the classroom and I would have the kids as a problem, as an
exercise,
figuring out what are the angles of the cuts?
What are the compound miters we need to cut from the lumber so it all can fit
together like
pieces of a puzzle?
And then we'd go back out to the job site and they would see how it's all going
together.
I would take...in fact...and you know, one of the other things that's happened
is that,
you know, at the early 20th century, 80% of the American population was
agricultural and
rural.
20% was urban.
Now those statistics have flipped exactly.
I've known kids that were in college that had never seen the Milky Way.
Never seen the Milky Way.
Couldn't find the North Star if their life depended on it.
But I think that that's part of the deficiency that needs to be corrected.
And so I'll just show you a couple of quick things here while we still have
some time left.
Are you going to have an online aspect to this?
Absolutely.
That's the how-to.
So it's two dimensions.
There's the hard, you know, what we say, the hard facility, the hardware and
the software.
The software is going to be how-to.
And we're actually just now putting up and promoting the whole concept of this
idea of
this school.
Like, here was the first class I ever did.
§36Transcript · 2:48:03–2:53:52
1995, Randall's first hands-on geometry class for young people.
Yep.
Over 120 kids tutored in classes over the next 15 years.
It is critically important to develop alternatives to the authoritarian,
hierarchical, monopolistic system of indoctrination that now usurps the
function of authentic education.
This is how it started, see?
And then I would take kids out.
We would do geology and nature, science out in nature.
So this group of kids I've just taken out, we've been studying what happens to
streams after storms.
So I did this, I had probably a hundred kids that I took out on these kinds of
field trips.
Like it says here, getting students out of the classroom into the real world of
nature is vitally important to any system of education and promotes the
psychological well-being of students.
So these were homeschooled kids?
These were all homeschooled kids, yes.
And here our homeschool trio beats 324 teams.
This is little Mark, that little nine-year-old.
And very sadly, about two years later, he passed away from his condition, tore
me up, tore me up.
And this is one thing when I got into this, I did not expect that I was going
to be bonding with these kids.
I've lost three of them.
One was killed in a car accident.
Another one had problems and he hung himself.
And so it was just, you know, that was something when I went into this, I did
not expect that that was going to be an element that I was going to get close
to these kids and then grieve over their passing.
I really, little Mark there, Mark McGinnis, he was 12 here.
He was nine when he actually came up with the idea.
And then a couple of years later, we began to actually, hey, let's take that
idea and go, you know, see if we can develop, enter a science fair contest.
And we did, like it says, we got second place nationally.
And then so scientists discover a major lasting benefit of growing up outside
the city.
And I'll just jump to this.
You can actually see that for kids exposed to nature, it actually affects
structural changes in their brain, that kids that are growing up in a strictly
urban environment now are being deprived of that.
And studies are now showing that kids that are exposed regularly to nature grow
up with far less psychological problems, lower levels of divorce, suicide, drug
addiction, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I think that this is the direction we have to move to start healing what
has gone wrong with our society.
Do you think that maybe we've overlooked a component of development for human
beings that it's not just a choice whether or not you're around nature, but it's
actually a necessity?
Absolutely. I totally think that.
That it's something like a vitamin or something like?
Yes. Yes.
And I consider myself extremely fortunate that I was able to grow up in a rural
environment and be exposed to nature.
I mean, my boyhood growing up was hiking, camping, swimming, canoeing, horseback
riding.
When I got old enough to work, we worked on the neighbor's farm.
So I had that whole opportunity to see farm life and how all of that came
together.
And I look back on that now and I go, God, I took that for granted back then.
But now when I look back, I go, boy, I was so fortunate to have that upbringing.
You know, and I think, God, more kids, young people need to have that kind of
an experience growing up.
So this whole thing that we're doing with this group of very incredible people
that I've been working with for
some now, oh, five to 10 years, some of them longer than that, are coming
together around these ideas.
And I don't know if you know Chris Martinson or does Peak Prosperity.
He'd be a good, he'd, yeah, I mean, some great people that are intimately
involved in this
and going to help raise money for the first prototype.
We're looking at land in eastern Tennessee as one place.
I'm also looking at land in Arizona.
I've got some people out there that I've been working with who are very much
about trying to make something like this happen, to create a prototype that can
so look, here's a place.
And see, another thing that I believe is that, and I did this in my classes.
I said, okay, you pay for your tuition for your kid as long as there's room.
I encouraged parents to come in and participate because I really believe that
this whole artificial
stratification by age is detrimental. And you need to, like, this horizontal
stratification,
to me, again, is debilitating. And we need to have, like, a vertical
integration.
So that I found this in my homeschool classes that I would sometimes have kids
from the range from 10
to, say, 15 or 16. And I noticed there was a natural dynamic that emerged. The
older kids
would naturally become mentors to the younger kids, you see? And we'd have
adults in there,
and pretty soon it was almost like this, you know, my generation, when we came
of age,
it was the generation gap. Have you ever heard that term?
Yes.
Yeah. Well, that was my generation, you know, coming of age, the baby boom
generation. We were the first
to have that, right? Well, what brought that about? What brought that about was
the way that American
education evolved because prior to World War II, most schools in America were
the one-room schoolhouse.
§37Transcript · 2:53:52–2:59:01
Coming out of World War II is when you begin to have these large institutionalized
consolidation of schools. Like, it really accelerated in the '50s.
My father was in a one-room schoolhouse until he got to high school, like in
1944, I think it was '43.
At that point, they had just built a brand new high school that had like 800
kids, which was
exceptional at that point. But when you go back and you look at it, what you
see is the schools got bigger
and bigger and bigger. And the bigger they got, the more impersonal they got.
Now, when I started
homeschooling, I was working with some of the teachers in the Waldorf system.
Now, here's what they do.
They come in, the Waldorf kids come in at the kindergarten age, and they'll
have a teacher
who stays with them all the way up until through middle school. Now, you have a
small class of 10
or 15 kids. You have a single teacher. Think about the dynamic and the
relationship. That teacher's
going to know those kids. I found that when I was teaching courses in math, and
I would have six,
seven, eight kids, if one of them wasn't getting it, I knew instantly. And I
never left anybody behind,
because we didn't have to. And I also found that, oh, if this child was not
getting it,
this student over here was more than eager to show, to jump in there and say,
oh, and help them.
I found that that was also something very important. And my memory, and you
probably had the same
experience. My memory was, you know, when I was particularly middle school,
bullism was rampant.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, I got my first year in middle school, I got bullied mercilessly.
And then eighth grade, when I went to eighth grade, I finally, I had gone
through adolescence,
and I had also spent that summer between seventh and eighth grade working on
the farm.
So what we did on the farm was hauling in hay bales. Now we'd have 80 acres of
alfalfa.
It would get cut in, you know, hay bales back in those days. And so you go out
there and you'd have
to lift the hay bales up onto the wagon. And then the wagon, another, one of
the other boys would drive
the wagon. Sometimes one of the girls on the farm, girls would be driving the
tractor, go back to the
barn, unload that, and then you go back out. You do this all day. So by the end
of the summer, I had
gotten way stronger, right? I had calluses on my hands from doing that. So I
went back to eighth grade.
And the same guy, remember, he started right in bullying me. And about a month
into school, we were
in gym class together. I come out and I'm, well, I've just got my underwear on.
He comes out and starts
whipping me with a wet towel. And I kind of lost it and didn't realize, you
know, he was still,
his dominance of me was at that point purely psychological. But it shocked me
how easily
I whooped his ass. But it was totally because I'd spent the summer primarily
doing this hard
physical work. Yeah, the hardest. Farmer strength is a real thing. Yeah,
absolutely it is. So,
but yeah, so, you know, but bullyism was very endemic to that whole stratification
because
what I observed was the bullies were always the kids, the boys primarily that
have been held back,
right? So particularly in middle school, there's a big difference. Yeah, you're
a year older,
two years older, you're bigger, but you're also got this insecurity about, you
know, this feeling of
inferiority because now you're been placed in your, you know, your peers are
these younger kids. It's
just almost like an open invitation to become a bully. It's also they're
probably psychologically
damaged, which is why they're not excelling in school in the first place. Yes,
but what I found...
Probably getting bullied at home. Yeah, that's right. But see, I particularly
like with math,
I found that everybody, for math particularly, you got to see people... I don't
know how many times I
heard like a parent would come to me and say, "Well, you know, little Mark
thinks he's no good at math.
He just, he's, you know, he's been in public school and, you know, he's fallen
way behind." And I said,
"Yeah, that's what happens. That's what happened to me in eighth grade. I fell
way behind and I got behind a
year." Right? Well, I got... So I work with Mark, you know, and get him in a
different environment.
And then he'd come to me and say, "Mr. Carlson, I didn't know I liked math."
You know, I have letters
from both kids and parents saying, "Yeah, I didn't even know I liked math. Now
I love math." And I said,
the reason is, is because you go back to square one and you explain something
and you take it step by
step. And what happens with math particularly, you get left behind, you know,
you go to public school,
they've got, here's what the teachers got this, here's what we've got to cover
this, this, this, and this.
If you fall behind, tough shit. Yeah, you're never going to catch up. You're
never going to catch up.
What's the point? Right. What a waste of time. Yeah. My problem was, I was a
little bit on the
§38Transcript · 2:59:02–3:03:57
upper end of the scale. So I just got bored to tears. And I would tune out
because I got so bored,
you know? Well, I think that's a giant problem with the large classes where
they just, there's no way
they can concentrate on so many kids. Right. Their education falls by the wayside
because of it.
That's exactly right. Yeah. And so this is part of what, you know, and if you're
interested,
I will keep you in the loop. I would love to hear about this. Yeah. Yeah. I
would love to hear about this.
And I think one thing that's solely lacking, sorely lacking, um, in school is
the concept that
there's jobs that are available outside of what we think of as mainstream occupations.
Like there's, there's not like, I'm not encouraging kids to become social media
influencers. I'm not
encouraging kids to become tick talkers or YouTubers, but you know how much
money those
fucking people make? Like if you're encouraging people to become lawyers, like
at what point in
time do you encourage them to play video games professionally? Because there's
a lot of
fucking money in playing video games. And I'm not saying they should do that,
but I'm saying there's a,
like a disdain for even becoming a standup comedian. Like I remember when I was
thinking
about being comedian, no one encouraged me, like maybe a couple of my friends,
but outside of that,
like my parents didn't encourage me. No one thought it was a good idea. They
were like, what are the odds
you're going to make it? Like, this is, this is the perspective because there's
no real structure in
terms of someone showing you and teaching you and it's not a class you can take
where you can graduate.
And then eventually you go on to, you know, apprentice as you know, with a, you
know,
more successful comedian. There's so many different things that a person could
do creatively with
their life in terms of art, music, whatever you want to do. There's a lot of
different avenues for
life that people are thriving in, but schools never encourage these things. And
they look at these kids
that are their class clowns or the loud mouse or the ones that don't want to
pay attention. And
they just assume that kid's fucked. And that's what I assumed about my own self.
I would see that and
I would go, well, obviously I'm not that intelligent and I'm not that curious,
but that wasn't what the
case was. It was just, I wasn't interested in what they were selling. Right.
The way they were teaching
it was not interesting to me. I didn't like the teachers particularly. There's
so many of them that were
under motivated. They, they didn't enjoy it. Yeah. They weren't particularly
good at persuading you to
be enthusiastic about these subjects as they were teaching. Did you have any
teachers though that
were good? Yeah. Yeah. I had a few. I had a Spanish teacher that was great. It
was a lot of fun. He made,
he made Spanish interesting. I had an English teacher that was really fun and
she gave you perspectives
and thoughts on life itself that was just different than the way most, and
everybody would talk about
her like, you gotta get, I forget her name. I think it was Mrs. Hanson, but
everybody wanted to get her
class because she was interesting. Yeah. And she wasn't even that interesting,
you know, but she was
interesting enough. Right. And she was kind and she was friendly and she wasn't,
you know, this authoritarian
and she gave you this idea that class could be something other than this monotonous
grind. Yeah.
Fucking sand sandwich that everybody else was serving. Yeah. It was just so dry
and boring. Oh yeah. Well,
I remember my first, my eighth grade geometry class was so boring. Um, it was
just, you know, the proofs
Yeah. And you know, all of that. And it was only, you know, years later that I
found out how really interesting
geometry could be, especially when I started building and I go, wow, this is
interesting. And then of course, I just got into
geometry just as a area of interest itself. And that's when I discovered things
like sacred geometry. And
you know, when we talk about the pyramids and things like that, you know, and
how geometry was used through
the ages and it was just unbelievably fascinating. And at some point it'd be
fun to have a, have a
discussion just about that. Yeah. I would love to do that. Yeah. Maybe next
time we'll just lay off the
catastrophic events and only talk about geometry. Yeah. Well, we have to maybe
tie it in a little bit.
A little bit. A little bit. Okay. A little bit. Because actually there is some
connections there.
So we've already done three hours. You want to, um, wrap this up? We should
probably wrap it up. Okay. I mean,
I, you know, I'm not, I'm heading back to Atlanta Tuesday morning. All right.
So, uh, Sunday,
we've got this reservation to, uh, Rangers are going to guide us to Canyon Lake
Gorge. We've got some
extra spaces. I don't know if you've got any opening on Sunday, if you wanted
to jump in for... How far
away is that? It's about halfway to San Antonio, maybe an hour south. Let's
talk afterwards. I have a
show Sunday night. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that. Okay. Well,
§39Transcript · 3:03:57–3:05:44
we could get you back,
I think. We'll see. We'll see. Let me see what I could do. If not, um, um, but
to let people
know if they want to get more into your research or read, uh, any of this stuff
or watch any of those
videos, particularly the videos that we were talking about earlier on Atlantis,
where, where's the best
place? Randallcarlson.com. Randallcarlson.com. Thought I'd make it easy. That's
pretty easy.
Yeah. I just spent 500 bucks to buy my name, but... Did you? Yeah. Who had it?
Another Randallcarlson?
Yeah. There was another Randallcarlson. Yeah. I had to buy JoeRogan.com. Oh,
did you? Yeah. Yeah. I finally just had to go on off the guy to... No, I didn't
do that. 500 bucks
is what it cost me. It's a good deal. It was a good deal. Um, listen, man, I
appreciate you very
much. I appreciate what you do. It's, uh, it's always very fascinating and
intriguing to talk to you. And,
uh, I'm just glad you're out there. I'm having a good life. You know, it's
going good. We've had
the ups and downs, as you well know. Uh, last time I saw you, actually, I was
in the audience when you
were in Atlanta. How long ago was that? Once it had been like, what, three
years ago? Probably.
Something like that. Something like that. Was that the tabernacle? No, no, I
don't. It wasn't. Where else did
you? Oh. I don't remember. The only thing I remember was I was laughing my ass
off. Well, that's great.
Yeah. I actually thought that, God, he's got, I don't remember what it was, but
you had me going.
Good. Yeah. Beautiful. That's the goal. That's the goal. Yeah. Well, thank you
very much,
Randall. And, uh, we'll do this again. Oh, absolutely. All right. Because I got
a lot
more to show you, man. All right. It'll happen another time. Yeah. All right.
deal. Thanks, brother. You're welcome. Bye, everybody.