Name: Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer
Uploaded: 2017-05-17T01:36:28.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-05-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-05-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer

3, 2, this is live, ladies and gentlemen, and this is a very unusual podcast we're
going
to have here, and a very unusual discussion.
I have to my left Michael Shermer, a very famous skeptic, he's been on the
podcast before,
of course, Randall Carlson, amazing gentleman who knows far too much about
terrifying things
like asteroids, and Graham Hancock, author, also a fantastic human being, many
times been
on this podcast as well, and this all came out of a podcast that Randall and
Graham and
I did recently, and Michael Shermer commented on it, and it was all essentially
on the hypothesis
that the great extinction that happened with the North American land animals
that happened
somewhere around the end of the ice age, and the end of the ice age, the abrupt
end of
the ice age, being caused, please correct me if I fuck any of this up, being
caused by a
comet impact.
Michael Shermer had some questions about that, and we said this would be an
amazing podcast
to get everybody together in a room and go over this.
Since then, there's been some interesting stuff that's happened.
Well, I thought this was really fascinating, that Forbes has a mainstream
article in Forbes,
did a comet wipe out ice age megafauna, and this is actually from just a couple
of weeks
ago, and then there was also this interpretation that's fairly recent as well
about one of the
stone tablets, one of the stone carvings, rather, on Gobekli Tepe, and Graham,
you would probably
be the best to describe that.
Yeah, that was published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, a peer-reviewed
journal,
by a couple of scientists from the University of Edinburgh, and they are
proposing an interpretation
of the Gobekli Tepe imagery.
There's quite a lot of imagery on those T-shaped pillars, particularly one
pillar, pillar 43 and
enclosure D.
And their deduction, what they take from their interpretation, of course many
will disagree
with them, their interpretation is that those images are speaking of the comet
impact.
They're speaking of a comet that hit the Earth roughly 12,900 years before our
time.
And Randall, this has been something that you've been obsessed with for many,
many years now.
We've documented it and detailed it in many conversations that we've had on the
podcast.
Oh, yes.
Now, I can't say that I'm that familiar with that article.
I haven't had a chance to get into it.
But this idea that the comet impact is what has caused the end of the ice age?
Well, it's so complex.
But now what we do is we throw some type of an impact into the mix, and it
seems to fill
gaps that have...
Pull this right up to you.
It seems to fill gaps that were, at this point, still unexplained.
You know, there's varying theories between some extent of climate change and
some extent of
human predation that caused the extinction.
And I've always felt like you can't blame it on one or the other.
I think humans probably had a role, but only in the very final stages of the
extinction event.
And one of the scenarios would certainly suggest that there were extreme
climate changes between
what's called the Balling Alorod, which was the rather gradual warming at the
very end of
the Pleistocene, which was then followed by the Younger Dryas, which was the
return to
full glacial cold.
And in the end of the Younger Dryas, which is dated at about 11,600, which is
considered
now to be the boundary of the Holocene, post-Younger Dryas, pre-Boreal, it's
called, would be the
beginning of the Holocene.
And it seems that most of the extinctions did occur between roughly 13,000 and
11,600 years
ago, although the dating has a widespread on it.
So you can't pinpoint it down to a specific event.
But I've always felt like that there had to be something we needed to look at
that triggered
the extreme climate changes that we do see at the end of the Ice Age.
And to my opinion, you can't attribute that solely to Milankovitch theories,
which is basically
the changing solar terrestrial geometries, because they're too slow.
And what we see at the end of the Ice Age were very rapid climate changes.
And so one of the things that I think has been missing has been the trigger.
Wallace Brecker pointed out years ago that possibly a major flood from the
draining of Lake Agassiz
caused an interruption of the thermohalene circulation, which is basically the
circulation
of the North Atlantic Ocean, and that this might have been what triggered the
Younger Dryas
and then also contributed to the mass extinction events.
But now I think that the dating of the draining of Lake Agassiz is too late for
that and was
probably a latter event within the overall melting phenomena that occurred
between roughly
14,600 and about 11,000 years ago.
Somewhere in there, we have to fit that mass extinction event.
And I definitely have thought that climate change was the dominant factor in
that.
But then what triggered the climate change?
That always seemed to me to be something that was not ever really explained.
The comet impact theory is very controversial, but the evidence has been
steadily mounting now
for a decade.
Including physical evidence, right?
Like the core samples that show nuclear glass scattered out throughout Asia and
Europe
at roughly the same time period when they do the core samples?
Yes, most of it's dating to 12,800 to 13,000 years ago.
These are called impact proxies.
Impact proxies.
Nanodiamonds, melt glass, microspherules, these kind of things are associated
with impact,
not necessarily always caused by impact.
So this has been part of the reason for the controversy, but it's the abundance
of all of
these at a particular level which leads a large group of scientists to feel
that we have had
a comet impact in the past.
It's the full assemblage of things that is difficult to explain by processes
without invoking
some type of a cosmic event.
And it also corresponds with what you believe is a period where Earth travels
through a series
of comets.
Well, this gets us to the ideas of what would be called the British neocatastrophists.
Victor Klub and William Napier and a number of others that have theorized that
from time
to time Earth encounters the debris from a large disintegrating comet.
And there's an interesting, William Napier addresses this in an interesting
article I can
pull up here pretty soon, that possibly around 13,000 years ago, Earth may have
encountered
some of the debris from a disintegrating comet, which ultimately goes back to
Fred Whipple,
who is one of the godfathers of cometary science.
Could I just come in on that for a second?
I mean, specifically, Bill Napier and Victor Klub are identifying the remnants
of this comet
with the torrid meteor stream, which is familiar, I think, to everybody.
We pass through it twice a year, we see meteorites, particularly at the end of
October, early
November.
That debris stream is still there.
It still contains, according to their argument, bits of the comet.
There are large objects in it, like cometing Enki, Rudniki, Ogiatto, and so on,
four or
five kilometers in diameter.
And the suggestion is that the meteor stream has got lots of small bits of dust,
but it's
got some larger stuff, too.
And some of that stuff fell out of the meteor stream 12,800 years ago and
impacted primarily
the North American ice cone.
Now, Michael, when you listen to that podcast, you had some questions, you are
a professional
skeptic, so of course you're skeptical.
What are your thoughts about all this?
Yeah, let me pull back and give a bigger picture.
After the podcast, I went and got the book, Magicians of the Gods, and actually,
I listened
to it on audio.
So it's, I don't know, like 16, 18 hours of Graham reading with his wonderful
British
accent, which is, you know, for Americans, that elevates the quality of the
argument by
an order of magnitude.
Yeah, that's how they sell things in infomercials over here.
And Graham, you're a good writer.
It's a very compelling story.
Thank you.
You're a great skeptic.
And, you know, and so I think, you know, a number of points about, in general,
the idea
of alternative archaeology, which is really what we're talking about here.
I prefer that to pseudo-archaeology because that's a little bit of a, it's
supposed to
be a little bit of an insult.
So alternative archaeology, so it's good to remember that, so you have these
guys on the
podcast for three or four hours, and the audience listening thinks, yeah, why
don't these guys
get a fair hearing?
I mean, it's like there's the mainstream, and then there's these guys.
Right.
But there isn't just these guys.
There's hundreds of alternative archaeological theories.
So which one gets the play, which one gets the tension, which one doesn't?
And for a mainstream archaeologist who's busy in the field and trying to get
grants and
so on, they mostly just don't have the time to sort through all these
alternative theories
because this is just one.
And as we'll see in the next couple hours, there's hundreds and hundreds of
things to
be addressed.
So that's kind of what we do.
So just to rattle off a few, the lost tribes of Israel who colonized the
Americas, Mormon
archaeology, explanation of Native Americans, the Kensington rune stones in
Minnesota that
the Vikings had come here, the black Egyptian hypothesis.
When I was in graduate school, this book called Black Athena was published,
that the Egyptians
were actually black, and that the sort of Western white male dominance of
history had
written them out of the past.
So this was a whole alternative history, alternative archaeology.
Piltdown Man, Thor Heiderdahl, in his hypothesis that the Polynesian islands
were colonized by
South Americans who went east to west, that's since been debunked.
But that's yet another one of these things.
South American archaeology, Omec statues seem to have African features on them.
So maybe Afghans went directly across to South America.
So there's, you know, Eric Van Donegan, Zechariah Sitchin.
Now, most of these Graham rejects in his book, to your credit.
So you're a good skeptic, too.
But for an outsider, to an anthropologist from Mars who steps into this thing
cold, doesn't
know anything, it's like, well, they're all alternative, which is the right one?
And how do we know?
And so what, the way it works in science is, you know, the default position is
the skeptical
position.
We assume your hypothesis is not true, not just you, anybody's hypothesis, like
the Klub-Napier
hypothesis.
That was widely published.
It was widely covered in mainstream scientific journals and popular science
magazines like Scientific
American.
And it has not fared that well over the last decade or so.
It's still around.
It's still debated.
But that, so you put it in the mainstream through peer-reviewed journals.
And then you go to conferences and you have it out.
And that's kind of where we end up with, well, this is what we think is
probably true for
now.
And then all these other people out here, if they don't jump in and into the
pool where
everybody is, then there's no way for an outsider to know whether these
alternative things
have any validity or not, other than they make a compelling case in a popular
book.
Yes, but what do the mainstream scientists think?
So, and the problem is, is that, so a couple of specific things like what I
call patternicity,
the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise, you know, the Virgin
Mary on a grilled
cheese sandwich or whatever.
Those are fun examples.
But, you know, taking like, um, uh, pectographs, pecto, pecto glyphs, and then
comparing them to constellations.
Like, you know, here we have some constellations on your roof here.
Uh, it's easy in the mind's eye to find a pattern.
The question is, did those people really think 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years?
So this is a field called archaeoastronomy.
Ed Krupp, uh, or the director of the Griffith Observatory here in LA, this is
what he does.
And sometimes the pattern, he thinks the patterns mean something.
Somet