Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1772 - Randall Carlson
Uploaded: 2022-02-05T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1772 - Randall Carlson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1772 - Randall Carlson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1772 - Randall Carlson

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.
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.
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, the