Atlantis, Aliens & Archaeology: John Hoopes Takes on Pseudoscience & Misinformation

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Unknown
You know, the rigor of scientific review and the rigor of peer review is basically to say

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Unknown
how easily is this hypothesis

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Unknown
scratched? How easy is this theory

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Unknown
shown to be

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Unknown
softer than another theory?

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Unknown
if it's something it doesn't hold up to, to careful scrutiny, then, you know, set it aside and come up with a

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Unknown
better explanation.

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Unknown
And we have very different viewpoints on many things. But a lot of these issues are American issues. They're not Republican or Democrat issues.

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Unknown
Today we have the privilege of being joined by John Hopps, someone who is no stranger to the controversial world of pseudo archeology. As you may have recently seen, and we explored with Flint Dibble. John has also faced his fair share of online backlash, and we're eager to dive into his insights on this fascinating and pretty contentious field lately.

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Unknown
So, John, thanks for joining us. How are you? I'm good, I'm good. Thanks so much for having me on. It is our absolute pleasure. We met you after, of course, interviewing Flint. And we've seen your names on some of the letters that have been written in this field, specifically from the Society of American Archeology. So we're grateful to have you on.

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Unknown
And just add another voice to this kind of dramatic conversation that's been going on. Just before we start, can you tell us our listeners a little bit about yourself? Some of your credentials? And then maybe we can get into some of, what we've been seeing online. Sure. I was just talking to somebody yesterday about how important it is to establish credibility.

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Unknown
I never in a million years would have thought that my degrees from Yale and Harvard would actually be disqualifying with regard to my, to my my ability. But, you know, the reality is, and actually, there's a lot, a lot of discussion going on about who the elites are. I'm definitely not one of the elites.

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Unknown
I grew up in a, in basically a single parent household. My, my parents divorced when I was eight. I grew up with my mom, who never remarried. And from first grade to 12th grade, I went to the Baltimore City Public Schools. I'm a public school kid. And, I was actually pretty much a minority my, during my whole public school education.

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Unknown
I first went to schools where I was, basically, one of the few non-Jewish kids in a Jewish majority school. And then in junior high and high school, my, my schools were respectively, about 95% and about 98% African-American. So I was one of the few white students and in a black urban school, I went from there to, to Yale, where I majored in archeology and got my degree in 1980.

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Unknown
And then, after working in the field for a couple of years, I enrolled in graduate school, and, I got my PhD in anthropology at Harvard in 1987. I taught for one year at Binghamton University before coming to the University of Kansas. And I've been here at the University of Kansas and in beautiful Lawrence, Kansas, right in the heartland, for 35 years now.

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Unknown
I specialize in the archeology of Central America. And, we'll talk some about what what that is. But I've also been involved with addressing pseudo archeology, pretty much my entire career.

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Unknown
this is a really exciting conversation because I think you add just another kind of different element that we were so happy to talk with Flint.

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Unknown
And if anybody hasn't seen that episode yet, please go back a couple weeks. And check that out. That was a response to Graham Hancock's Netflix documentary that came out, Ancient Apocalypse, and recently as well with season two. So, John, really quick, could you also just tell us what I'm sure that you've kind of maybe browsed through some of Hancock's, latest works, but just also to get started, what is your history with Graham Hancock or understanding of these kind of claims that are made?

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Unknown
And maybe you could provide a little bit of history before we dive into the, the current right now. What's happening? Sure. Well, it's it's it's it's kind of a a deep rabbit hole, as you know. But but, I was, I was mentioning my own longtime interest in this. The very first research paper that I ever wrote in my life was for a 10th grade English class.

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Unknown
And I was 14 years old, actually, I was 15 when the paper was submitted. That was 50 years ago, in 1974. And the topic of the paper was a critical evaluation of the story of the lost continent of Atlantis. So I actually, Yes. Good. You be there. So I, I was actually looking I was actually looking at the story of Atlantis 20 years before Graham Hancock published fingerprints of the gods.

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Unknown
So this this sounds like a fait accompli, that this was just destined and in the making for you here. Well, I think the you know, the thing is that the internet and the web and social media has a way of bringing individuals, into each other's orbit. But it does sort of feel like I have the know, a very, particularly well-suited background for addressing these types of things.

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Unknown
But I also was going to add that in addition to that, in 1982, when I first started at Harvard, I was hired by a professor there named Steven Williams, who was developing a new course that was called Fantastic Archeology. And this was in 1982. It's the first course in the country that was ever developed around the theme of pseudo archeology and teaching critical thinking by by evaluating texts and stories and claims.

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Unknown
In, in what we now call pseudo archeology. His term was fantastic. Archeology, but it's basically the same thing. And so I helped him to develop that course. And then I was the first, pegged for teaching that class, which was a very popular course at Harvard. It typically had enrollments of over 200 students. Because it counted for a general education requirement.

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Unknown
And, you know, what's kind of weird is I still have yet to encounter, somewhere in cyberspace, any of the students who I taught back in the day. I keep expecting to to run into them here or there. In terms of these critiques. But I was addressing these issues, in the early 1980s. And then when I came to the University of Kansas in 1989, I've taught a course called Archeological Myths and Realities all along.

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Unknown
So you're asking about Hancock, and the reality is that Hancock sort of came into my consciousness. Well, after I had been involved with the issue of pseudo archeology. Back in the day, we were addressing Erich von Daniken, and his, ancient astronauts. We were also looking at, you know, stories of Atlantis and Lemuria, which have been around since the 19th century.

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Unknown
We were also, addressing the work of, Barry Phil, who many people have probably forgotten, but he was a bestselling writer of the 1970s. He wrote a book called America Back and another book called Saga America. But Barry Phil was a specialist in invertebrate marine zoology who became obsessed with deciphering inscriptions that he was finding across the United States that he persuaded himself, were ancient scripture inscriptions left by Iberian and Celtic and and Viking travelers.

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Unknown
And he wrote these books about deciphering these ancient texts, most of which turned out to be completely fake. I mean, he he sort of built it, built a career, and wrote these books about deciphering what were essentially hooked inscription, hoax, hoax, inscriptions. But anyway, we were addressing all of this stuff. And, and I remember when I, when I first heard about Graham Hancock and it was, it happened in the in in the early 1990s.

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Unknown
And basically in 1993, there was an NBC, documentary on, on primetime TV called mystery of the Sphinx. It was hosted by Charlton Heston, and it came on at prime time and it featured, Robert Schock and his theory about the Sphinx being showing, showing water erosion, and being 10,000 years old. Well, Graham Hancock was not in that first documentary, but they did a follow up that that aired in 1996, that was called The Mysterious Origins of Man.

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Unknown
And it revisited the Sphinx issue, but it also talked about this ancient civilization. And it was on that documentary, also narrated by Charlton Heston. That I first kind of saw Graham Hancock. And I remember telling my student I was teaching the archeological Archeological Myths and Realities class that semester, and I told the students, I said, watch this documentary, and then we'll come in and we'll talk about it in class.

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Unknown
And Graham Hancock was featured in that. We began talking about it in class. But, you know, this was 1996. The web was young. Okay. I first had my hands on a on a, web browser in summer of 1995. One of the first things I did was get online and use, I think it was Yahoo! To look for videos of Graham Hancock and I and I came across some, and I think it's really important to understand that Hancock's success went hand in hand with the advent of the World Wide Web.

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Unknown
Okay. Fingerprints of the gods is published in 1995. People are using the first web browsers. Some of me, some of you may remember this. There was mosaic. There was Netscape. Remember Netscape Navigator? Oh, yeah. And then there was, Microsoft Internet Explorer, which came bundled with, windows 95 in fall of 1995. So Hancock sort of came on the scene at exactly the time that the web was in a good, position to promote his work.

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Unknown
And so it literally went viral and in the early days of the web and, and sort of the, the rest, the rest is history or pseudo history, depending on what you want to call it. So there's an important theme, I guess, and a lot of people ask, you know, is Hancock just asking the questions? You know, is the is this a benign exploration of these concepts and ideas, or is there perhaps, you know, some danger in spreading this kind of pseudo archeology, you know, so I guess that's kind of the big push back online is people are like, why can't I just, you know, you know, fantasize and enjoy these ideas.

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Unknown
But I think what happens is when you start to hear something so many times you take it as truth and things spread like wildfire. So what would you kind of say to the folks that just say, you know, just, you know, he's just doing investigative work and he's just another voice in the conversation? Well, there's absolutely nothing wrong with investigative work.

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Unknown
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with asking questions. And doing the research and finding out for yourself. And archeology is is a wonderful thing for people to explore. I mean, it's one of those things like astronomy. There are a lot of amateur archeology, amateur aficionados of archeology, amateur astronomers, amateur paleontologists. You know, it's it's one of those things that engages people.

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Unknown
But what's different about Graham Hancock is that from the very beginning, and you can see this if you go back to his interviews in the 1990s, he has attacked the discipline of archeology, he has attacked archeologists, and he basically has discouraged people who are interested in the ancient past from looking at the archeological literature itself or from listening to what archeologists have to say.

00:11:27:23 - 00:11:49:14
Unknown
So he's he's doing two things simultaneously. He's saying, oh, the past is really mysterious, and it's really a wonderful thing to do research, but don't listen to those archeologists and don't read any books on archeology. And don't even consider where these ideas might have come from. And so it really, you know, the biggest danger of it for me is that it's it's anti-intellectual.

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Unknown
It sort of discourages an intellectual engagement with what is a huge literature and long tradition of research. It's kind of pernicious that way. And that it's it's anti-science, it's anti-intellectual. And it gives people ironically, I mean, I find this, you know, this is the height of irony. One of Graham Hancock's messages from the very beginning has been a very anti-authority message.

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Unknown
No, don't believe the the the the governments don't actually he's. You ever listen to his interviews? He's a bit of an anarchist. He doesn't like governments. He doesn't like leaders. He says, you know, don't believe any of these organizations. But at the same time, if you listen to his accent and watch his body language and see how he presents himself for some reason, his readers all view him as an authority.

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Unknown
Okay? You don't have to talk to too many, Hancock fans before they say, oh, yeah, Graham knows what he's talking about. He's done all of the research. He's been to all of these places, and the implication is that he's an authority. Okay, so there's an irony there. Somebody who's delivering an anti-authoritarian message while at the same time presenting himself as an authority to the point where people believe that.

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Unknown
And he's not an authority, not by any stretch of the imagination. Well, I remember watching Flint when his first appearance on Joe Rogan and I had I told him on our interview, I had never really followed Graham Hancock, but I'd seen him on Rogan and I was kind of like, hey, this is cool, you know? But I didn't really think deeper into it than that.

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Unknown
And I do have to imagine that this kind of prevalence of pseudo archeology and it's no question that sounds like your fantastical course you had mentioned. Right. They attract more people. So there must be a good way that it kind of it does bring more people and more attention to archeology. But then when you turn on the second interview with just Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan and all of a sudden they go, yeah, this guy was lying.

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Unknown
He was fast and loose with the truth. It must feel like a slap in the face. And John, just a little bit more broadly, when you turn on a show like Ancient Apocalypse and the very first words out of the, anti-authority, anti-authority authoritative figure, and he says they're trying to cancel me. Don't trust archeologists. I mean, it's got to be a slap in the face to the 50 years you've put into this field.

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Unknown
What is your emotional reaction? Well, it's a it's a strong emotional reaction. I feel anger, and I think that's natural. Because, you know, I and so many others, and I think about the life of a graduate student is, is is pretty rough. Okay. I think about people who forego living in a nice apartment or forgo having a decent income or even put off starting a family.

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Unknown
And you know how important that is so that they can get a PhD in, in something like archeology. And to have somebody say, well, none of their work is matters, you know, don't, don't even bother to listen to them because they're, they're not going to tell you the truth. It's it really is pretty horrible, I think, especially when you think about all of the sacrifices that all of the archeologists have made in order to bring this information, to the world, because we think it's really interesting and cool.

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Unknown
And we're doing it, believe it or not, from from a pretty, a pretty good place in our hearts. I mean, we're not doing it for commercial reasons. I don't have a book to sell you, okay? I have books that I publish, but they're academic books, and they go into academic libraries. You're not going to find them in the airport bookstore.

00:15:26:13 - 00:15:46:16
Unknown
In fact, you're probably probably not going to find them in any bookstore. You've got a special order of them, but I don't I don't get a penny from those. Okay? Those are those are not sold for for for profit. Those are those are books that go into libraries that people can study. I'm not leading tours. I'm not making any, YouTube or TikTok content.

00:15:46:16 - 00:16:11:11
Unknown
I'm not selling ads. And somehow my, my noncommercial reality, does that discredit me somehow that I'd be more credible if I were selling you a book? I just don't understand that. But the problem here is what I've outlined, which is that, yes, people who are really interested in archeology. But then the next message is, but don't talk to the archeologists.

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Unknown
Don't don't pay any attention to what, what what their research has been because they're not telling you the truth. Well, I just find something very disingenuous about that. And it's really pretty unfortunate because I've spent my whole life engaged with archeology and trying to interest people and teach them. So one of the big narratives is that the they're trying to preserve the orthodoxy, and they don't want, you know, these grand changes to the, you know, the explanations and theories that they have.

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Unknown
Perhaps you could talk a little bit about peer review. I'm sure. You know, you've been in academia for a long time. You know how brutal but important the peer review process is, right? It could be very humbling, but it's very important. Maybe you can let our viewers know a little bit about what it's like when you publish research and, well, something has to undergo.

00:16:54:12 - 00:17:13:22
Unknown
Sure. Well, a peer review is is not first of all, there is no such thing as orthodoxy. It doesn't exist. Every single PhD student struggles with, okay, what are you going to say that's new? How are you going to challenge this particular idea? How is your research going to add something that we didn't know before? I mean, that's how research progresses.

00:17:13:22 - 00:17:30:22
Unknown
It's not oh yeah. We want you to totally toe the line and say exactly what it is that we've taught you. That's just not how it works. And the same is true for peer review. One of the first questions that you ask as a peer reviewer of an article that you're looking at is, is this new? Is this something that's meaningful?

00:17:30:22 - 00:17:57:14
Unknown
Is it does is it adding something to to to to knowledge? And then the other questions that a peer reviewer needs to answer are, is this original research? Is it is it good quality research? Is it presenting new data and new ideas that have not been presented before? I mean, all all of that is all about finding those things that Graham Hancock says that we reject, which is which is simply not true.

00:17:57:16 - 00:18:19:02
Unknown
Talk to any graduate student and they'll tell you how much they struggle with trying to come up with something original for their dissertation proposal. Because so much has been done already. But there's plenty more that still needs to be done. And, you know, among the other things that peer review does is that it looks at what the credentials are of the individuals who were published from the research.

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Unknown
You know, this is something that they that they know there's something that they, have put in the time to, to study. Have they done the field work? Are they qualified to write about what they're writing about? Do they know the literature? You know, are they overlooking anything that was really important that was published, 20, 30 years ago?

00:18:37:17 - 00:19:02:05
Unknown
But for some reason, they're not citing it, you know, why are they leaving things out? Is it because they're not well-educated, or is there something more devious going on? And then the other thing that peer review looks for, and this is really pretty important, is a plagiarism check, okay. Because it's those people, those of us who know the literature will be able to recognize something if somebody somebody is copying something or stealing something and that happens.

00:19:02:07 - 00:19:30:16
Unknown
And it's really pretty, fatal to a review if somebody says, oh, yeah, pages two and three were taken from this other source, which is not, you know, not cited or attributed. And sadly, plagiarism happens. People do that. It happens in academia. People can also self plagiarize and they'll republish something that they published before. Well, it's those of us who have read the literature and who keep on top of it, who can recognize stuff when, when, when it's when it's plagiarized.

00:19:30:18 - 00:20:04:16
Unknown
And actually, I had this one happen with a student. Most egregious example I can, I can think of, as a student who was writing a take home final exam, and I was reading this exam and I thought, man, this is really sounding very familiar to me. And I went and checked and sure enough, she had she had lifted it out of an article by a colleague of mine, that I recognized, and that kind of stuff, as I'm sure you can appreciate, becomes so very important now when you've got something like ChatGPT, where you can just sit down and type it in a little, spit, something back at you, somebody who

00:20:04:16 - 00:20:22:07
Unknown
knows the literature. Well, somebody who knows the field well and has been doing this for a long time, will be able to recognize and say, oh, I see where that came from. And yeah, I've seen that idea before. Yeah. This is the person who thought of that other thing. It's that depth of knowledge that allows us to assess whether something is authentic.

00:20:22:09 - 00:20:46:04
Unknown
Okay. And that becomes an important part of the peer review process as well. So you talked about having new ideas, meaningful ideas, citing your sources. That's, that brings us to the next topic, which is that these ideas from Graham are not exactly new yet he puts them forth as if that's his pop culture revolution. So when you read his book, I do believe he cites it as Ignatius Donnelly.

00:20:46:10 - 00:21:08:18
Unknown
Is that right? And could you tell us a little bit about what that source material kind of looked like and why it might be weird that he's pulling from that author? Well, and he does. He does include some footnotes that cite Ignatius Donnelly, and he acknowledges him in the in the acknowledgments of fingerprints of the gods. But Ignatius Donnelly was a populist, politician.

00:21:08:18 - 00:21:38:10
Unknown
He was a congressman from Minnesota, who spent a lot of time that at the Library of Congress. But he was very interested in an ancient Atlantis. And I've kind of speculated about where that might have come from. He was he was working in the in the 1870s, 1880s. He publishes his book in 1882. And it's kind of interesting that in the 1870s, I think it was 1875, science fiction writer Jules Verne, published a book called 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

00:21:38:12 - 00:21:58:05
Unknown
And in that science fiction novel, Captain Nemo takes his submarine, the Nautilus, and takes the narrator down to visit the ruins of Atlantis deep under the ocean. That's a that's a scene in the book. And so I've sort of wondered whether Ignatius Donnelly was a science fiction fan. It turns out he was, And I think that he got the idea.

00:21:58:05 - 00:22:24:12
Unknown
But Landis, from having read Jules Verne, I mean, that's just a possibility, but he spent a lot of time in the Library of Congress putting together various resources and also putting together essentially, his book Atlantis The Antediluvian World, which I first read. I kid you not, at the age of 14, when I was doing research for this 10th grade English paper, and I read the whole thing all the way through 1882.

00:22:24:12 - 00:22:48:07
Unknown
It's weird language, but it was kind of kind of interesting. But I have a I have a thesis about or I have an idea hypothesis about about why he wrote, Atlantis, the Antediluvian world. And it has to do with ethnicity and immigrants. Ignatius Donnelly was an Irish-American, okay. But his family, his his parents had come over early in the 19th century.

00:22:48:09 - 00:23:14:05
Unknown
Okay. So he was really sort of a, a middle class Irish American. And what was happening in the 1870s, 1880s, was the potato famine in Ireland, a resulted in lots of Irish immigrants coming to the United States. They were impoverished. They were poorly educated. They had poor health. And the Irish were essentially regarded as as as undesirables.

00:23:14:06 - 00:23:39:23
Unknown
Okay. There were all kinds of terrible stories about about the Irish. I think one of the reasons why Ignatius Donnelly wrote his book when he did was to sort of rehabilitate the Irish in, in the eyes of his fellow Americans, because he actually traces the Irish to the lost colony of the land of Atlantis. Okay. They've got blue eyes and red hair and light skin, and they came from this, this sunken continent.

00:23:40:01 - 00:24:14:22
Unknown
But there was also something much more devious going on. I mean, he he's writing about European. He's writing about what are essentially European immigrants to the US. And using the hypothetical lost continent, the in the, in the Atlantic, for sort of framing this. And so this book is really about immigration, okay. And it's about, the, the legacy of Atlantis and how these people who appear impoverished now were at one time, the, the masters of a golden age on the lost continent of Atlantis.

00:24:14:23 - 00:24:42:08
Unknown
But something else is happening in 1882. It's called the Chinese Chinese Exclusion Act, which is essentially legislation passed by Congress to exclude immigration that was coming from East Asia and particularly China. And Ignatius Donnelly's book is essentially one about Atlantic migrations. Okay. That's why it's featuring Atlantis while ignoring and excluding and devaluing any type of migrations that might have been coming across the Pacific.

00:24:42:10 - 00:25:13:19
Unknown
Okay, because they were they were denying immigration to to Chinese, immigrants while encouraging immigration or trying to justify immigration of Irish and Italians and Eastern Europeans and others who were coming in from from the Atlantic world. So, so when you look at it in that sense, Donnelly is really justifying Atlantic immigration. While at the same time doing the opposite with Pacific migration, that that's especially damning because he's a politician, right?

00:25:13:19 - 00:25:34:04
Unknown
So he's obviously trying to swing, the public opinion. But I, I also when you go into saying that it's, you know, exclusionary and all this, I in this conversation, there is a lot of talk and calls for that. These theories are racist. Why does it go that far to say that? What should we be calling these ideas racist?

00:25:34:04 - 00:25:59:18
Unknown
Or is it just he had a certain plan that didn't necessarily align with, inviting Eastern Asian people over to the United States? Well, Donnelly talks about race and other people talk about race as well. His work was picked up on by, Helena Blavatsky, who was a founder of the Theosophical Society, who had this idea about ancient route races on Atlantis and Lemuria and other lost continents.

00:25:59:20 - 00:26:39:08
Unknown
She also had ideas about inferior races. But, you know, this is the 1880s. The eugenics is just getting underway. And it ultimately becomes scientific racism. That's something that's kind of serving British colonialism. Some of the worst racism that we ever saw was, was happening in these years, ironically, after the Civil War. Okay. We're talking 1870s, 1880s, when we're getting a much more diverse population, but it's one in which people are responding, by, developing these very pernicious ideas about superior and inferior races.

00:26:39:10 - 00:27:11:21
Unknown
So there is quite a lot of racism in Donnelly's work and other work at the time. Sometimes people dismiss it and they say, well, that's just what people thought back then. What? Well, that is true. That is just what people thought back then. But it was wrong, okay? It was not scientifically accurate. And people knew that at the time that all humans have the same capacity for intelligence, the same capacity for achievement, achievement, and and it doesn't have anything to do with what the color of their skin is, or the shape of their noses, or whether the hair is straight or curly, that that has nothing to do with it.

00:27:11:21 - 00:27:40:10
Unknown
But there's this fascination with Atlantis. It's something that grew, in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. And you get people like Madison Grant. Do you know who Madison Grant was? He was actually an anthropologist. Yale trained anthropologist. He wrote a book published in 1916 called The Passing of the Great Race. And what Madison Grant is known for is coming up with the idea of Nordic superiority.

00:27:40:11 - 00:28:06:00
Unknown
And the great race to which he was referring was was a Nordic race of light skinned, blond haired, blue eyed, superior people. And his book, his 1916 book actually became a favorite book of, of Adolf Hitler. While he was writing Mein Kampf. And in fact, the name of the book in English is The Passing of the Great Race, but it was translated into German.

00:28:06:02 - 00:28:43:19
Unknown
And then when the German is retranslated it back into English, it's that book that gives us the phrase the master race. That's where that comes from. But Madison Grant was a eugenicist. He he wanted sterilization. He felt that you could actually breed humans to produce more intelligent people. And he was writing about this Nordic race, which becomes tied to Atlantis when, you begin getting, Alfred Rosenberg, who's, who's writing about it, and he is best known for a book that he wrote that was called The Myth of the 20th Century.

00:28:43:21 - 00:29:09:19
Unknown
I can't I don't know what the title is in German. Alfred Rosenberg was was German, but the myth of the 20th century is one in which he sort of took some of Madison Grant's ideas and basically located the homeland of this superior Nordic race on the lost continent of Atlantis, and wrote about Atlantis. As, as as, as the homeland, and kind of like the motherland.

00:29:10:01 - 00:29:33:03
Unknown
The Fatherland claims to have been there. You're saying. No, no, no, he this was his his interpretation. His hypothesis, I see. But, his model. But Alfred Rosenberg, became a leading ideologue of the Nazi Party. And it's been his book has been identified as second only to Mein Kampf in terms of its importance for Nazi ideology.

00:29:33:04 - 00:30:06:05
Unknown
And it was something that was openly racist and openly anti-Semitic. But it has this kind of foundational myth of, of Nordic races, superior Aryan races, being based in Lost Atlantis, and this idea is picked up by Heinrich Himmler. It's promoted in the context of a group called the Ancestral Heritage Study Group, also known as the Autonoma which becomes an, sort of ideological wing of the SS, which, you know, is responsible for doing archeology in search of this ancient civilization.

00:30:06:07 - 00:30:30:05
Unknown
And when Indiana Jones is punching Nazis, it's members of the unknown. Herbert. Who? He who is who he's punching. That was actually a part of the Third Reich's, ideological orientation was to find archeological evidence in different parts of the world for the superiority of a white race in Tibet. There were also beliefs that there was a superior white race in Bolivia.

00:30:30:07 - 00:31:02:13
Unknown
And, you know, all of this stems from from a long history of this. And in fact, you know, that also goes back into other other writers of the 19th century. It ultimately becomes associated with symbols like the swastika, which were considered to be an ancient symbol of the superior white race. Heinrich Schliemann found a lot of swastikas at Incirlik, which is, you know, also known as Troy, or where he felt Troy was, and the Nazis adopt the swastika because it's this symbol of this primeval, heritage.

00:31:02:17 - 00:31:33:04
Unknown
And so there's a very thick history of the association of the idea of, of, of of Atlantis and Aryans and Nordic races and white supremacy and white superiority. All of that is very clearly tied together, which is why anyone who's writing about this, including Graham Hancock, should acknowledge that history and then immediately distance themselves from it and say, I want to write about this lost ancient, this lost civilization of of of the Ice Age.

00:31:33:08 - 00:32:13:20
Unknown
But I'm not talking about the one that the Nazis talked about. I'm not promoting, a white supremacist model here. And anybody who's familiar with that history would would be saying, oh, no, that's not what I'm doing. That's not what I'm saying. But but you don't see that in his work. You don't see that distancing. In fact, I haven't seen it until relatively recently, when a, British journalist, a Welsh journalist, wrote in the Daily Express that he had had an interview with Graham Hancock and kind of sat down with him and showed him, a video with Hardy Lloyd, talking about his use of Graham Hancock's works.

00:32:13:22 - 00:32:47:12
Unknown
Now, you probably don't know who Hardy Lloyd is either. Well, he's doing hard time right now for having threatened witnesses. And jurors in the Tree of life, mass shooting case in Pittsburgh. Hardy Lloyd is a is a is a neo-Nazi. He's a he's a white supremacist. There's a video of Harry Lloyd talking to to to one of his colleagues and describing how he uses Graham Hancock's books as a soft introduction to white supremacy, because the white supremacy that he sees in Hancock's books is very subtle, he says.

00:32:47:12 - 00:33:08:16
Unknown
It's something it's not explicit. And that and that's what makes it a good sort of gateway, entrance for people who are who are interested in what he refers to as racialism. But anyway, Hancock responded to that, and it was very good to see Hancock responding to it and say, that's terrible. I don't want to be associated with these people.

00:33:08:16 - 00:33:42:12
Unknown
This is awful. I can't remember his exact quote, but he did very effective distancing from it. But why did that? Why did that only happen a few weeks ago? You know, why was that not happening 30 years ago? That that's a that's a real question. Well, I think part of this, his claims as well for this ancient, advanced, pre ice age civilization two, is it kind of robs those other indigenous civilizations of their ingenuity and the solutions that they came up with survival because it had to be some superior, you know, Atlantean or in this case, you know, a white race that came before and and taught them everything.

00:33:42:12 - 00:33:58:00
Unknown
But what are some chief claims? Because I guess this is where it kind of rubs off. Is he he says he's not an archeologist, but he loves to make all these strong claims as if he was an archeologist. But then I guess he eventually gets challenged by archeologists who are very familiar with these areas of study that he's not so familiar with.

00:33:58:00 - 00:34:16:20
Unknown
So. So what are you you know, someone who specializes in Central American archeology? What are some of your big rubs that, you know, he really, you know, takes liberties with to, to work his grand theory of things together? Well, something that you probably encountered, there's a lot of discussion about his use of the the myth of ketzel.

00:34:16:20 - 00:34:48:10
Unknown
Kohut, who was, a culture hero, of the Mexico or the Aztecs. And he asserts that there are authentic indigenous stories and legends about capsule co-op having been a a light skinned, fair haired, bearded man who had come from afar and taught, agriculture and metallurgy and astronomy and building pyramids and things like that. Well, that's the way that he presents that story in fingerprints of the gods is is is not correct.

00:34:48:12 - 00:35:13:02
Unknown
We know that those stories were changed, at the, you know, shortly after the Spanish conquest and that those changes were done, either by the Spanish themselves or by indigenous people who had been subject to the, to mission ization and therefore exposed to a lot of, of Christian ideas, and integrated those and synthesized them and, and synchronized them.

00:35:13:04 - 00:35:38:15
Unknown
And then we get these narratives, but they date to decade, often decades after the, the conquest. They're not they're not pre conquest pre Spanish, ancient indigenous narratives. They're ones that have been have been modified. And my critique of Hancock's use of them is that he, he's done it in an uncritical way. He doesn't consider the possibility that these are things that were altered by, by the Spanish.

00:35:38:15 - 00:36:01:19
Unknown
And and the same is also true for the the stories about mirror culture in South America. Those are also ones that we know we're we're altered by it, by Spanish sources, referring to visits from Saint Thomas and other types of things like that. We just know that those stories are not authentically indigenous stories, so that that's a problem right there.

00:36:01:21 - 00:36:28:10
Unknown
In Central America or in Mexico? Mexico, not Central America, but Mexico in particular. The issue of the Olmecs is, is another really interesting question, which is that we got these these colossal Olmec heads that that look like they're black Africans and are used to kind of assert that there was contact between West Africa and Mexico in the time of the Olmecs, but there's really no archeological or genetic evidence there.

00:36:28:11 - 00:36:50:13
Unknown
A lot, actually a lot of reasons not to think that there was any contact going on between West Africa and, and Mexico. Just to be clear, that would indicate that they were a seafaring civilization that were able to travel Intercontinental. Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn't it would suggest that they were safe, that there were seafaring peoples of West Africa who came to Mexico or maybe the other way around.

00:36:50:18 - 00:37:11:16
Unknown
You know, it's all based on just a, an interpretation of what these what these massive sculptures look like. But but it's there's so much that's missing. I mean, the West Africans had and worked a lot of gold. The Olmecs had no gold. The West Africans also were working iron. And in fact, iron technology was invented in sub-Saharan Africa.

00:37:11:16 - 00:37:32:23
Unknown
They were doing it 3000 years ago. Iron doesn't appear in the Americas until after the Europeans arrived. Plus, in the Americas you have things like, like like corn and beans and chili peppers and tomatoes and all kinds of wonderful foods. Well, a lot of those are very popular in Africa today, and they're being cultivated all over the place.

00:37:32:23 - 00:38:00:09
Unknown
But they didn't make it to Africa until Europeans brought them back. So the question of this whole what we call the Colombian exchange of, of of, plants and animals, between, Africa and Europe and the Middle East and the Americas, the Colombian exchange doesn't happen until after Columbus. If there had been ancient seafaring cultures, why were they ignoring all of these amazing plants and animals and resources and technologies?

00:38:00:14 - 00:38:22:07
Unknown
Why weren't they transferring those? Why weren't they picking them up so that those are some big question marks? And, you know, we don't have all of the answers. We don't know everything for certain. We proceed, by by using something called Occam's razor. Okay. What is the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions about things that you don't know?

00:38:22:09 - 00:38:43:14
Unknown
Okay. You sort of eliminate interpretations that are based on, you know, maybe they did this and they have this other thing, and they had that. They had boats. They, they understood longitude. They could calculate the time of day and therefore they knew where they were. All of these assumptions or things for which we don't have any direct evidence.

00:38:43:16 - 00:39:11:01
Unknown
And there are other explanations, such as the explanation of no contact that seemed to work better, or fit the fit the evidence better. I will say that when I first learned about this topic, you know, and especially which was basically watching Flint and Graham talk on Joe Rogan, I personally, you know, I and you follow me on Twitter now, John, so you know that I'm right leaning and Mike is the left wing, pundit on the show, but and it's great that you guys do that.

00:39:11:01 - 00:39:34:09
Unknown
I think that's wonderful. Yeah, yeah, we try to keep it pragmatic and we definitely disagree about a lot of things. But what I was let's just take a look at our chat group. There's a lot of disagreement there. Well I'm I'm probably of the ilk where I hear something like, hey, this archeological theory is makes you racist. And I got probably countless in the hundreds of comments that said, this is ridiculous, this is ridiculous.

00:39:34:09 - 00:40:04:02
Unknown
And what I've found, and it's actually very similar with climate change, which we've had multiple climate experts on our podcast. You know, we're happy to report that. I think it's like 91% of people now all agree. Yes, the climate is changing. Yes, it's due to human activity, but it's been very strange to me, to experience and watch it happen that people on the right have this tendency to believe pseudo information or potential or non factual information.

00:40:04:02 - 00:40:23:13
Unknown
And what I sometimes think, and this is what I almost experienced, was there's this initial knee jerk reaction where you say hey, the world is the climate is changing. This is an existential crisis. And the right wing says, no way we're going to pump more fuel than ever, because that's my way to own. You own the libs here, right?

00:40:23:16 - 00:40:56:21
Unknown
And I think that when they hear the very simple, simplified claims to say, don't call me racist, how could you do that? I'm going to keep listening to Graham because he's not racist, right. It it lacks the important context that you've just given me. And since, you know, I've been researching this stuff for a couple weeks now, I've gone back to a couple of people and they've been pretty not listening to say, you know, you guys acknowledge that the Spanish came over, that even that we came into America as Americans and we called them savages, and we rewrote the history.

00:40:56:21 - 00:41:29:10
Unknown
We gave them disease, you know, don't doesn't that make sense that it kind of adds up that way? So I, I hope that you can understand that at times, I think people are just turned off to the whole conversation of race as tied into this archeology conversation. And I'm wondering, you know, you actually said something. You said that if Graham had done a better job at acknowledging the racism of the past and some of these sources, that maybe it actually would be no big deal for him to kind of explore this idea of Atlantis or high technology or something along those lines.

00:41:29:10 - 00:41:48:09
Unknown
And it might carry, characterizing that properly. Would you say that if he acknowledged that, that maybe it would be a different story? Absolutely. Yes, of course I think it'd be a totally different story. What what what is what has made people bristle at his work? It's the fact that there's so much that's left out, it.

00:41:48:09 - 00:42:08:21
Unknown
And he gets charged very often with cherry picking, which I think is one of the things that he mostly does. There's a huge amount of information, that he doesn't give to his readers that he leaves out. He picks those things that support his interpretation. But it's important for people to know about Madison Grant. It's important for people to know about Alfred Rosenberg.

00:42:08:21 - 00:42:29:16
Unknown
It's important for people to know about the unknown. But it's important to know about the Spanish conquest. It's important to know that there were lots of very racist sources who were writing about Atlantis, and writing about these lost civilizations. So it really shouldn't be a really big deal for him to say, no, I'm not doing that. Let me just kind of clarify that.

00:42:29:18 - 00:42:47:08
Unknown
I want to distance myself from that. And the fact that he hasn't done that is part of the reason why people have been reacting the way that they have. But for the record, you know, people are going to hear about this podcast and say, oh, whoops, he's the one who calls Graham Hancock a racist. Well, no, that's not true.

00:42:47:08 - 00:43:16:00
Unknown
I have never called Graham Hancock a racist. I don't think that he's racist. What I have said in that saga letter is that the models that he present the the ideas of the past that he had writes about in this story have historically aligned with racism. Okay. And they have there's no question that they have the letter also said, I don't want to say encourages but empowers, if that's even that word.

00:43:16:02 - 00:43:45:12
Unknown
Anyway, I was referring to people like Hardy Lloyd. I was referring to people who use his works to say, look, you know, there really was this superior white civilization in the past, and then to use that to kind of tip that into, what becomes a racist ideology. I don't think that Graham Hancock was racist. I just, I just think he was manipulative and possibly extremely incompetent or seeking virality, you know, like you kind of pointed out at the beginning, it's a way to gain celebrity status in that way.

00:43:45:12 - 00:44:04:11
Unknown
Because it was funny. One of the things Flynt called out was how cancel culture is actually coming for him. Right? They're threatening his job and all of this. And, you know, what is the paltry paycheck of an archeologist as compared to two a Netflix star that, has been on Joe Rogan countless times. I mean, that's it's pretty cut and dry when you ask me.

00:44:04:11 - 00:44:24:06
Unknown
So it's. Yeah. Well, Graham Hancock and people don't use this term often enough, but Graham Hancock is essentially a New Age writer. And, you know, back in the 1960s and 70s, we talked about a cult stuff. And you talk about the New Age. We talk about the Aquarian Age, and those of us who grew up in that time, you know, know that we saw this stuff all the time.

00:44:24:06 - 00:44:47:06
Unknown
It was in the supermarket aisles, you know, it was it was part of pop culture. Donovan wrote a hit song in 1968 called Atlantis, which I suspect played a role in Graham Hancock's Consciousness because he was born in 1950 and he would have been 18 years old, when when Donovan's pop song hit hit the charts. And Donovan was a Scottish singer and and Hancock was from Scotland.

00:44:47:06 - 00:45:14:10
Unknown
So it's sort of it's sort of a but in the 60s and 70s there was a lot of that New Age stuff. And Hancock talks about us being a species with amnesia. And I say, yeah, he's right. But it's not an amnesia for these ancient civilizations. It's an amnesia for the 60s and 70s. It's an amnesia for the fact that Shirley MacLaine had a bestselling book called out on a limb in 1983 that was made into a TV mini series about these New Age beliefs.

00:45:14:10 - 00:45:38:11
Unknown
And how did the Mayas go up into a spaceship and fly away and and things like that? I mean, it was something people theorized as kooky not all that long ago. You know, it's still kooky today, but people have forgotten some of it. And it's because of that amnesia. It's because of that forgetting that you can monetize it again, you can make more money off of it the second time around because nobody knew that it was kooky the first time around.

00:45:38:13 - 00:46:08:10
Unknown
So, so these things just come back and back and back and the stuff that, that, that Donnelly was doing, the stuff that there's a guy named Augustus Laplacian who was another, another writer who thought that, his basic model was that Freemasonry had not originated in Egypt. It it it it originated on the Yucatan Peninsula with the Mayas and the Mayas were the original Freemasons and that they had taken Freemasonry from, from from the Maya land to Atlantis and then eventually made its way to Egypt.

00:46:08:10 - 00:46:32:16
Unknown
But he was writing about this ancient civilization. 11,500 years ago. In the 1870s, LaPlante was the first person to actually put that in the title of his book. The the, The Sacred Mysteries of the Mayan and 11,500 years ago. Well, anybody who's familiar with Lamar John's title in the 1870s is going to say, oh, yeah, that's what Hancock is doing.

00:46:32:16 - 00:46:50:02
Unknown
He's just, you know, he's just doing it again. And so many of the ideas in his books are ones that, for those of us who know the literature, for those of us who spent some time with this history, we recognize all of them. Okay, this is from the 1980s or this is from the 1880s. This is from the 1920s.

00:46:50:04 - 00:47:15:12
Unknown
Do you know who, Manley Palmer Hall was name dropping like crazy today. Unfortunately, now people people should know who Manley Palmer Hall was. He he published, when he was like, 27 years old. He published a book that was called, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, published in 1928, publishing a great big folio edition that that sold by subscription for $100 a piece.

00:47:15:12 - 00:47:40:18
Unknown
And it was revealing all of the secrets of Freemasonry, Rosicrucian ism, the Kabbalah, astrology, the tarot, you know, all of these things that we identify today as being sort of new agey stuff, was was in this 1928 book. Well, that book was very influential on Graham Hancock. He cites it he produced reproduces things out of it.

00:47:40:20 - 00:48:03:03
Unknown
And so I know that he was reading Manley Palmer Hall. But here it is, you know, 20, 24. And these are things that were popular back in 2028, although actually not super popular because Hall's book was was sold as something that was a mystery. You know, this was this was esoteric. This was something that only only a small group of people would know about.

00:48:03:05 - 00:48:28:18
Unknown
And so it was sort of a secret thing, but it did have an influence on American culture, one of the most, one of the most, best known occult couples in the United States who were into Manley, Palmer Hall and all of this stuff. Ron and Nancy Reagan. Yes. Okay. They were into astrology. Ronald Reagan had read Manley Palmer Hall and and frequently referred to him.

00:48:28:18 - 00:48:48:08
Unknown
And actually, you know, when the Moral Majority sort of scrubbed up the Reagans for the white House, you could no longer call this stuff a cult anymore. You had to refer to it as something else, and a cult became a bad word, along with the Satanic panic and everything else. But a cult coming back now we're seeing that word lots more.

00:48:48:10 - 00:49:10:09
Unknown
But that was what Helena Blavatsky called her stuff. And that was what Manley Palmer Hall stuff was, was referred to. It was all occult knowledge. But, it's kind of interesting how these things go around and come back and go around and come back again, which, which actually correspond to the cosmology of Graham Hancock and many of these occultists.

00:49:10:11 - 00:49:42:23
Unknown
And actually, I refer to it as is almost like occult archeology, but but actually coined the phrase, you may remember when creationism was big. People refer to scientific creationism and scientific creationism was the idea that you could use science to prove that creation creation as as it took place in the book of Genesis over six days, you know, 6000 years ago, you could you could prove that creation was true using science that became the basis for the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in Kentucky.

00:49:43:03 - 00:50:14:21
Unknown
Okay, that's that, that orientation. But that's known as scientific creationism, which is actually not scientific. It is creationism, but it's not scientific. But anyway, the phrase that I've coined is scientific occultism. And scientific occultism is the use of science actually really pseudoscience in order to make these occult realities, seem authentic? So you seem real to say that science proves, the paranormal science proves crystal healing, science proves astrology.

00:50:14:23 - 00:50:43:12
Unknown
These kinds of claims, knowledge claims, and science proves Atlantis and this lost civilization, all of these things that were part of that, that kind of grab bag of of of, of esoteric and occult knowledge are things that the people who are doing scientific occultism are claiming that science supports, when, when in fact it doesn't really. So so Hancock has, one of his chief tactics is simply saying that we've just not dug up enough or there is more of the Amazon rainforest.

00:50:43:12 - 00:51:09:12
Unknown
We could be using lidar and do more excavations. We could be finding, you know, more sea wrecks out there that might prove his hypothesis. But it also, you know, it belies this, you know, misunderstanding that the interpretations by the archeological community are just qualitative, these, you know, these interpretations. But I think he doesn't really, you know, acknowledge enough of the experimental archeology that goes on and the quantitative.

00:51:09:12 - 00:51:25:22
Unknown
So again, these aren't just, you know, wild interpretations. And it's not just simply using the Occam's Razor right there. So there's a lot of experimental archeology that goes behind the scenes. And I just I really enjoyed the way Flint broke down a little bit on on Joe Rogan. And you can use certain char samples and you're trying to create modern day examples so you can compare them to see what it looks before.

00:51:26:02 - 00:51:45:18
Unknown
What are some other examples of, you know, experimental archeology that that goes on that doesn't just, you know, rely on interpretations, but actual hard science and data? Well, there's there's a lot of experimental archeology that goes on. There's, you know, there's flint knapping, which is where Flint's name actually comes from. His father was a Flint knapper and did experiments in recreating ancient stone tools.

00:51:45:18 - 00:52:01:17
Unknown
I mean, that's that's where Flint Flint name came from. But there are also ways of, sort of replicating a whole host of different kinds of technologies, whether it's whether it's making pottery and then using that pottery in ancient ways to see, you know, how it how it heats, how it cooks, how it breaks all of those kinds of things.

00:52:01:19 - 00:52:19:11
Unknown
Looking at something called Tiffany, which is which is doing experiments to understand how archeological sites are formed. Okay. When you when you burn a house, how long does it take for the remains to disappear? Or, you know, when, when when an elephant dies, how long does it take for it to decay? And what are the processes that go into that decay?

00:52:19:16 - 00:52:43:11
Unknown
You know, there's a whole science of understanding how the archeological record is formed, through the various, both natural and cultural processes, that that caused the deterioration of of of sites and artifacts over time. And we can do experiments with that and understand it and quantify it and in fact, the whole quantification thing has been a fundamental part of archeology since the 1960s.

00:52:43:13 - 00:53:20:17
Unknown
When an archeologist named Louis Benford drop a number, another name and his name doesn't get mentioned enough in this, but people should know the name of Louis Benford, who made a very strong case for more quantification, the use of statistical, modeling. The, the approach to archeology from a regional rather than a site focused perspective. And the use of something it was called middle range theory, which is coming up with explanations, tests, models, experiments to be able to understand how it was that human activity, the reality of the human experience goes into the archeological record.

00:53:20:23 - 00:53:41:22
Unknown
Okay. If we're going to interpret the archeological record as, as as as fossilized human behavior, what are the things that we need to understand that that that mediate between what's actually living and breathing and acting human beings and what winds up, in the archeological record. And that's something that many people just kind of take for granted today.

00:53:42:00 - 00:54:24:09
Unknown
And it's a very important part of archeological science is understanding how, how things wind up in the ground, what happens to when them, when they're there, how the various things preserve over time. How are they altered, by different geological circumstances or climatological circumstances or sediment or logical reasons or all of those kinds of things? I mean, archeology, a lot of archeology is just understanding, soil, understanding materials that people work, understanding the environment, understanding, how it is that various animals, will, will, will, will have an effect on an archeological site by, by burrowing and by digging, you know, how do we recognize what the natural effects are so that we

00:54:24:09 - 00:54:46:06
Unknown
can see what the cultural effects are? I mean, that's that's a huge amount of archeology does that. And so there's a lot of science in archeology. Archeology is very much a science that Graham Hancock is very dismissive of that. But he's wrong. It's just he's just not correct in that. Yeah. Well, science to me, and I think to most people means coming up with a hypothesis and, and testing it.

00:54:46:08 - 00:55:04:05
Unknown
So I mean, before we wrap up here, John, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine that if there was some sort of major discovery that went back 25,000 years and, oh my God, look at this ship, we can't even understand what it is. I mean, that sounds like every archeologist on planet Earth would be celebrating and going crazy to go see this thing.

00:55:04:05 - 00:55:33:22
Unknown
So of course, absolute Lee, if if the radiocarbon dates from Gunung Padang really indicated that there was a buried pyramid there, archeologists if if you know, if the if the evidence held up to scrutiny, archeologists would be jumping up and down. This is amazing. We've discovered something new. A whole civilization that we didn't know existed. But, you know, the background to that is that, Danny, Natalie Zaza had published a book in 2013 claiming Atlantis within was in Indonesia.

00:55:33:23 - 00:55:59:16
Unknown
Yeah. That's the that's the the name of his book is is, Plato. Plato never lied at, Atlantis in Indonesia. That was published in 20 2013, long before he ever submitted that manuscript to archeological perfection. So, you know, there's there's something going on there where he basically had a particular, interpretation that he wanted to be true.

00:55:59:16 - 00:56:20:01
Unknown
And as a result of that, there's kind of massaging of the, of of the data and the interpretations, and that just didn't hold up to scrutiny. And that's what peer review does. We're talking about peer review before, the, the analogy, the metaphor that I like to use actually comes out of the archeological laboratory. But do you know what the Mo's scale is now?

00:56:20:01 - 00:56:45:14
Unknown
It's something I've heard of, I don't remember, that's from school. Well, a number of it. It runs from 1 to 10. And it describes minerals, the hard hardness. The hardness is. That's right. Yeah. So the softest minerals are, have a most number of one. And then something hard like a diamond has a most, number of ten and basically, a number, an object of the same or a higher number.

00:56:45:16 - 00:57:05:05
Unknown
We'll scratch and we'll scratch another object, and I think that the truth is something analogous to the most scale. If it's if it's if it's true, it's going to be very resistant to scratching. If it's true, it's not something that you're going to be able to make a mark on with your fingernail. I mean, a piece of chalk.

00:57:05:05 - 00:57:28:05
Unknown
You can, you can, you can, you can modify that with your fingernail because it has a hardness of one, or two, but a diamond you're not going to be able to scratch with your fingernail or even with a knife. You need another diamond to do that. And so, you know, the rigor of scientific review and the rigor of peer review is basically to say how easy, how easily is this hypothesis scratched?

00:57:28:06 - 00:57:50:04
Unknown
How easy is this theory, shown to be softer than another theory? You know, it. Give it something it doesn't hold up to, to careful scrutiny. Then, you know, set it aside and come up with a better, better explanation. But anybody who looks at that Gunung Padang article will see that the evidence does not support the conclusions.

00:57:50:06 - 00:58:12:16
Unknown
And it was really pretty irresponsible for the international press to publish in every country of the world. 25,000 year old pyramid found in Indonesia, when in fact, that was really not the truth at all. That's that's not what, what what the data shows. In fact, there's not a pyramid. In fact, there's there's no evidence of any human activity.

00:58:12:17 - 00:58:29:20
Unknown
In in the levels that they were dating to that, whatever, 27,000 year time period. I think that's a that's a key point, because that was one of the most off putting things. It was the first episode of the second season, ancient Apocalypse. I watch that and I'm like, they're just digging up old dirt. I'm waiting for them to see, like some sort of artifacts.

00:58:29:20 - 00:58:44:11
Unknown
And like you said, that's some sort of evidence of another civilization we've never even encountered before. And I'm ready for this mindblowing reveal. And then I realized, you know, they just they all they didn't even do any evidence on on dirt, you know, they just said, yeah, this stuff below here is also got to be a pyramid, I guess.

00:58:44:11 - 00:59:12:15
Unknown
Yeah. They fast and loose with the truth is, done more by the Hancock camp than the Flint Devil camp in that regard. Yeah. Well, and something else I pointed out to people is that it's not surprising that they found charcoal at that depth. It's a volcano. Yeah, right. Volcanoes start fires. Yeah. Fire produces charcoal. It's really not surprising that the soils are going to contain some charcoal, but that doesn't mean that any humans were doing anything there, although there were certainly humans in Indonesia at that time.

00:59:12:15 - 00:59:34:14
Unknown
Okay, that that's an interesting question. It's not impossible that humans were there. It's just very unlikely that they were building a pyramid. Yeah. Well, John, I mean, I can speak for myself and Mike and I, a lot of our listeners that we definitely prefer hearing, factual evidence based claims. And so for that, we were very grateful. You know, it was definitely eye opening.

00:59:34:14 - 00:59:57:17
Unknown
I've learned a lot just today, and I've been reading about this stuff for a few weeks here. So before we go, I do want to get your thoughts on one more thing. They're currently doing, hearings in Congress about Aero, about UAP and those appearances. I'm curious if this is anything in your purview whatsoever. Do archeologists or anthropologists look at, aliens from other planets?

00:59:57:18 - 01:00:17:07
Unknown
Is that something you even care about to put the TV on, or is that another one of these? We're going to dismiss it until some evidence or as it's head. Well, of course it intersects with archeology because of the whole ancient aliens thing. Sure. And, you know, one of the interesting things to think about is ancient aliens has been running for 20 seasons.

01:00:17:09 - 01:00:42:14
Unknown
Has anyone ever attacked ancient aliens the way that we're criticizing Graham Hancock? No. Why? Because the people on ancient aliens don't attack archeology, and archeologists. You know that. They're throwing it out there. And could this be aliens or. Yes, it was aliens or whatever. But they're not attacking archeology. They're not discouraging people from from investigate these things by talking to archeologists or reading archeology books.

01:00:42:16 - 01:01:02:17
Unknown
But with regard to dealing with that, I mean, it it depends on it depends on the archeology. Some people are very interested in it and some people are just not. I should I need to confess that when I was reading about Atlantis back in the 70s, I was also reading about UFOs. I read about Betty and Barney Hill and their alien abduction.

01:01:02:19 - 01:01:24:14
Unknown
And I, I was paying attention to that. And there are some archeologists. I have some good friends who have been, you know, deep into ufology from, you know, being involved with MoveOn back in the 1970s and 1980s. So, so we know this stuff, and we're intrigued by it. It is something it's certainly very interesting. But where's the evidence?

01:01:24:14 - 01:01:49:22
Unknown
You know, let let's see it. And I'm kind of skeptical, having tracked this on this stuff for over 50 years, I sort of have a feeling that another 50 years will go by and there will not be a disclosure. I, I'm I'm just very skeptical about it. And the thing is, you know, the the great Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

01:01:50:00 - 01:02:20:04
Unknown
Okay, just simple evidence is not going to cut it. And I keep wondering, you know, the videos of UFOs were really shitty back in the 60s. Why are they still shitty today? Right? Right. Oh, yeah. Everybody's walking around with it with an HDTV camera in their pocket. Why can't we get any decent footage of of an alien spacecraft if it if it's there, you know, why haven't the why hasn't the photography, much less the videography, gotten better in the past 50 years?

01:02:20:05 - 01:02:43:00
Unknown
Well, my theory about that is that the reason why things are UFOs or waves is because you can't identify them, and you can't identify them because you have shitty imagery and because you couldn't really tell that well, to begin with. But if we're being visited by, by by extraterrestrials and vehicles from outer space, we really ought to have much better imagery.

01:02:43:02 - 01:03:07:09
Unknown
We ought to have much better photographs. We ought to have much better eyewitness reports. People should be pulling out their phones and making videos of these things. But, you know, if you know this material, there's not anything we're seeing today that's substantially different from what we were seeing in the 1960s and 1970s. You know, it's made with it's made with, with digital video instead of film video.

01:03:07:11 - 01:03:23:08
Unknown
But but the imagery is pretty similar. Yeah, definitely. Well, before we wrap it up here, Mike, is there anything else that I missed or that you'd like to add? No, just that I'm very excited for the recent move of everybody going over to blue Sky. I've been enjoying it for the last few days. They're the environment.

01:03:23:08 - 01:03:46:04
Unknown
They're so much different than Twitter. He's already there. Too late. Cooper yeah, yeah, but I put in a plug for my for my blues. Please do that. What? I was just going to ask you there. It's, J1 op s2 dot BSc ui dot social. But J ops two will you'll find me there. But I'm hedging their bets.

01:03:46:06 - 01:04:08:21
Unknown
I'm on I'm also on Mastodon. I'm on tribal. I'm on threads. I've been I've been in social media, and I kid you not for 40 years. I first bought my my first desktop PC in 1985, and I started with pyro. Net BBS systems and then moved from that to, to Usenet, and then to, you know, a variety of different platforms.

01:04:09:00 - 01:04:27:19
Unknown
But I have been online in one way or another, pretty much every week for the past 40 years. I'm a long time are in terms of this cyberspace thing. I'll put a pin on it. Are you leaving X? Are you leaving Twitter? I'm not leaving Twitter because I still want to engage with people. I still want to teach people.

01:04:28:00 - 01:04:49:01
Unknown
I still want to keep a keep an eye on what's what's being said. I really, you know, just like you guys do. I really like to listen to both sides. I pay attention to both sides. I will put on Fox News every once in a while. My my, you know, I will listen to right wing talk radio.

01:04:49:03 - 01:05:15:19
Unknown
I used to listen to rush, you know, just to see what the other side was saying. And in fact, I even this is I'll, you know, I'll reveals. I used to send in very small donations, like a dollar or $5, to things like the Christian Coalition or to other groups just to get on their mailing list so that I would be getting the mailings that are coming from, from from the Christian nationalists and, and other groups because I wanted to see what they were saying.

01:05:15:19 - 01:05:35:03
Unknown
It was really interesting to me. And so I try to keep on top of all of that. I also should say my family is a very politically diverse family. You would probably not believe that some of the people in my extended family are actually related to each other, because of the way the differences in the way we see the world.

01:05:35:05 - 01:05:53:06
Unknown
And so I just find that really fascinating. I just have been intrigued by that my whole life. And I just think humans are so incredibly interesting, which is why I became an anthropologist to begin with. Beautiful. Well, what a way to end it. And just for the record, I'm off setting you guys. I vote that I'm voting blue in every single poll that gets texted to me.

01:05:53:11 - 01:06:08:19
Unknown
So you guys can go to Mastodon and all of that, and they'll Christian, that's just me. Now, I honestly, I've never responded to a poll. I don't know how they do polling, but, John, this was a lot of fun. Put all of your socials on the screen as you were saying them, but they're also down below in the description.

01:06:08:21 - 01:06:23:16
Unknown
We're really grateful for your time. And thank you again for coming on here. And, this has been elevated thoughts.