#606 - Randall Carlson
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February 02, 2015
TLDR: Randall Carlson is a master builder and architectural designer who also teaches geometry and geology through his explorations.

In episode #606 of The Joe Rogan Experience, Randall Carlson returns to discuss his groundbreaking insights into cataclysmic events that have shaped human history and the rise of civilizations. Carlson, a master builder, architectural designer, and geomythologist, delves deep into the evidence of ancient civilizations, asteroidal impacts, and the ensuing catastrophic changes to our planet. Here are the key takeaways from the episode:
Introduction
- Carlson begins with a light-hearted acknowledgment of the intensity of his previous discussions about disasters and cosmic impacts, assuring listeners that there's an upside to these events.
The Journey with Graham Hancock
- Carlson had recently taken author Graham Hancock on an excursion through landscapes impacted by ancient cataclysms. This trip was part of Hancock's research for his sequel to "Fingerprints of the Gods," which posits the existence of lost civilizations.
- A primary critique of Hancock's original work focused on the lack of physical evidence for the civilizations he proposed. Carlson supports the idea that cosmic catastrophes, such as asteroid impacts, could explain the scarcity of archaeological traces.
The Concept of Deep History
- Carlson introduces the concept of deep history, dating the emergence of modern human civilization back to around 11,000-12,000 years ago. He urges listeners to consider how much of human history might have been wiped clean due to cataclysmic events.
- He discusses how modern civilization could be a reboot following severe disruptions rather than a direct linear progression.
Evidence of Catastrophe
- The discussion touches upon significant archaeological finds that support the theory of ancient civilization disruption, including:
- Göbekli Tepe: A site that predates traditional views of civilization, suggesting sophisticated social structures far earlier than previously believed.
- The Tunguska event: An asteroidal explosion in Siberia in 1908 that serves as a modern example of catastrophic impacts.
- Carlson argues that many structures, such as the Great Pyramids and Stonehenge, may encode knowledge of astronomical phenomena and ancient cosmology.
Climate Change and Human History
- Carlson draws parallels between historical climate events and the adaptability of human civilization. He asserts that much of recorded history may reflect a misunderstanding of cataclysmic influences on society's evolution.
- He discusses how major climate shifts have historically led to both population decline and growth in different eras.
The Role of Sacred Geometry
- The conversation also touches on sacred geometry, exploring how ancient builders encoded their understanding of the cosmos in architectural design, such as the layout of cities and structures.
- Carlson presents the idea that these designs reflect profound cosmological secrets, aligning human architecture with cosmic principles.
The Future of Humanity in the Cosmos
- In closing, Carlson posits that humanity needs to learn from its past catastrophes to navigate future challenges, particularly concerning climate change and cosmic threats.
- He emphasizes the importance of being aware of our cosmic vulnerability but also of our potential to transcend it through innovation and understanding of our ancient history.
Key Insights
- Lessons from History: Catastrophic events have repeatedly shaped human history; understanding these events can offer insights into our future.
- Civilizational Reboots: What we consider the foundations of civilization may actually be a continuation from a much older, potentially advanced society that was disrupted.
- Cosmic Perspective: Emphasizing humanity's connection to the cosmos can foster greater awareness and responsibility regarding our impact on Earth.
This episode is a thought-provoking exploration into the intersections of architecture, history, and cosmic events. Carlson's insights challenge listeners to reconsider established narratives of human history, advocating a more nuanced understanding that incorporates the potential for catastrophic impacts as pivotal to our development.
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It makes it look like we're on a radio show. Yeah. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back. Randall Carlson. How are you, sir? I'm doing well, Joe. You freaked out the entire podcast population. The last time you were here with your stories of cataclysmic disasters and
and the ramifications of asteroidal impacts and just the evidence that you presented was a real mind fuck, as it were.
well uh... what can i say but i apologize to all the listeners out there that uh... might have had nightmares no worries i i knew that was going to be the case though i knew uh... after the first uh... time i met you we had a long conversation in atlanta and you uh... once you sat down for three hours on a podcast and open up about that stuff it was really gonna uncork a lot of people's domes well you know
Ironically, there's an upside to the whole thing. Maybe we'll have time to get into that a little bit today. Yeah, definitely. So tell me you just returned from a long excursion with Graham Hancock. If you want to bend that thing like that towards your face or probably work a little, yeah, there you go. Like this? Yeah, there you go. You just returned from a long excursion with Graham Hancock. You guys were on the road and what was the nature of your trip?
Well, I was taking Graham on a tour, showing him some landscapes. I could call him the landscapes of catastrophe, because he's doing his sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods. And you know, when he came out with that book in 1995, he was theorizing that there had been this lost civilization in prehistoric times.
You know, the critics, the gist of most of what the critics were attacking him on, and there were considerable attacks on him as a result of some of the things he put forward in that book, was that, well, if there was this, you know, great civilization that had existed in, you know, somewhere back in prehistory, where's the evidence of it? Where is the pottery? You know, where are the carvings? Where is the infrastructure that would have existed?
And, you know, I don't know if he really had an answer for that other than the fact that, you know, there had been cataclysmic events that had intervened between then and now, but he wasn't really specific about what the nature of those catastrophes actually were.
And a lot of additional research has come out since 1995 that basically opens the window onto those events that basically separates our modern history, which, you know, the recorded history goes back five or six thousand years. You know, when we look at the emergence of modern civilization, we would basically trace it back to nine or ten thousand years ago with the emergence of
of agriculture, the dispersion of languages, the first cities, and so forth. When we go beyond that a few thousand years, we're in a completely different world. And I mean, so completely different that it's almost unrecognizable from our modern world.
If we started recreating maps, going backwards, like taking snapshots of the planet, every millennium, going back, what we would see is that going back to seven or eight thousand years ago, the basic configuration of our planet would not change much.
Once we get 11, 12, 13,000 years ago, the changes become profoundly dramatic. We start seeing sea levels going down hundreds of feet. We see massive ice sheets covering North America and Europe and lots of other enormous changes. Beyond that is what I consider to be deep history.
because as we may have talked about in our last interview, we modern humans have been on this planet for 150 to 200,000 years, at least. If we go back, say I think the oldest modern human skeleton ever found was named Homo adulte, and he dates to about 180,000 years roughly. If we think of a generation of humans as 25 years, that's 7,000 generations of humans.
Now, so the question is, is what were we doing for all those thousands of generations until somebody finally realized, hey, you know what? We can plant crops. We can build cities. We can form communities. We can invent language, et cetera, et cetera. Well, my contention is, and I think the evidence that's accumulating supports this interpretation, that what we're really seeing
seven eight nine thousand years ago is not the origins of civilization but the rebooting of civilization you see what i'm saying and when we go back and we realize that
modern history is separated from deep history by this extraordinary series of events that transpired between about 11 and 13 or 14,000 years ago. Once we begin to recognize how extreme these events were in remodeling our planet, totally remodeling our planet, it then becomes obvious to us why there is not a lot of hard evidence for whatever went on prior to these events.
And there's been some things that they've found since then that have really sort of made Graham Hancock's theories become more and more palatable to even mainstream scientists. Yes. Like, go Beckley Tappi. Exactly. Exactly. Go Beckley Tappi, Gunang Padang. These are apparently structures that were built at least 11 or 12,000 years ago. And I'm waiting to find out the
the most recent ideas on them. I think that probably they go back much older than that. Because from what Graham told me, they're just only in the preliminary stages of being excavated. So yeah, I believe Quebec Lee Tempe is less than 10% excavated, right? Yeah. Yeah. So this is this enormous ruin that appears to be, you know, late place to see an ice age in age.
that apparently was deliberately buried, which is interesting, brings up a very interesting issue. Why would they deliberately bury it? And they know it's deliberately buried because of the uniformity of the dirt. Yes, I questioned Graham on that because I wanted to know if it was because the first thing I thought to myself was it could be natural because I have seen so many sedimentary deposits caused by great floods.
Graham assured me that it was, that it was human, that it was deliberate. It was not, because if it had been buried by floods or water, there should be internal stratification. It would be very obvious. I've been giving it some thought, and you know what occurred to me was this, and I ran this by Graham, but I haven't gotten a response from him on this, but I started thinking, if it was deliberately buried, why would they bury it?
Then I began thinking, what we talked about last time when we were talking about the Tunguska event in Siberia, when you had this massive aerial detonation, you know, that was about a 15 megaton explosion. Okay, now that's equivalent to our biggest hydrogen bombs that used to be in the American arsenal. And it's just because of an asteroid that blew up in our atmosphere. Yeah, about a 150 foot diameter asteroid, which is not that big, really relative in the cosmic scale of things.
The point, though, is that it was moving really, really fast. A rifle bullet, let's say, on average, is about 1,000 feet per second. An asteroid coming into the atmosphere is going to be 20 or 30 times that velocity. So it carries an enormous kinetic punch when it hits the atmosphere.
It explodes because of the fact that the Earth is not actually absorbing a lot of that energy. It's dispersed widely through the atmosphere. Now think about this, particularly during the height of the Cold War, in order to protect our missile silos, our super harden command and control centers, what did we do with them?
put them on the ground. Put them on the ground. We buried them, exactly. And that began, I began to think perhaps could explain why it was buried in order to preserve it. Hmm. Against the possibility of some kind of an aerial burst or
you know, some kind of a highly energetic event. That seems a weird thing for 12,000 years ago, no? I mean, we have really no evidence whatsoever that anybody's capable of doing anything like that that long ago. Well, I think on the contrary, I think that what we see at the very beginnings of recorded history is an obsession with the sky.
And that's one of the points that Graham brings out in his work, is that humans are ancestors of 10, 12, 13,000, even much sooner than that, had just an obsessive concern with events in the sky. And all of these ancient structures, whether we're talking about Stonehenge, and I'm sure it's going to be the same case with Gobekli Tapi,
When we look at these, this infrastructure from, you know, like the Mesolithic period, through the Neolithic period from, you know, six, five, four thousand years ago, three thousand years ago, what we see is that there's this concern with astronomy. You know, the astronomical alignments that are built into these structures actually allow some pretty sophisticated observations of events happening in the sky.
And we can maybe pull up some stuff here that I've brought today to look at. But yeah, I think that it's highly plausible that people back then could have, because think about this again, to try to put this in context. How many generations ago was the primary mode of human transportation horseback?
Not that many. Four or five generations ago. Pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. Now, think 7,000 generations. Are you going to tell me then, on all of that time, all of those generations of humans that have the same presumably intelligence as our own, because they've got the same brain size, that they're not going to be able to come up with some kind of a transmitted tradition, some type of
you know, the idea of somehow, of culture, of civilization, of language, of, you know, that's my point is that there was so much that has been lost. And once we understand
How dynamic this planet really is, it'll become clear to us why we don't have the hard physical record of things going on 20 or 30,000 years ago. To put it in perspective for people who have never studied ancient Egypt, Cleopatra, the pyramids, if you look at the date of the pyramids, the Cleopatra is closer to us. Yes, yes.
then the pyramids were to clear back. Yeah, which is nuts. It's great. You stop and think about that. Like, wait a minute, what? They was that old back then, and they found these little tiny airplanes inside the pyramids, these little miniature carved airplanes that look like airplanes. People have tried to say, well, no, they represent birds. That doesn't look like a bird at all. I mean, they have a rudder.
And they look like planes. Well, yeah. And, you know, there are traditions, particularly the Vedic traditions. They're full of descriptions of flying objects. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So what is that? You know, I'm not going to proclaim unequivocally its airplanes, but at the same time, we've got to keep an open mind about it. And the point I'm trying to make is that, yeah, there was so much time to transpire
All kinds of things could have happened that have basically been erased. Right. And hopefully by the end of today's interview, you'll have a better, a clear idea of specifically what some of those things really were. So we're talking about a potential civilization of maybe tens of thousands of years of growth. And if we're looking at what we have from the beginning of
the dawn of civilization and we believed Mesopotamia somewhere around 7,000 years ago. From that till today, we're talking about maybe double or triple that was lost in these gigantic cataclysmic events, maybe 15, 20,000, 30,000 years of human beings inventing things, people building upon the inventions of others, expanding, and then all of that, boom, wiped out where Rubbin sticks together again to start fires and then whatever
Memories are left, people have to rebuild. A generation or two ago, it was easy to dismiss ideas like that as fringe science. Right. Today, as we say here in 2015, it's not nearly so easy to dismiss that anymore, particularly what we now know about the history of this planet and how truly dynamic it has been.
And that we have in effect been sort of blessed the last six to 10,000 years with a relatively stable climate. And I'm going to show you some graphs here that really will blow your mind. That really will underscore how significant some of these changes have been, how profound some of them have been. And once we know that and begin to incorporate that into our thinking, we realize we're going to have to kind of reevaluate our models of prehistory.
Okay, well, we have a new setup now. So with the TriCaster, we're going to allow Randall to take control of the situation here. If you're just listening to this, this might be one of those podcasts where if you're one of those people that listens to it on a commute, you might want to go back and check out the, well, Vimeo or YouTube or those are the ones that you stream is going to give you a HD now too, right?
we do some people even know we do a HD video of this podcast as well so what is this oxygen isotopes in Greenland oxygen isotopes in Greenland yeah what we're looking at here this goes back to the early 90s when um
You know, glaciologists and paleoclimatologists, guys who study ancient climate, extracted these ice cores from the summit of Greenland. And the reason they went to the summit was because they were looking for the most undistorted ice core record that they could find. Previous ice core extractions had been near the perimeter of the ice sheets. And there, the ice flow is much more dynamic. So there was more distortion in your record. So what they did was they went to the very center. There was a European team and an American team.
And without getting into the background, basically the ice sheet there was almost two miles thick. It took them five years to drill through. Two miles thick. Yes, yes. Just think about how far like looking, how far two miles away. It's like, what is a plane? A plane's a mile in the air? No, no. Well, a jet's going to be about 30,000 feet. What's a mile? 35,000 feet? A mile? No, you've got to remember this because it's going to be important. Number 5,280 feet is a mile. Is a mile.
Now, the tallest building in downtown LA is probably not over 800 feet, 1,000 feet at the most. I'm not sure I did look it up at one point, what the tallest building was. I don't remember what it was. I know the tallest building in Atlanta is 1,060 feet.
two miles, you'd have to think of 10 of those stacked on top of each other to get a two mile thick sheet of ice. That's a amazingly huge mass of ice. And that's pretty much the summit of Greenland. And what we're looking at on this graph here, if you go down the left side of the graph,
This is, it's the surface. And then down here, there's 1,500 you see right at the bottom, that's 1,500 meters, right? 1,500 meters, you figure there's about 3.28 feet per meter. So that's going to be 45, it's going to be close to 5,000. So this is 1,500 meters, absolutely a mile.
Yeah, a little less than a mile. Over here on the right is the time in thousands of years before the present. So as you go down right there, there's 1,000 years, you go down, there's 2,000. Down at the bottom, you see 10. So that's 10,000 years ago. Now basically, what the oxygen isotopes do, they're a proxy for.
temperature change adjacent to the ice mass, right? And if you look at this, these are snapshots basically taken like every 10 years, right? And what you see here is that the temperature is oscillating back and forth, back and forth. It's two to four degrees centigrade.
Now, to put this into context, the concern, we got into this somewhat last time, the whole issue of global warming. And I know that in some of the feedback we got, some of the most critical comments came from people who didn't like me undermining this whole concept of global warming induced catastrophe, right?
What we see here though is clearly that the climate, this is the 10,000 years that we're talking about here is called the Holocene by geologists. It's oscillating back and forth two to four degrees centigrade every 10, 20, 30 years. So we're talking about a degree that has changed basically in the last century to a century and a half.
right which which really almost wouldn't even show up here you see but we're going down as we go down we'll see is you go to the right that means temperatures warming as you go to the left it means it's cooling right and so as we go back down this is through the Holocene we're going through here and if you look there's some interesting stuff going on right here at about eight thousand two hundred years ago there's a really there's a spike of cooling right there and that was very very significant cooling I mean that was probably
caused the glaciers worldwide to start growing again for short for a couple of centuries after they had basically disappeared at the end of the ice age. So this was a very significant event right here. And then as we get down right here at 10,000 you see it starts deviating to the left, it starts deviating to the cooler. I'm going to go to the next slide where we take this graph and we turn it on its side.
And what I've done here is, you see, this is the present right here. And this is basically 10,000 years ago over here on the right side. And I've drawn a level, there's a level green line in here to kind of give you a comparison. And you'll notice something. Here's this 8,200 year ago cold spike.
Right? And then as we're going along here, you'll notice something that the general amplitude of these oscillations starts increasing as we get closer to the present. Can you see that? Yeah. It gets bigger. And you'll also notice that it's dropping. It's dropping below that green line. And that means it's cooling. So in the last 10,000 years, we went from a period of considerable warmth in the immediate post-glacial era.
And then it began to cool off around 6,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago. And as it began to cool off, the temperature oscillations began to increase in magnitude, which actually contradicts the computer models that are saying the amplitude of the oscillations is going to increase as the climate gets warmer. What we actually see from the Greenland ice cores is the opposite of that. And it's right here in this graph. But what's really significant about this is when we go
back beyond 10,000 years ago. Whoa. And we see this. Jesus Christ. Yeah. For folks who are listening, there's a giant change. I mean, we're looking at little tiny, you know, maybe millimeter left, right, left, right, left, right up until this point. Now we're looking at huge changes. Huge changes.
catastrophic changes of temperature. Yeah. And here we're going back. This is, notice this is between 11 right here, roughly 11,600 years ago and about 14,000 years ago. Look at what happened right here. You can see right around 15,000 years ago, the climate is actually, if we took this thing out of here, you can see there's almost a
trend upwards that gets interrupted right here. Boom, instantly. Boom. Overnight jump. Overnight. Overnight. Yeah. And in fact, what has happened is if you go back through the literature of climate change and you read the estimates of how long it took for the planet to shift modes from full glacial to the interglacial, like we're in now,
50, 75 years ago, it was 1,000 or more years, thousands of years. When radiocarbon dating came along in the 50s, it began to compress. And what happened is that if you look in the 80s, they're talking about perhaps a century, several centuries. Now comes the Greenland ice cores and other ice cores and other proxies, deep sea cores and so forth, and the correlation of all of this evidence. And it goes from centuries to decades.
Well, as the ability to perceive these changes with ever greater precision and ever greater resolution has evolved, it's gotten to now where the change, the climate change that took us from glacial to interglacial happened in less than five years. And that's what we're seeing right here in this graph.
What? That's what we're seeing. So 2010, Glacier, 2015, done. Ice Age over. Glacier, yeah. Bear in mind now that there was a considerable lag between
the actual, the manifestation of the glaciers, because the glaciers didn't melt that quick, because they're so huge, the temperature that started. Imagine that we had a big chunk of ice, we had an ice sculpture here, right? And if the temperature is, you know, 31 degrees, it's not going to melt.
If you turn the temperature up to 70 degrees, right, we could turn the temperature up in a matter and it could warm up the room in a matter of hours or minutes. But it's going to take a while for that ice sculpture to melt. There's going to be a lag. Right. Although the change that led to that meltdown was virtually instantaneous, you see. Right. So, but in that period, in this interim, what we're seeing right here,
There was an extraordinary right here. I think if I go to the next slide, I think, let's go to the next one. Yeah, I'm going to zoom in here so you can see this. There were two massive warming spikes. One right here, you can see that we're down here in full glacial mode right there. And then boom, right there, this huge spike of warming. Now, what does that represent when it comes to like temperatures?
That could be on the order of, well, that would be about 10 to 12 degrees centigrade, which would be about 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Average temperature. Which is a crazy change. Crazy change, because we're scared of two degrees, right? We're scared of two degrees. And here we're looking, we're scared to two degrees centigrade. Here we're looking at five, six times that much in a matter of a couple of years. You see? Wow. At this point,
We don't really have an explanation for this. That's why I get really frustrated when somebody says to me, oh, the debate on climate change is over.
No, no, no. We're in the infancy of understanding the climate of this planet. And when we look at stuff like this, you see, it really drives home that point. And you can see here, right? I think what people are saying when they're saying that the debate on climate change is over, though, is whether or not human beings have had an impact on it in current times. No question. We have had an impact. Right. No, no question. Kind of what the debate is, right?
Well, if you say that the debate is about have humans had an impact or not, I think that there's no debate. Humans have had an impact. What they're looking at, though, in your mind is one aspect of a very multidimensional issue. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
And my concern is that we're going to get so focused on carbon change and carbon change that we're not looking at any of these other factors. Isn't that what people do though? We concentrate on one aspect of things and it becomes like almost like a cultural meme and that it spreads and this is all people talk about.
And so many people I guarantee you that we're upset at what you said have not researched climate change at all. They just have parroted the words of people that they've heard on television that are experts. Well, you got this. Well, 97% agree. Well, if you look into the origin of that, it's pretty contrived. It really is. I mean, how you come up with that. And we could do an hour-long discussion on that. I don't really think we want to get into that today.
but I really feel like I should write an analysis of the source of that 97% so-called consensus so that people can really see where it came from. In a nutshell, basically, it goes to three or four pieces of research, some surveys that went out that were slanted right from the beginning, such as, do you feel that humans have had an impact on climate?
Yes, nobody disagrees with that. See, you can go through all the whoever these so-called deniers are. I have looked and looked. Who's denying? Is there any climate scientists on any anywhere on the spectrum that denies that the climate changes or that denies that humans have had an influence on the climate? And I haven't found a single one.
So in other words, these deniers that you hear about, you know, the climate change deniers, they don't really exist. There are those who criticize the consensus view, right, that the dominant mode of climate change is being induced by humans.
And they are being shoved into this camp of climate change deniers, but they're not. They're absolutely not climate change deniers. And when you look at stuff like this, a lot of these guys who had questioned the so-called anthropogenic climate change consensus are guys who've done this work. Now, this work is how old? Well, this goes back to this work that I'm showing you here was published in 93.
the Greenland ice sheet project in the Greenland ice sheet project in the Greenland. Oh, I forget, it was grip and jisp. The two, it was a European and an American team, they spent five years drilling. So these are the most accurate proxies we have in hand. And they're pulling tubes of ice? Yeah, like cylinders, picture, maybe six inches in diameter.
So they have like a circular cutting thing. They have a circular cutting drill that extracts these ice cores. And for the last 20 years, they've been analyzing the ice core. You know, it took five years to get them out. And it's been, you know, 20 years now of analyzing what they're telling us. So before they had all these ice cores, when they were saying that this climate change took thousands of years, was that just guessing? Pretty much. That was based upon
actual empirical observations of ice glaciers receding as a result of the modern warming because you have to understand.
Up until about the middle of the 19th century, we were in the middle of what has commonly been referred to as the Little Ice Age. And this is another thing that's important to put into context. The Little Ice Age was in two phases. The earliest phase came on in about the mid-1300s. Then it warmed for about a century in the 151600s, and then the second phase came on.
During that time, the glaciers worldwide began to grow. And most of the evidence today suggests that during the Little Ice Age, glaciers were bigger than they had been in 10,000 years. So around the middle of the 19th century, around 1850, give or take a decade or two.
The climate began to warm out of the little ice age, and glaciers began to recede. Now, if we look at glacier recession that's going on right now, and it's been going on for the last 10 or 20 years, what we see is it's basically a continuation of the recession that's been going on for 160 or 170 years.
So, it's important to establish what's our baseline. When we're comparing modern recession of glaciers, bear in mind that our baseline is we're starting from the glaciers being bigger than they had been in 10,000 years.
I think then we have to understand that that little ice agent, in fact, had some pretty serious consequences for civilization. We can see that there were two periods, in the last 2000 years, there were two periods of global cooling. One of them occurred in the sixth century. It actually now can be accurately dated to occurring between 536 and 544 AD.
which is a very interesting time. This was basically the time the historians have for decades said this was the onset of the Dark Ages. It's also the time during which all of the Arthurian myths and the Grail quest stories are placed.
Arthur's death is traditionally placed at the Battle of Camlawn, which is usually dated at about 540 AD, which basically culminated this quest for the Grail. Now, the Grail stories themselves were set down in writing between about 1180 and 1230 AD.
in this really interesting time during the Middle Ages, at the same time that the great cathedrals were being built. When the Cathar movement was at its strongest, when the Knights of the Temple were at their strongest, when Cobblism schools were flourishing in Spain, when the troubadours were making their circuits around Europe, you know, spreading news and entertainment, but really probably carrying
esoteric information to the initiates that had the key to the secret language that they used. It was very interesting time, but it was in that 1180 to 1230 that the grail stories were written down.
Now, the grail stories actually refer back to this period of the Arthurian days. And the quest for the grail, if you recall, was that the land had succumbed to blight. It had become a wasteland. England had become a wasteland. And the idea of the grail was the grail
not only restored the wasteland, it restored the king, because remember the king, whether it was King Arthur or Bron or on Fortas or the Fisher King, there were different names and different stories. It was the same deal. He was sick, he was in decline, he was wounded, the wound wouldn't heal, he was debilitated, and the only way to restore him was to bring the grail back
Allow him to drink from the grail, but the grail was also the means of restoring the wasteland to fertility and fecundity. Now, here's where it gets interesting is that the dendrochronologists who study tree rings have been looking at that period, exactly in that period that the tradition places the grail quest and have discovered that for about eight or 10 years forest growth in the northern hemisphere almost came to a screeching halt.
And this has now been well documented. Mike Bailey has done most of this work.
basically showing that there was a serious global cooling that took place during those years. And the historical record of that seems to confirm because there's multiple descriptions from Irish monks and so on describing how for weeks at a time the sun is not visible, that it's darkness has come over the land, that there were reports of these mysterious fogs, and then there are multiple collapses of agriculture.
Okay, so as a result of these multi-year collapses of agriculture because of the cold and the dark and the damp, people got malnourished and then you had famine. As a result of famine, people, their immune systems became weakened. And then in 542 AD, you had the onset of the Justinian plague, which wiped out maybe a third of the population of Europe. Whole villages disappeared as a consequence. Now these events,
pretty much followed in sequence. You see, the cold brought about the collapse of agriculture, the collapse of agriculture brought about famine, famine brought about weakness, and as a result, boom, you have plague.
Now, it took European civilization nearly three centuries to recover from that. Now, what brought about the recovery was the return of warmth to the world, what is called the medieval warm period. And this began really to occur in about 900 AD. The sea ice began to retract back well inside the Arctic Circle, which opened up the sea lanes between Northern Europe, Iceland, and Greenland.
And so was this period of time that the Vikings were able to sail to Iceland and then sail to Greenland and actually establish colonies on the west coast of Greenland and far more than now the ground is perennially frozen. Let me try that again, perennially frozen.
Right? So it was clearly a warm period. And what happened was, if you look back now at the studies from that medieval warm period, you see that agriculture rebounded. Some of the people had lots of food to eat. Actually, studies of skeletons show that the stature of humans during this period of time increased by four or five inches on average from what it had been during the dark ages.
And now Europe started becoming wealthy, because the basis of all wealth, basically, was agriculture, was food. Without that, you don't have anything else. Population began to expand enormously. You see other things going on. Lifespans increase, infant mortality decreases. All of this stuff has been well documented in a whole variety of studies.
Well, after about a century and a half of this warmth with the concomitant wealth that came along, European society was wealthy enough to undertake this extraordinary cathedral building phase, you see, where you had literally hundreds of thousands of highly trained, highly skilled craftspeople working on these things. You had, essentially, when you begin to look at the cathedral building phenomenon,
It required basically the mobilization of the whole of European society behind this enterprise because you had to quarry huge amounts of stone, you had to transport these stones, you had to carve the stones, you look at the statuary, the stained glass which is
exceptional in its refractive properties that really have still not been mimicked to this day, the way the stained glass was able to refract light so that it gives the appearance of not the light shining through the glass, but emanating from within the glass. And you could go on and on with this. The carpentry skill, the engineering skill, the astronomy that went into these structures, all of this combined basically shows up
basically an historical instant. And what's interesting is the scarcity of evidence showing
What preceded this? Who organized this? Who raised the money? Who trained the craftsmen? There are references to this in history, but really, there's no explicit detailed discussion where we can go and trace and say, OK, this is how it happened.
It's important to realize that this was a consequence of the expansion of wealth in European society that was able to allow this to happen. And that's a consequence of the warmth, the warmth of the earth.
And what we see is that the cathedral building era comes to a sudden termination in the early 1300s. And if you go and you travel around the cathedrals, you'll find that there's in many cases, you know, the record suggests that it's almost as if in the middle of their work that workmen laid down their tools and left in some cases. This is why there were so many cathedrals of the great ones that weren't finished, okay? But what you see
is that exactly concurring with the cessation of cathedral building within a few decades anyway was the onset of the Little Ice Age, and the return of the cold. In his first phase of the Little Ice Age, again, brought about agricultural collapses, it brought about famine, and then you had the black plague that showed up, I think, around what was it, 1330, 1340, right in there. Again, decimated the civilization of Europe.
So you can see, I mean, if we look at the historical record, what we see is the times of global warming have actually been times of advancement in civilization. Now, of course, that would have its limit. I mean, we could get to, you know, at some point where we could get too warm. But so far, what we've seen, we're at this point well within the range of natural variability.
Why is this never brought up by anybody but you? I've never heard anybody else discuss this very controversial subject. It's controversial because everyone's so fixated on global warming being a bad thing. It's there. It's there for anybody who is willing to do their homework.
And if somebody goes on my website or whatever and says, what are your sources? I'm glad to provide multiple, multiple sources going back. I've been collecting this data for decades. And it's there. And I have to ask the same question. Why are we ignoring this evidence? Well, I think we're ignoring it because climate change has become a political agenda rather than a scientific question.
And so because there are political factions that are lined up behind it, the intergovernmental panel on climate change is now looked at as being the ultimate source for data on the climate.
And bear in mind, they were created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and given the mandate of go out there and demonstrate that humans are causing climate change. So right from the very start, that was their mission. And they were not told, go and look for natural causes of natural climate variability, study the human. And it's important. I mean, I'm not at all saying it's not important for us to study our own effects on climate.
But it's going to be dangerous, I think, if we neglect what we're seeing right here on this graph that I'm showing you, because that's clearly not carbon dioxide. See, if we're told, and we have been repeatedly told, that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere held relatively steady at about 280 parts per million.
right, prior to the Industrial Revolution, and only subsequent to the Industrial Revolution, did carbon dioxide start going up? Well, if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that that's correct. Well, look at this graph. What we're saying is that if carbon dioxide held steady at 280 parts per million, going back hundreds of thousands of years, as Al Gore has actually stated, and as many others have stated,
It's not carbon dioxide driving those climate changes, is it? Well, it can't be that. It can't be. No. If that's the case, and that's hard science. This is hard science. Here it is. Right here. It's hard science as well. You're looking at something really crazy, some event. Yeah.
Yeah, that's my point. Now, the alternative is okay, are we saying if carbon dioxide is the dominant driver of climate change, and that's what we're seeing here, then what that basically says is that there's some gigantic unknown reservoirs of CO2
that have outgassed into the atmosphere, which again undermines the so-called consensus view, because so far the consensus view states that CO2 has only increased because of burning fossil fuel. So this graph is the real and convenient truth. This graph
That's well put, yes. This graph is the real inconvenient truth. And when we look at some of this, I mean, right there, that is a major global warming right there, because this dashed line represents the modern temperature. Like the 20th century average is this dashed line. That dashed line, what year are we looking at right there? Right here, this is between 100 and 150,000 years ago. And that's a giant jump. That's a giant jump.
So what does that represent as far as degrees temperature? Oh, well, let's see. That's probably going to be, you know, 15 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Whoa. Yeah, right there. So that's, you know, again, 15 to 18 times greater than the presumed temperature increase of the last century. Is there any mainstream, I shouldn't say mainstream, scientific explanation for what that is?
No, well, it's called the emian. It's called the emian period. It's an interglacial period. But even within the interglacial period, you see that there are these massive oscillations. Massive cooling. Cooling and warming again. And so there's a variability. If you're saying the warming is between 18 degrees, that what you said. Up to that. So the cooling, you're talking about almost that much in the other direction. In the other direction. Yeah, and you're talking about this over a period of just a few decades.
Well, as we get back this far, we don't have the same degree of precision as we do when we're here. Perhaps, yes, but we were not sure, but we do know that these changes that we're looking at here that terminated the last ice age were just in a matter of a few years. Yeah, for sure. And the instantaneous nature of those is what you focus on when you start talking about astroidal impacts and things along those lines of that is something
that we can explain. That's something you can point to. By default, there doesn't seem to be a lot of other things that we can invoke to explain what we're seeing right here. And there's absolute evidence that we have been hit multiple times. We're going to get into that. Yes. Yes.
And that's a big part of what Graham's book is gonna do. This is amazing when you look at the ancient history. I mean, it's not even ancient as far as, I mean, they were human beings living, sort of like us. Oh yeah. But how much different the climate was, like it was so fucked up.
Well, I'm not sure about the west coast, but I know on the east coast, there were swarms of icebergs stranding like off the coast of South Carolina, for example. There was no Great Lakes because the Great Lakes were under thousands of feet of ice. New York, Boston, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, or not some of Portland, but Seattle, Twin Cities, Chicago, all of these areas were under thousands of feet of ice.
thousands of feet. And we're not talking millions of years ago. We're talking 12, 13,000 to 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. That's incredible. It is. And sea levels were basically in round numbers 400 feet lower than now, which essentially exposes the entire most of the continental shelves. And I've got some interesting graphics here to show you.
what continental coastlines would have looked like. There was an article that I was reading recently about aborigines and aboriginal tales of the lowered sea levels. They're starting to correspond now with actual climate data and understanding of what the sea levels actually were at that time. These are stories that are supposedly 10,000 years old, passed through orange traditions. These traditions, to me, are just beyond valuable.
Up until very recently, they have been considered basically just, you know, interesting in the anthropological or psychological sense, but had no real hard scientific credibility to them. Now, I think we're beginning to reevaluate them. There's an archaeologist by the name of Bruce Massey, who's been doing some very interesting work for the last 20 years analyzing
many of these ancient myths and realizing and putting out there the argument that these myths and these legends and these epic tales encode really hard scientific information that we can extract from them and talking about global changes and astronomical events and so forth and
So, and I've been a believer in that for a long time, you know, and this is, you know, one of the premises of Graham's work is that the myths and the legends actually have a great deal to teach us beyond just the psychological orientation of our ignorant, prescientific ancestors, you know. But yeah, you're a good point you make there.
When we look at this graph, basically what we're seeing here is the coming out of the ice age. You can kind of see that we're coming up here. And then we have this first massive spike of warming. And then a seesaw is backed down into this full glacial cold. This is called this period between these two green arrows. It's called the Younger Dryas.
which is named after a polar wildflower that had disappeared in northern Europe and then suddenly came back again. It only grows in polar environments, dry as octopetala. So the younger driest, compared because there was an older driest too, but it lasted. Now the dates are placing it from roughly 12,900 years ago. Give or take a few decades to 11,600 years ago.
This spike of warming right here is 11,600 years. Now, if we look at the next one here, this graph basically goes to a different realm of evidence. And what this shows is the average, the rate of sea level rise. You see?
Now, oceanographers and marine geologists have been studying. There's a number of different ways they can correlate this information. They can look at actual evidence of submerged shorelines, right? They can look at changes in the flora and the fauna that have lived in the oceans. They can look at coral reefs. There's a lot of different things that they can pull together.
to see how rapidly sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age. And again, a generation or two ago, the assumption was that there was a smooth continuum of rise that took tens of thousands of years, right, to get us from minus 400 feet up to what we are now at the present level. What this graph shows is that there were two massive spikes of meltwater introduced into the oceans, into the global oceans at the end of the last ice age.
And you can see the first spike called meltwater pulse 1A is the biggest, followed by another one, meltwater pulse 1B. If we go back to this graph right here, those two spikes of glacial meltwater and sea level rise coincide with this warming spike and that warming spike. And you can see how this warming spike seems to be the most intense.
followed by this one, and we see that meltwater pulse 1A is the biggest. So what this is showing is that the rise in sea level was not a smooth. It was like, whoop, and then whoop again. So there was something that caused all those glaciers to melt within just a very short amount of time, relatively speaking. Yes, a geological instant, exactly.
What's further interesting is when we look at this graph, this is the late Pleistocene mortality graph and each square represents a fossil specimen of an extinct mammal. You know, could be a woolly mammoth, could be a giant ground sloth, could be a saber tooth cat, could be the giant cave bear,
roughly 120 species of mega mammals that lived during the ice age when extinct, right, at the end of the ice age. And basically, what this graph is showing us here is that you probably can't read this here, so I'll interpret it for you. If you go back to here, the left side represents 50,000 years ago.
And here where the cursor is, that's 40,000 years, 30,000, 20,000. And you see that as we're going along here, each one of these squares represents the finding of a fossil of an extinct mammal in the fossil record. What we see from this graph is that when we get to between 11 and 13,000 years ago, there's a massive spike of shoots through the roof.
This demise of these animals directly coincides with this right here, directly.
Now, what we're dealing with is that for 50 years, the dominant theory has been what is called overkill or blitzkrieg. And this theory basically states that bands of paleo-Indian hunters came across the Bering land bridge, slaughtering every animal that they encountered along the way. And somehow within less than a thousand years swept from Siberia down to Tierra del Fuego and killed off every woolly, every mammoth in the world,
and presumably every other of the extinct mammals. And that has been the dominant theory that humans caused this mass extinction. And personally, I think that's just absurd. Because for one thing, based upon anthropological studies, there were possibly more woolly mammoths in the world and there were people for a while. You have to assume that the blitzkrieg was so instantaneous and so all encompassing.
that there was no time even for the mammoths to reproduce. Of course, the overkill hypothesis basically addresses itself only to woolly mammoths. Woolly mammoths were one species of four different species of mammoths. But what about the other roughly 120 species? What about the giant armadillos and the giant beavers in the American place to see lions? It was as big as a horse.
You know, the list goes on and on and on and on. And these animals all basically disappeared during this spike that you see right here. And that spike falls exactly between these two warming spikes and between the two sea level rises. So all the data all points at the same time period. Yes. Wow. And so what I'm saying, and this is
This is basically consistent with what Graham's saying in his book, is that this episode basically represents a curtain that has come down and obscured 150,000 or more years of deep human history, and basically has lost that history to modern perception.
But now, once we understand that, yeah, you know what, the uniformitarians were wrong to reject all ideas of catastrophism. Because in the early days of geology, the founding fathers of geology were catastrophists.
They went out in the field, unencumbered, unencumbered, unencumbered by dogmas and doctrines and so forth. They looked at the evidence in the field and concluded that there had been catastrophic episodes. And this is, you know, Baron Von Cuvier, Sedgwick, Murchison, if you'd go back and do all of these guys who basically are considered the godfathers of modern geology, they were to a man, catastrophists.
James Hutton, Lyle and Playfair came along and basically proposed the idea of uniformitarianism. The present is the key to the past. Very powerful working idea is that we can look at stuff that's going on today, extrapolate backwards and try to figure out things that happened in the past when we don't have an eyewitness account, right?
Very powerful. But what happened was it became so entrenched as dogma that anybody who invoked catastrophes was considered basically fringe. Because in the early days, some of these guys, like Sedgwick, for example, he was a theologian. He was a traveling minister who went around and in his travels to convert the people to Christianity, he would see the stuff.
place it within the context, perhaps of being Noah's flood, right? And they would place it in some of, not all of them, some of them would place it in a biblical context, right? So when they were attacked, basically the substance of the attack was, well, you guys are trying to bring us back to the days of biblical literalism and sciences move beyond that.
We're not here. We don't want to talk about catastrophes or great floods, deluges. We're through talking about all of that. That's all been discredited. And what you see is between the early 1800s, with the beginning of geology, earth science, to about the 19th century, what you see is a steady decline.
You know, some of the older guys die off. They're replaced by the new guys who have now basically taken control of the university curriculums, and they've been indoctrinated into this idea of a strict gradualism. And that any deviation from that strict gradualism is heresy, basically.
So by the time we get to the 20th century, you had this reigning uniformity, reigning gradualist dogma that had been imposed upon all Earth science. And anybody who deviated from that was immediately kicked out of the club. And this is why when J. Harlan Brettz came along in the 1920s and proposed that there had been these gigantic floods in the Pacific Northwest,
You know, the geological community basically said, ah, get out of here. We don't want to hear about it. We know that that couldn't have been just because we know. J. Harlan Brett's continued to document, exhaustively document from the field that these floods were very real.
his critics said well you don't you can't provide a source for these floods therefore they didn't happen now bear in mind that all of his critics is his most vocal critics had never even gone out to actually look and uh... graham is going to have he has got a great section in his new upcoming book describing that the ordeal that brats was put through but he finally prevailed of ultimately
Most of his critics died off. He lived to be, I think, 98. So I think when he was 96, he was given the Penrose Medal, which is the highest honor of geology. And he said he was very grateful, but the only thing he was unhappy about was the fact that all of his critics had died off, so he didn't get to glowed over him.
But so what happened was you had the younger geologists come in who are more open to that. And what you see is between the 1950s and 1960s, you have a transition going on where they're beginning to accept that these great floods had happened. But what they did was they took a modern example, which is glacial outburst floods, which
We've witnessed dozens and dozens, probably hundreds of such cases in Iceland, particularly Alaska, British Columbia, the Himalayas, where you have, particularly going back to the Little Ice Age, when the glaciers began to recede in the mid-19th century, you had a lot of what are called proglacial lakes formed, or lakes, bodies of water held in by the melting ice.
and then eventually the ice gave way and the water rushed out in the form of a flood. The ice landers called it a yolkalops. Okay, so we have a modern example. So what they did was in the 60s and 70s was they said, okay, guess what? We've got now evidence that there was a huge body of water, a huge lake in western Montana.
It was held in by an ice dam. That ice dam gave way. All of this water gushed out over Idaho and in southeastern Washington down the Columbia Gorge to the Pacific Ocean and caused all of these amazing erosion and sedimentation that Harlan Bretz was documenting.
Never mind that we have to extrapolate up three orders of magnitude from modern examples. Never mind that the modern examples are utterly minuscule compared to what Brett was looking at. That has become the dogma to explain these floods. And it's still the entrenched dogma as we speak now.
I am trying to demolish that dogma. I want to show that these floods were something much grander than they have even imagined, and that the source of them was not actually a big glacial lake, but was what Brett's originally, originally theorized, was that there was something that caused a rapid melting of the ice.
But then his critics said, well, there's nothing that could melt the ice as fast as you're requiring for your floods. So again, your floods didn't happen. But his floods did happen. And they were on an enormous, inconceivably vast scale. And this is what I was taking Graham out to see firsthand. Because I felt like for him to really have a handle on this
this information and this insight into the catastrophes that basically would have terminated his mother civilization, as he called it, that he should see this stuff in the field for himself. Because, you know, as they say, a picture's worth a thousand words. Well, going out in the field and experiencing this directly is worth a thousand pictures.
And so he's going to incorporate that into his book. And I would like to say about that book that based upon what I know and what he's shown me a bit of what's going into the book, I'll proclaim without any equivocation that I think is probably going to be the most important book that's come out in the 21st century. Because it's opening a window onto this story like no other
Single source of information, credible information. Wow, that's a big statement. This whole thing is so mind-blowing and as mind-blowing is your first appearance, this chart especially is really freaking me out. Like looking at the mortality, all the animals, the mass extinction event that must have taken place.
One of the things that always bothered me about that idea that human beings killed off the woolly mammoths is that they found these vast fields of uneaten mammoths where there was thousands of them that had died almost instantaneously. Yeah. Which is just that doesn't make any sense. Like what do they do? They went on a mass killing orgy of slaughter and then just decided not to eat any of them.
Well, you know, the field evidence itself is inconsistent with that idea right here. This is an example. This is one of the many mammoth cemeteries. And what happens is that you can see here that you can see from the shoreline, see that there was a flood. The river rose up to this level. And then when it rose down, it left this in its wake. And what you see here, like this is bone counting at the Baralak Mammoth Cemetery in northern Yakuza, Siberia.
identical deposits are found throughout the tamer peninsula. And what we see here is these massive bone deposits that have been showing up for the last couple of hundred years. Every time that there's, you know, a thawing or a flood, or these things are washed up on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, you know, what we see is that there were huge, huge herds of woolly mammoths. Grazing were now
the plant material is only two inches high. So clearly, it was a completely different climate there. What's interesting is that you had in Siberia able to support herds of woolly mammoths at the same time that half of North America is buried under two miles or more of ice. How is that possible? Just a totally different atmosphere. I'm still puzzling over that. I have some ideas, but until I can test these ideas a little further,
So without ice core samples, is it impossible to figure out what the temperature was in Siberia at that time? No, no, they can figure out basically based upon fossil plant remains. And you can see that in some cases, the tree line was hundreds of miles further north than it is now. And that's clearly, if you've got trees, forests growing now, where, you know, 13 or 14 or 15,000 years ago, it was permafrost, you know it was warmer, clearly.
So there's still, whoa, what is that? 19th century scenes showing ivory floor of the London docks covered by thousands of mammoth tusks from Siberia. This is a drawing, obviously. Yeah, yeah. This is predates photographs. Yeah. For hundreds of years, thousands of mammoths, entombed mammoths, and mammoth tusks were being exhumed from the Siberian permafrost. Thousands and thousands and thousands of these.
And basically, to me, you look at this, this is just in your face evidence that this was not humans doing this.
You know, it was not humans that were slaughtering these mammoths and burying their remains. The instantaneous nature would almost be like people had figured out some new thing. Like they figured out some, like a doom gun. You know, they shot the whole, the doom gun. Well, look at the near extinction of American bice. What brought that about?
trains and high-powered rifles. It was a technological, major technological advancement that was able to bring about the near extermination of the American body. There's actually a guy that I'm going to bring on the podcast soon to discuss that. His name's Dan Flores who spent a big chunk of his intellectual career studying this. And what he believes is that the Bison had a massive population jump
that was directly correlating to smallpox epidemic, the Native American people. And that when the United States, when we look at the United States history, the big stacks of, excuse me, the big stacks of bison skulls we always look to, like that was a very unusual population of bison that existed because the Plains Indians had experienced this massive extinction event. And then when they had incorporated the horse,
like the horse and the apparently the american indians native americans rather were on their way to extripating the bison even before we came along but then they died off in this massive uh... uh... uh... death scenario with the smallpox and all the different diseases that the europeans have brought over here
And then the mammoth population, or excuse me, the bison population had grown almost unnaturally. It had been much larger than it had ever been in the past. And that's when the United States was established, and that's when all the Western European immigrants had come along and started killing off all these bisons. It's really a very interesting subject. It's an interesting idea. It's plausible.
I haven't looked into that. I assumed, and maybe, maybe wrongfully, but I had assumed that the bison population had been relatively stable. I am not convinced, though, that there was this massive die-off of the Native American population yet. I'm not convinced.
Well, because I haven't looked into it yet. But one of the things I have seen is that the assumption there is predicated upon that the Europeans arrived and brought the diseases that Native Americans had no defenses for. But the thing is, is that there's so much evidence now showing that there were lots of explorers and immigrants to the new world prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
you know, with the Chinese, the Phoenicians, and I'm not necessarily saying that's credible, none of it's been proven, but there's some interesting data out there that suggests, and there are a number of books written that, again, I haven't accessed it, so I'm not gonna say to pretend that I'm an authority on that because I'm not. But if some of that turns out to be credible, it would suggest that there was a lot more interaction between the Native American population and other groups around the world. Which, if true,
To me, kind of somewhat undermines this idea that they were completely susceptible to the introduction of these foreign diseases. But again, I've got an open mind. I'll wait and see. I'd like to see what he says. I'd like to hear his ideas. For anyone interested, and he has a paper in the Journal of American History, it's called Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy.
the southern plains from 1800 to 1850. I just looked for it online. There's a preview that's available, but to download the entire paper or book, I'm not sure which one it is, it's $19. What journal is it in? The Journal of American History.
from September of 91 and like I said he's working on a new book right now and I'm trying to get him to come in but it's just it's very difficult while he's in the middle of you said September of 1991 yeah yeah I can probably ask Dan Flores is his name and
Well, just the information that I got about it was pretty mind-blowing. Okay. Sounds interesting. I want to thank you for that joke. Yeah, please. Now, let's go back to that photo that you have on your desktop that you were going to explain to me, but we decided not to talk about it before the podcast because it's so incredible that you said this, all of this incredible change that we're looking at, the geological structure
All that took place within just a week. Let's go to this. I've got that. We'll come to that. This is a satellite photograph taken from about 500 miles up.
And what you see here, this is in southeastern Washington. And what you're looking at here is part of what's called the Columbia basalt plateau. This is part of the terrain that we crossed when I was with Graham. What you see here is that you have an area of, if you look here, you can see the, oh,
differentiate between the pixels and the actual squares. Like you see this red area down here is area that's actually being farmed. And this is an infrared photograph. And so what happens is that the areas that are being cultivated will show up warmer than the surrounding areas. This whole plateau is covered in this stuff called loss, L-O-E-S-S. And it's a type of very fertile soil.
that has a rather mysterious and controversial origin. We won't get into that right now. But in some places, this lust layer is hundreds of feet thick over a dark basalt bedrock. It is a result of these massive outflows of basaltic lava that came out that extruded between about 6 million and 16 million years ago.
The hot spot that was the ultimate origin of this basalt is now where Yellowstone is.
which so you can make that connection here, the Yellowstone Super Volcano. Super Volcano, yeah, yeah. But what you have here is that you have the lighter areas is where this lust topsoil still exists. And the darker areas is where the underlying dark basalt has been showing through because the lust was washed away. So what this is, is your typical, the geological term is a nastomosing. And basically that means a branching,
flow pattern of the water and you can see that very clearly here that the water came off of this river which is the Columbia River up here and flowed over the landscape and washed away the basalt and left these gigantic channels in its wake and there's more over here to the east there's more over here to the west
And if we look at actually this, let me go to a different program here. I think it'll actually have some that actually I think has the picture in it that you were seeing.
Now, what we're looking at here is what's been called the Missoula Flood, named after the town of Missoula, Montana. Missoula is in a basin that was part of this hypothesized giant lake that presumably caused this flood. And again, there was an ice dam. There was this ice dam. The ice dam broke. And as soon as this thing comes up, I will be able to show you some slide. Here we go. Let's see.
Here we go, it should be coming up right here. While that's coming up, we'll look at this slide right here because this will kind of give you a picture of the Earth as it was during the height of the Ice Age.
So, wow, that's pretty deep. The sheets of ice go pretty far down. That's amazing. Canada didn't exist. Canada didn't exist. Wow. Yeah, poor Canadians. Yeah. Well, yeah. And, you know, and, you know, the ice, part of it is, you know, a lot of it in the Midwest now, a lot, you know, the farming belt of America is basically, you know, growing out of the fur-cliled soil that the ice scraped off of Canada and dumped
you know, down in Minnesota and Iowa and Wisconsin and so on. So, you know, someday they may want that back. But we're not going to let them have it. It's fascinating when you look at that, that there was this big ice cap, but then the areas around it, no ice. And why was that?
Well, that's one of the mysteries. Again, like over here in Siberia, you can see over here, this is where all the woolly mammoths were, giant herds of woolly mammoths, and it appears like it may have been warmer than now during the Ice Age, which is very odd. There's some ice up there? Is that what we're seeing? Yeah, there's some ice up there.
sporadic glaciers but nothing like what we see in northwestern europe over here this was called the fenno scandian ice sheet and the ice sheet over north america actually consisted of two ice sheets the laurin tied which was centered over hudson bay and accordier in which was centered over the canadian rockies and in this particular slide you can see uh...
You can see here, this was the Cordilleran over here, over the Canadian Rockies, and this was the Laurentide was much bigger, see? And then there was an area between the two, right here.
which has been theorized at one point having been a corridor called the ice-free corridor and migrants from paleo-Indian migrants from Siberia would have come across Alaska and down through this corridor here to the lower United States and ultimately down here to South America.
And it was that group, these groups of bands of paleo-Indian hunters that, according to the overkill or blitzkrieg hypothesis, wiped out the mega mammals as they passed by.
see okay there we go okay so here this kind of will show the coastlines of the of the world during the ice age and let me just escape out of this so that we can zoom in a little bit and look at it closer okay so here would be
as we see now. And this is modern coastline. This is modern coastlines. And now I'm going to jump to this is actually only 300 feet lower than now. And quite a bit different.
Let's just look at the United States, North America. That's amazing. There's a lot more United States. Yeah, now check this out. Okay. Now here, here's North America's it is now, and you see up here, this is what's called, this is the bearing straight right here between Alaska and Siberia, right?
During the ice age, this whole area was exposed because of the lowered sea level. And we'll go one slide further, and you will see, take a look. Now watch what happens up there in Beringia.
Boom. Wow. So it's all land. It's all land and it's connecting North America to Siberia. And that's all drowned. Wow. I didn't understand that. See, I always thought that the Bering Strait was an ice mass. I thought it was during the ice age that there was some sort of ice that it was ice, but it's not. It's land. It's land. Wow. And it's not glaciated. And it was home to these extraordinary herds of mega mammals.
that ranged over these thousands and thousands of square miles. I mean, the drowned area is bigger than modern Alaska. So how long goes this? Well, this is, you know, right at the end, up till the end of the ice age. You know, between like 14, 15,000 years ago. So 14, 15,000 years ago, no glaciers in this area. This is all just land and there's animals living in it and people are walking back and forth. I mean, essentially, it was a continent. I mean, it was connected. It was all one continent. It was all one continent. Wow, that's amazing.
And the coastlines of the world look at Florida out here. Wow. See, it's double the width of the modern peninsula. Yeah, it's enormous.
And it's so close to Mexico, too. It's almost like a little boat ride. Now, here is Indonesia, and where stories, which I don't know how credible they are, but there are stories like La Maria and the Pacific and all of them. Again, I don't know how credible those are. I think the Atlantis story actually has a little more credibility. We talked about that last time somewhat, but here's the modern. And you can see the light blue is the coastal shelf area.
Right? Now, let's go back. We're going to drop sea level 300 feet. And then you'll see here the enormous change. So again, enormous areas of land were drowned by the rising sea levels.
Remember this. Now, when we look at the rise of modern cities and modern civilizations, where did they first show up? On the coasts? On the coasts, right. At the mouths of rivers, on the coastlines. And during the Ice Age, where would have been the most obvious prime habitable real estate? You know, down close to sea level, right? So if there were cities built, you know, if they were thriving communities during the Ice Age, they're now 400 feet under the walls.
It's so amazing that all of these stories of the floods, the epic of Gilgamesh, Noah's Ark, that all of these stories seem to really correlate with all this data. I mean, they all seem to coincide. That's exactly the point. It's so weird.
I get, you know, most people would think about the story of Noah Zarg, oh, it's just some crazy old horseshit. But it's most likely, they're basing it on something that happened very rapidly in their area.
Yeah. Now, of course, we're most familiar with the story of Noah's Ark, you know, because of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But there are hundreds, literally hundreds of stories from all over the world that parallel the story of Noah, the Caleon, Zissathris, Utnapishtim, Manu. The list goes on and on of these culture heroes that somehow had foreknowledge of this impending disaster and were able to take steps to
preserve themselves, their family, some diverse cross-section of species. And they all have this similarity. They all parallel. Now, my way of looking at it is this, okay, we now know from the hard geological record that massive floods have taken place on the surface of the earth, massive floods, right, beyond anything that we have even imagined, right, up until a decade or a few decades ago.
They're real. On the other hand, we have stories and myths and legends. Repeatedly, it's probably the most ubiquitous of all the stories that we've inherited from the past is the story of this gigantic world destroying flood that occurred. Now, on one hand, we have the hard geological record which shows there were giant floods. Then we have these epic tales and myths from all over the world about giant floods.
Do we now dismiss those floods, those stories out of hand and say, oh, that's just superstitious, pre-literate, pseudo-scientific nonsense? I think we'd be making a big mistake to do that.
If we accept that those flood stories, and maybe they have been altered through the time and through the telling, represent something real, what about the other elements of the story? The fact that in so many cases, there was somebody that had four knowledge.
Do we dismiss that out of hand as well? Or where does that come from? That there was one group of people, small group of people, that saw this thing coming and prepared for it, and others who basically paid no attention. Maybe they were just preppers. Maybe there's the preppers of 10,000 years ago. The preppers of 10,000 years ago. And I think that explains it right there. One last slide quick here. Here's Europe and look at the British Isles.
Right, now we'll drop sea level. Look. Nobody's eyes. That's incredible. See, that's what I was saying earlier when we started talking. I mean, the world of 15,000 years ago was so dramatically different than our modern world that, you know, it's almost difficult to conceive until you start looking at things like this. And this is all during the ice age. Yes.
And so the melting of the glaciers just changed everything. And this is while human beings were absolutely alive. Absolutely. Absolutely. No question. Human beings were alive. Yes. Okay.
So, we'll start looking at some of these pictures here. This is from Western Montana, you know, it says in Genesis 719. The waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth and all the high hills were covered. I want you to take a look as you can see many mountains in Western United States if you know what you're looking at that have this on them.
You know what those are? Those horizontal lines? They look like where the shore is. They're shorelines. Exactly, they're shorelines. That's absolutely what they are? That's absolutely what they are. They're shorelines. Reaching right up to the very tops of the hills, you see. And basically what you had was you had this enormous gush of water filling these mountain valleys almost to the mountain peaks and then draining away. And as it drained away, it left the succession of shorelines etched into the hillside. Wow.
And all along the pathway of the floods, we're gonna see stuff like this. This, right, this was our first stop with Graham. This is La Torrell Falls. This is that basalt I was talking about. Look at this stuff. There's layers of this basalt. Well, that's, you guys underneath it? I don't think in this period, I think I took this picture about 10 years ago, but yeah, I have pictures of me and Graham under there. Well, you're so tiny. That's so crazy. It's so big.
Right. Now, here's what you've got a picture, Joe. Picture you've got this nice, gentle valley with a nice river, very pastoral scene, you know, trees and stuff, probably, you know, mammoths and herds of these animals grazing along the side of this peaceful river with gentle valley slopes. Here comes this massive flood, and we're talking about perhaps a flood wave 800 to 1,000 feet high.
coming through, as it comes through, it's ripping up everything in its path. And what it does is it now changes the profile of this valley from this gentle profile to downcutting 800, 1,000, 1,200 feet or more into the bedrock, right? So now prior to the passage of this giant flood, you had streams and nice little rivers flowing into the main river, which in this case was the Columbia.
what happens is after the passage of this flood wave, it sheared off the sides of the channel. So now, rather than a gentle slope, you've got shear cliffs four, five, 600 feet high, these pre-flood streams and rivers come up and they're now waterfalls. And that's what we're looking at right here in this picture, if that makes sense to you. And you notice how you've got this undercutting here.
That undercutting only occurs when you have enormous, intense turbulence in the water doing this. You see, the water doing this will undercut. See, this modern waterfall here had nothing to do with the creation of this cliff. This cliff
was cut again probably in a matter of days to weeks by the passage of these giant floods. And there's dozens of these waterfalls that are left. And these are called hanging valleys. They can be produced by glaciers, but they can also be produced by enormous, intense flood waves.
This is your typical, not typical, this is called, this is a bar, a gravel bar, but in this case it's a boulder bar. Now if you've ever done any walking along a river or a creek or along the beach and you've seen ripples in the sand and they're typically, you know, if you've got a water that's a foot or two feet deep, you don't have ripples that are maybe an inch or two high.
What we're looking at here is a flood bar that's three miles long. It's up to 250 feet above the modern river. And the ripples that you can see here are up to 50 feet in height and 350 feet in wavelength.
This was produced again by gigantic flood flows. And if we look right over here, that's a three story building you see right there for scale. Oh, wow. So this, this gives you an idea. It's, it's features like this that are just unequivocal in terms of realizing that this is, this is not pseudoscience. This really happened.
And there's this date back to a very specific time. Yes. To this 13,000 years. So it's everywhere. Everywhere. You're seeing this. You're seeing it geologically. You're seeing it in ice cores. You're seeing it in fossils. Yes. Yes. Wow. This is evidence of the big meltdown. Has anybody ever tried to debate you on this stuff?
I would certainly welcome debate. I don't claim to have the final final word on this, but you know, here's the thing. I've interacted with a lot of geologists that are studying this, professional geologists that are studying this. What I can tell you is that in most cases, the geologists that are studying this, it's basically something they're doing in their spare time.
Most of them are engaged either in the energy industry or working for government for other purposes. What you actually will see here though when you begin to look at the trend in the evidence is that I think that the geological community is moving much closer.
to a scenario like I'm describing. And right now, there's actually a controversy because, you know, some of the older guard is wanting to defend this idea of the yolkalops, this giant lake draining out. There are a group of Canadian geologists, though, who are challenging that under leadership of a man of who may now be retired, named John Shaw, who goes back to the 1980s and begin
a reinterpretation of a very ubiquitous glacial feature called drumlins. I can show you some pictures of them here after a bit. They're very interesting. They look like inverted bolt holes. They're always associated with the locations of the glaciers and the ice sheets.
So it was therefore assumed that they were somehow created by the glaciers themselves. But glaciers tend to grind things that they're moving over and level things off and scratch them and leave striations and all of this abrasion.
These drumlins are smooth, streamlined features. What Shaw first proposed back in the late 80s was that they had actually been produced by water, flowing massive amounts of water, flowing under the glaciers.
And there's a very similar. The critic said, well, where did this water come from? And he said, well, I don't know. It must have been an enormous subglacial lake, subglacial reservoirs. The critic said, well, there's no way that a reservoir as huge as your floods would require could have existed under the ice. Therefore, your subglacial floods didn't exist.
And that was, to me, the fatal weakness in his theory was to explain where the water came from. But I think now we can't explain where it came from. And you believe it's an asteroidal impact. Again, by default, we look at all the possible, the cross-section of possible explanations within the realm of nature. We can go through and we can eliminate this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and what we're left with is one.
that of itself would be fully capable of doing it. Fully capable and makes sense that it would happen instantaneously. That would make sense that it would happen instantaneously. Any other sort of thing that would... Yes. So, is there an impact crater that corresponds to this timeline? Well, that's what I'm working on. Trying to find it? Yeah, and I think I've got a pretty good idea, but it's going to take some field research and next summer I'm planning to do some more field research. Is there an idea where it hit?
Yeah, I have several ideas. You don't want to talk about it. You don't want to keep it mum. At this point. But when it's time to reveal it, okay, let's do it here. Oh, I'd love that. I would love that. Well, you've shown several impact craters. You showed a bunch last time you were here, the one in Australia that was, I believe you said 5,000 years ago.
Yeah. Yeah. And of course, everything. Hypothetically, it hasn't been proven yet because again, some of these more recent craters of the last 10,000 years, some of these that have been hypothesized are actually on the bottom of the ocean. The Birkeland crater that I think we talked about on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, it's under two miles of seawater. So until we can actually get back there and do more in-depth sampling and examination, it'll be impossible to prove it.
I think that the evidence is strongly supportive of that possibility that maybe 5,000 years ago there was a significant impact into the Indian Ocean that could have caused enormous tsunami waves. Now, I actually posted one of the somebody called into question some of the things I had said in the last interview about tsunamis.
and that the things I was saying weren't really tsunami. So I actually wrote an elaborate response to that which is posted on the sacred geometry website where I've gone into great detail showing that the evidence really in the end I think does support the idea that there had been enormous tsunamis, possibly hundreds of feet high, sweeping over the coastlines of the Indian Ocean probably around 5,000 years ago.
that could have been the origin of some of the flood myths. And your timeline where this mass extinction event occurred, where the massive warming occurred, all that also coincides with the discovery of this nuclear glass all over Asian Europe, which is somewhere in the, when they do the core samples of around the same area, right? Around 12,000 plus years ago? Yes. What we can see here,
We'll go through a second. This is some of the research. You can see this is very typical, the mysterious onset of the Younger Dryas. Now, this has been kind of the consensus view, is that, OK, we don't have an explanation. The Younger Dryas remembers that's that interval between those two spikes, right, where you had the warming, then the snapback to glacial cold, and then the warming again. So that interval in between is the Younger Dryas.
So here they're saying the mysterious onset of the hunger dries, the 1300 year long, the hunger dries cold, reversal, and you notice the dates, 12,900 to 11,600. That means calendar years before present. So what they've done is they've calibrated this from radiocarbon dating, which is not necessarily going to be the same as the actual calendar years. So those dates are very interesting.
11,600 years ago, you may recall from our last interview, is the date given by Plato for the subsidence of Atlantis. 11,000. I mean, he says that Atlantis subsided. Anybody can read this if they want to pick up Tameis and Cretius, the two dialogues that he describes Atlantis in. He gives that date, 9,000 years before this exile of Solon in Egypt, which took place in 600 BC, roughly.
So 600 B.C. in roughly is 2,600 years ago. Add that to the 9,000 years in the year 11,600. So now what has happened is 2,500 years ago, Plato gave a date, which would seem to suggest that something immense happened in the Atlantic Ocean, and you had an island complex that sank.
perhaps from rapid sea level rise. Now, 2,500 years later, here's modern science coming up with the exact date showing, hey, there was a massive meltwater pulse into the ocean at that date. Now, at this point, nobody within mainstream science is going, oh, well, see, he doesn't mention here. Oh, that's the date given by Plato. They don't say that, but it is the case. That's incredible.
Yeah, that's so amazing. Now Plato, he was told that, right? It was all through stories. Yeah, it was handed down, so long handed it down. Let's see if I can remember this, through Dropitis, Dropitis, to Critius the Elder, Critius the Elder, to Critius the Younger, then Critius the Younger, I guess the Socrates, actually at the forum where Plato would have heard it would have been the Socratic forum where it was told. So I think there was like three generations between so long and Plato.
the wise men of the time were the people that were in charge of disseminating knowledge back then. It was such a critical job. Critical job, yes. No internet, no books. And the whole thing was that the whole emphasis was on transmit, the oral transmission had to take place without, not one Iota of change. It had to be transmitted from mouth to ear
unbroken, without change, without alteration. Which has always been the issue with human beings, hence that telephone game. Yes. You know, you tell someone something and they tell you something. But if you start out, and you know, it's going to be the same with Native Americans. And the Native American storytellers have to go through a very long, arduous term of initiation to show that when they tell the story, it's going to be exactly like they heard it.
That's one of the basis of modern Freemasonry too. We need to get that with today's modern gossip. Yeah, they need to nail that. But let's just run through a quick succession here of some of the most recent research. Shock synthesized hexagonal diamonds in younger, driest boundary sediments. Oh, now these shock synthesized hexagonal diamonds only occur. There's no natural, no natural process that will produce them except for the intense heat and pressures of a cosmic impact.
Okay, and what year was this study? Oh, this has been very recent. This is probably within the last 10 years. Since 2007, this is probably around 2011.
There was something that was released very recently about micro diamonds and micro diamonds corresponding. Last summer. And that also was the same timeline. So it's just like the evidence keeps accumulating in this time period that something hit us. The micro diamonds, the nuclear glass, the spikes in warming that's observable on the ice cores. All correlates. That mass extinction events of all these animals. This is an event. This is an event.
why this is crazy that you're you're the guy talking about this event this is really nuts but not anything taking away from you but there's so few people beating this drum that did there's so much information we're talking about hard data or you've shown on the show three four different examples of hard data that points to this event
Well, see, here's the thing. Modern science does tend to get over-specialized. And so what happens is the guy looking at extinctions might not be looking at glacial melting. The guy who's looking at glacial melting isn't... The geologist is not looking at what's going on in the sky. They're not looking at
you know traditions from thousands of years ago saying what it does is because of the the power of this specialization and the specialization is extremely powerful but it's shortcoming is is that it's easy to miss the big picture what that does is opens the door for generalists guys who are just you know people who are just
I say, guys, men or women, anybody who's curious about this stuff to look into it and try to see the big picture. Why am I bringing this? Well, it's just because for 40 years, I've been obsessed with this stuff. And I read two or three scientific articles every single day and have done so for 40 years plus. So that adds up after a while. And I don't just read them. I study them. I take notes. Two or three every single day. So you figure, what is that? That's 1,000 a year.
You go back 40 years. That's means I probably read something in the order of 40,000 scientific articles from anthropology, geology. When I studied geology and astronomy in college. So, you know, I have some academic background in that, but, but, you know, basically what I have done is tried to piece together the big picture because early on I saw nobody's doing that. No, nobody's doing it really.
And some of the guys that are out there doing it are not doing it with academic rigor. You know, they're bringing in all kinds of weird stuff, which makes it easy for the critics to attack them and dismiss them as being a fringe science. They're throwing some woo into the mix. They're throwing some woo into the mix. Yeah. In fact, one of the rational wiki entry on me says something about Randall Carlson and his woo. And that's all it says.
You know, so I took that as sort of a compliment. Well, people love to be able to dismiss anything that's not mainstream, right? That's outside. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's this cult of authority. You know, that's why you hear somebody says, well, what does a real scientist say about this? What does a real scientist say about this flood? And am I, well, which real scientist, you know, Vic Baker, Richard Waite, you know, Roy Breckenridge, you know, I've read or talked to every, almost every scientist that's done work on the Missoula flood.
you know, so I know what they're saying and what they're thinking, you know, and what they've written. So, you know, when you say, well, what are the real scientists say? Well, okay, let's get a little more specific. Who are you talking about? Because there are different points of view. You know, are you talking about John Shaw's idea? Are you talking about, you know, Victor Baker's ideas or any of the others? Well, you know, and that's the thing. They say that because they don't really know. They've got this idea in their mind that there's this authority that's got it all explained
Which makes it easy right because if somebody's got it explained then we don't need to concern ourselves with it or think about it right right so What I say is okay? Forget about who says what let's just look at the facts Let the facts dictate to us what the meaning of all of this is You know and let's look at all points of view
Because that's what I try to do. I've got in my archives here, I've got not only the research that supports the idea of a cosmic impact back during the Younger Dryas, but the criticisms of it as well. And I go, okay, how can we explain those criticisms? And in the give and take of science, that's part of the process. That's how it evolves. Because somebody puts out a new idea,
you're supposed to attack it you know and then if it withstands the assault the onslaught that shows that it's a credible idea you know it's like a last man standing sort of thing and i think that the cosmic impact really is going to end up being the last man stand well it seems like there's so much evidence that you're you're you're bringing up that's so hard you know the this how do you say that word
Condrite. Condrite like mineral from black matte. I mean, all the various things, the micro diamonds, the nuclear glass, the mass extinction events, the evidence of the flooding, warming, the flooding, the sea level rise. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it.
And this is basically saying chondrite. Chondrites are a type of meteorite. So this is saying chondrite-like material. In other words, material that would have had its origin in space from the black mat. Now this black mat is really interesting. I'm going to show you a couple of slides of it because this black mat layer, it's black. The reason it's black is because it's so loaded with soot.
and what has set the result of fire, right? So let's go through here. Yeah, this discovery of a nano diamond rich layer in the Greenland ice sheet. So nobody had looked. But when these guys, Richard Firestone and James West and James Kennett, these other scientists that are working on this Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, said to their colleagues, check out the Younger Dryas boundary layer 12,900 years ago and see if there's anything that shows up there.
They did in what you suppose they found. Here it is right here, a nano diamond rich layer. So there it is showing up in the ice sheets. Here's new evidence from a black math site in the northern Andes supporting a cosmic impact 12,800 years ago.
very high temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic air burst impacts 12,900. So they're getting closer and closer to refining the date, but it's coming in 12,800 to 12,900 years ago.
Um, wildlife, wildfire and abrupt ecosystem disruption on California's Northern Channel Islands at the Alarod Younger Dryas Boundary at basically 12,900. 12.9 KA means 12,900 years ago. K, you know, is the universal means a thousand.
Great, it's all the same. Everything keeps coming back the same date. Yeah, nano diamond rich layer across three continents, consistent with major cosmic impact to 12,800 calendar years before present. Evidence from central Mexico supporting the under driest extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. Evidence from northwestern Venezuela and Andes for extraterrestrial impact, the black matte enigma.
evidence for deposition of 10 million tons of impact spirals across four continents, 12,800 years ago. See, it's coming in, man. It's coming in in abundance. And what's gratifying to me?
as I theorized this 25 years ago. Wow. And to see now the hard evidence coming in, supporting a scenario where I had pieced together from all of these different realms of knowledge is very gratifying to me. What was the seed in your mind that led you to be obsessed for a lack of a better word? Not only the lack of a better word, I think it's pretty accurate, right? With this subject.
Okay, I guess it's time to come clean. I was on mushrooms. I was on top of a mountain. Well, no, you're actually pretty close. Yeah. You are. Okay, 1969. Oh, that's a good year for mushrooms. Yeah. Well, it wasn't mushrooms, but it was something in their family. Okay. Okay.
I'm going to a rock concert, right? In the beautiful summer day, early summer, 12,000, 12,900 years ago. No. 1969, right? Okay. So it's on a field next to a little airport in just out southwest of many, the Twin Cities, Minnesota, which is near where I grew up. Okay. The Minnesota River flows through there, right? Minnesota River flows into the Mississippi.
I think I'll have some slides coming up here I can maybe even show you. So what we have here is that in the middle of this thing between bands or whatever, I wandered off from the main area where the crowd was gathered to listen to the music and I walked over to these 200 foot high bluffs.
overlooking the valley of the Minnesota River. Now, the Minnesota River currently flows in a little channel at the bottom of this valley. And I'm standing up on this hill and I'm looking down at this Minnesota River, you know, hundreds of feet below me in this channel.
And three miles, four miles across, I see another set of bluffs matching the ones that I'm standing on. And I had this, all I can say is it was kind of a revelation that I'm looking down here at this little river flowing in a channel. And then I'm seeing just a gigantic version of that same channel, but it's three and four miles wide. And I just looked at that and it was almost as if
For a short period of time, I got transplanted out of time or something. I don't know how to explain it. I had this sense that this whole thing was a gigantic river at one time.
I came away from that with this idea planted in the back of my brain and it bugged me for years after that, right? And it was maybe five, six years. This is now into the 70s. There was not a whole lot on catastrophism available in the 70s. There was, you know, a manual Velikovsky, one of the four runners, but, you know, he, he came up with some really wild ideas that made it very easy for mainstream science to dismiss him.
But he came up with some really solid ideas, too. His book, Earth and Up Evil, basically was just a documentation of all of this geological evidence for great catastrophes in the history of the earth. I think he misinterpreted the cause of those catastrophes, but nonetheless,
When you look at the criticisms, you've heard of Manuel Velikovsky, right? Velikovsky, I've heard of him, you. Well, he was famous, best-selling author, one of the big best-selling authors of the 1950s. Maybe in a sense, a forerunner of, in fact, Ram Hancock has been compared to Velikovsky now and then. I've actually seen some of that.
Although Velikovsky's work, I don't think was anywhere near as credible as Graham's. Graham is very, very assiduous in his referencing and his detailing and so on. Velikovsky went way off into this really weird astrophysics to explain.
his theories of geological catastrophe, which again, allowed the critics to basically dismiss everything he had done. But his book, Earth and Up Evil, I think, has upheld the test of time. Basically, in the 1950s, he was accumulating all of this evidence suggesting that there had been catastrophes in Earth history. Like I said, a bestseller, but the mainstream scientific community was very dismissive of it.
Okay, and then after that you had a book by Charles Hapgood called The Path of the Pole, I think it came out in 76. And he in near theorize that there had been a sudden pull shift that had brought about the quick freezing of the mammoths in the end of the ice age and so forth.
So, you know, I was familiar with that stuff, and I would read that stuff just out of curiosity, you know, because that was some of the stuff that was out there. And, you know, somebody would say, hey, did you read Velikovsky? And so, as I was reading this stuff, I would keep thinking back to this image I'd had of this.
And then in the early 80s, I was talking to somebody, I actually gave one of my very early lectures on this stuff, and there was somebody who had a degree in geology who stood up and he said, no, no, no, no, that valley that you're talking about was created over millions of years.
I said, I don't think so. And we kind of got into it a little bit. But what that did was it kind of pissed me off. And I said, OK, I'm going to research this thoroughly. And I did. I thoroughly researched it. I went and I found every single thing that had been written on it and discovered that there's actually mainstream geologists that have said, yeah.
That river channel, that giant river channel was actually created by a huge meltwater flood. And they estimated that it's volume. They called it River Warren. And they estimated that it's volume might have been 4,000 times greater than the modern Minnesota River that's flowing in there. So I felt very vindicated from that. And this was by the early 80s. So that was like one of the key things. There was other things. I spent the summer of 1970, mostly sitting on a mountaintop in Colorado.
in a hot that I had built, studying and reading stuff and traveling. This was back in the days when you could hitchhike and travel all over. And I think at one point I was with a buddy and we were in his old camper van and other times I was hitchhiking. But it's been the whole summer traveling around the western states.
And the thing, I came away from that summer with the, you know, I traveled the first time I'd traveled down to Columbia Gorge. And as I did, I had this overwhelming sense that there was something in the landscape that I was, that was
that was waiting to be revealed. You know, I would look at these features in the Columbia Gorge when I showed you that huge, that waterfall with the basalt over and that's in the Columbia Gorge. So that was the area I had traveled through in 1970. And I came away with that with this sense that point or something that that landscape is trying to tell me.
And so it goes back to that. And I just, you know, I got very interested in this stuff because I'm interested in science and I love the outdoors. So, you know, I love a good mystery, you know, and I love.
you know, ancient traditions. So how all this sort of came together over a period of, you know, a couple of decades. So I began really, I would say obsessively really going into this in the early 80s, you know, where it went from just more or less casual reading into, you know, spending hours in university libraries.
digging up these things, going back to the early geologists, to see what were they saying, why did they believe?
that the history of the earth have been catastrophic. And it just accelerated. It doesn't seem like a ridiculous idea at all when you consider what we see on the moon. The moon is so fascinating because we can look right at it. There's no oceans. There's no forests. We can see the evidence of impacts all over it. It's completely covered. Completely covered.
with our minds living in this very small window of life. You know, if we're lucky, we get 100 years. And then of course, you know, we have the history, which goes back to about seven plus thousand years. This is not enough to really represent what we're looking at when we look at the moon. When we look at the moon, this covered with craters, we're looking at potentially billions of years of impacts. Yes. And the assumption that those impacts
ceased. Hundreds of millions or billions of years ago is clearly not correct. Well, there's no evidence that it ceased or why it would cease. Right. When we look at how many known near-Earth objects are floating around. Oh, in the last few years, there's been dozens of close flybys. There was one the other day that had a fucking moon. Yes, yes.
Something that flew by that had its own moon. Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. And so think about this, Joe. Here's what's happening. We've got geologists who are looking at the crust of the Earth and discovering that, yeah, if we strip away the biosphere and the oceans and account for plate tectonics, the Earth is going to look like the moon.
Right? There are now hundreds of identified craters, right? At the same time, astronomers are looking out into the near-Earth neighborhood of space and discovering, wait a second, we assumed that we were pretty much isolated. There was nothing else going on. We're now realizing that near-Earth spaces densely populated, the inner solar system is densely populated with cosmic debris.
And this stuff is whizzing by us all the time. And now, at the same time, you've got paleontologists who are looking at the record of life and realizing that the record of life is not a smooth curve. It's sea sod.
You know, life proliferates and then suddenly bam, it's like the hammer comes down and you have these mass extinction events. So this is our time right now, but it could very easily end. And there could be some new bug-like creature that takes over and becomes super smart a billion years from now. To me, it all comes down to this. This to me is like...
Okay, human species on planet earth, it's time for you to grow up and start paying attention to the bigger picture because whether you like it or not, you're a part of the bigger picture. And if we finally accept the fact that maybe our predecessors have undergone, in a sense, cultural mass extinctions, it suddenly implies that we can't take our own
Unending future for granted that we have to we have to incorporate this bigger picture into our thinking and you know the evidence is continues to
Yes, like here. This was just from 2011. Multiple lines of evidence for possible human population decline settlement reorganization during nearly younger dries. Wow. In the three years, four years since this was published, more evidence has emerged that yes, the events that caused the mass extinction of half the great mega mammals on Earth
did not leave the rest of the mammals, the rest of the animals unscathed, including humans. And there's now emerging evidence, hard scientific evidence that the human population crashed during the Younger Dryas. So this would completely coincide with Graham Hancock's ideas about the Sphinx.
The Sphinx. Absolutely. Showing very clear, according to Robert Shock, Boston University geologist. John Anthony West. John Anthony West. That there is clear evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx, which would indicate thousands of years of rainfall where there hasn't been rainfall in the Nile Valley since I believe it was 9,000 BC. So that's 11,000 years ago. It's all the same stuff. It's all the same stuff. God, this is crazy.
Yeah, we're on the verge of a major paradigm shift. And where it's going to go remains to be seen. We live in a shooting gallery. Listen, it's not an exaggeration to say that we are sitting ducks in a cosmic shooting gallery. Exactly.
But the point is, here's the point, is the only thing that's, see, it's like, what was it in the book of Matthew? There's an interesting quote, and I'm not, you know, I'm not, not thumping the Bible here, but the Bible is full of just like all the traditions of ages are gone. The Bible is full of some very powerful, interesting stuff. There's a part in here where one of the disciples asked Jesus about, when are we gonna know about the end of days? And he says, well, as it was in the days of Noah,
When the people were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, so will it be again in the days, the end of days. When the flood comes, when the people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the flood came and swept them away, so will it be again at the end of days.
So what that seems to indicate to me is that we just get comfortable and relaxed and do well. Yeah. And when we do well, that's when we get hit. But it's, it's not saying that the everyday stuff, the stuff of everyday life, there's anything wrong. It's not saying that. It's just saying, if we get so preoccupied with the minutia and the trivia of everyday life to the exclusion of the bigger picture, that's when we open ourselves up.
But there's been, I've had these weird conversations with people about me, asteroidal impacts over the years because I've, before I even met you, I've been obsessed with this stuff. Not nearly as much as when I met you in Atlanta and we started talking, then I got really into it. But what they would talk about,
the asteroids that killed the dinosaur, oh, today we'd be able to stop that. And I'm like, okay, really? Is that true? And then I started looking into it, well, what has been done? There's nothing, some fucking theories. See, here's the thing. Potentially, yes. We could someday. We could do it. And really...
You know, within a decade or two, yes, we could. We could do that, right now, potentially. But see, what happened on February 15th of 2014, when that little meteor came in and exploded over Chelyabinsk, Siberia, injured 1,500 people.
Now, you know, and damage thousands of buildings. That was a wake-up call, right? That was a little speck. It was a little speck. Now, here's the thing. If it had been a little bigger, a little denser, if it's an angle of approach, it'd been a little steeper. If it's velocity had been a little bit greater, we might have been looking at thousands of deaths rather than just injuries. And Tunguska, as you said, only 150 foot wide object, right?
Right, so that's very, very small in the cosmic sense. That's just room. Yeah, well, it's the building. Yeah, well, from here to the front door. Yeah. You know, I mean, that's not that big. That's not that big. What you've got there was velocity. And you think, like, you know, think of a, say, a 38 slug. It's not big. If I was to throw it at you, even as hard as I could, it might sting a little bit, but it wouldn't do any damage. But if it came out of a gun with a muzzle velocity of 1,000 feet per second, think about that little thing and what the damage it would do to you.
And see, that's the thing about an asteroid or meteorite or a comet coming in. It's moving really, really fast. So that's why, like I said, it packs such a powerful kinetic punch when it hits. And some of them are even made of iron. Some of them are made of iron.
So if there's a moral doll of this, it's simply this. Look, we are the one species that could prevent the type of mass extinctions that have dominated the biosphere of this planet for a couple of hundred million years. Or we could keep putting our resources to fracking. Yeah. Well, I still haven't made up my mind about fracking yet. But I do believe that what we need to do is be thinking of if we're going to extract the resources of this planet,
Let's do so in such a way that what we're doing is implementing the transcendence of human culture into the cosmos itself, because I ultimately believe that is the destiny of terrestrial life, is that terrestrial life wants to become cosmic. It knows on some level that as long as life is confined to the surface of a planet, it's vulnerable.
Right. And, you know, it's without getting into all of this, there's growing evidence, you know, that life originally came to this planet from space, right? Was seeded here probably through comets that carry organic material. All of them spare me a pan-spermia, exactly. So here's the thing.
You know, if you're an environmentalist and rightfully critical of some of the things that humans are doing to disrupt the environment, you got to, though, place in context the fact that nature itself has done things to the environment that so far exceed anything we have done yet.
What I showed you with that slide showing the ice sheets over Canada. Think about this. Suppose some logging company got a contract from the government, US and Canadian governments, to clear cut every forest from like the 47th parallel up to the Arctic Circle from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We're going to cut every single tree from the northern United States up to
the tree line in northern Canada, we're going to cut billions of trees, billions of board feet. We're going to clear cut every single tree. We would rightfully be up in arms and say, no, you're not going to do that, right? Well, what do you think that ice did? It wiped out. You know, there's evidence now that 35 and 40,000 years ago, there were forests growing up there.
Right? A few thousand years later, the ice has bulldozed everything. There's no forests growing under two miles of ice, right? Imagine if we said, well, we're going to just decimate the shallow marine ecologies. We're going to go in there and we're going to just wipe out the coral reefs. We're going to overfish them till there's nothing left of the shallow marine ecologies less than 400 feet below sea level.
What do you think a drop of 400 feet in the sea level did to the shallow marine ecologies?
to the coral reefs that were growing there. You see, that's what I'm just saying. It's not to justify that we can ransack nature willy-nilly, but it's to say we have to have a realistic context for thinking about this. And bear in mind, the environmental movement was born during an era of total gradualistic dominance in the 50s and 60s. If you go back then,
Again, only the fringe, the fringe science people like Velikovsky and others were talking about catastrophes. The assumption was that all global change occurred one grain of sand or one drop of water at a time, right? Well, we've come 180 degrees from that model of Earth history. But our thinking has not really evolved to incorporate such a dynamic planet.