Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Flint Dibble (Round 2): Battling Pseudo Archaeology & Sharing Science

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

We return to the world of lost civilizations, pseudo-archaeology, and real archaeology with Cardiff University archaeologist Flint Dibble. Sadly the senior member of the Decoding team was absent for the interview but junior decoder Chris struggled on as best he could. This episode, recorded just before the release of Ancient Apocalypse Season 2 on Netflix and Graham Hancock's associated podcast PR tour, examines the appeal of myths like Atlantis, criticisms Flint has faced from Hancock and others, and the broader challenges of communicating good science online.The discussion covers whether debunking false narratives is effective, Flint's experiences post-Rogan with public engagement and social media harassment, and the importance of academics actively participating in public discourse to counter culture-war-fueled stereotypes.Finally, in a crushing blow, Chris also gets Flint to acknowledge that BIG ARCHAEOLOGY can't disprove his stunning new theory about ancient seaweed submarines.LinksOur first interview with Flint from just after his appearance on Rogan.Archaeology with Flint Dibble: The Aftermath of Talking to Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan: A Reply to the HatersArchaeology with Flint Dibble: The Top 6 Penis Bones in ArchaeologyNew Scientist article on Flint: The archaeologist fighting claims about an advanced lost civilisationReal-Archaeology Event!Graham Hancock's Response Video to Flint: Fact-checking science communicator Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan Experience episode 2136Bridges Podcast: Uniting YouTube Against Fake History Frauds | MILO ROSSI & FLINT DIBBLE | Bridges #21The Skeptic: Dr Flint Dibble wins 2024 Skeptical Activism Ockham awardHalmhofer, S. (2024) Manufacturing History: Atlantis, Aryans, and the use of Pseudoarchaeology by the Far-Right. Conspiracy Theories and Extremism in New Times (pp.53-81) Chapter: 3. Lexington Books.

I'm here with Flint Deble, the archaeologist from Cardiff University, themed internet warrior, facing the pseudo-archaeologist hordes. And my coho seat is empty. Flint, there's a missing Australian vibe because the other 50% some would say of the recording the gurus podcast is potentially asleep in America, snoozing away, possibly dreaming by the agents of like sessions of and whatnot, but not here. But he gave me his permission to represent the coding the gurus brand. So I apologize that you're stuck with the junior half of the team, but nonetheless, thank you for making the time and it's good to see you again. It's good to be back. It was a good time chatting with both of you last time and I'm sure it'll be

a good time chatting with you, Chris. Yeah. So now, a surprise guest, I've just got Graham Hancock behind the curtain here. I'm going to, not quite, but I suspect everybody in our audience is aware that you had a career in archeology and have an ongoing career in archeology and academia. Come on, I have a career. You had a career, it's over now, in archeology and have an ongoing career in archeology. You had a career. It's over.

But you probably rose to broader awareness with the Hancock debate with Rogan, right, for a lot of people. And I think since then as well, it's fair to say that you've become something of like a public face for archaeology online. I know there are other people doing similar things on YouTube and in some cases like focusing on debunking and in some cases presenting history, but your YouTube channel existed before the whole issue with Rogan. But has there been a significant rise in subscribers or popularity off the back of that? Or did you just get pure notoriety from it? Well, a little bit from a column A, a little bit from column B. I mean, some of it was also just me and my wife,

who's my video editor and an archaeologist as well, Yoni. So when we found out I was going to be on Joe Rogan, that's when we said, oh, we should do something with this YouTube channel. Before that, I'd really only had a few of my teaching lectures up from the pandemic. So just some lectures from class at Dartmouth when I was teaching at Dartmouth, and it was all online. And so, yeah, I'd always wanted

to do something more as YouTube, and since we figured I'm going to get that exposure going on Joe Rogan, maybe we should do something with it. So we started recording interviews with people, experts whose expertise in archaeology intertwined with the topics that Hancock talks about and writes about. And so that's how it got started. And since then, we've just continued interviewing experts and producing some scripted content and other things. And yeah, I mean, there's definitely been a large gain since then. I find it funny in the debate on Joe Rogan. Graham Hancock pulled up a screenshot of my YouTube channel and he's like, Flint is a major figure in social media and media. And

it's like I had 4,000 subscribers at the time. So I even said it, I'm like, Graham, I have 4,000 subscribers, you have to be kidding me. And but but now I'm up, I'm pushing 30,000. And I've started working with other YouTubers to try to A, collaborate a little bit. And some of those YouTubers are scholars, some of them are enthusiasts, they're a wide range of different people. And we're actually putting together, just so everybody knows, an event for October 25th to 27th called Real Archaeology, www.real-archaeology.com. And we're going to have on some fantastic scholars for live streaming and then 50 of us. So we have YouTubers, podcasters, TikTokers, bloggers.

We're all putting out content that weekend affiliated with the event, just any topic related to actual archaeology that you can imagine. So it should be a good time. Yeah. This is not the broad thing that you would want. So it should be a good time. Yeah. This is not the product that you would want the associate with, but I was like 50 people. That's like, I was recently watching rescue the Republic, Brett Weinstein crankathon, and they had, you know, I huge about the speakers.

So it's in my mind, but obviously not parallel. I'm with a kind of opposite focus, right. And not saying don't trust mainstream authorities, don't heed academics. But yeah, so I apologize for the parallel. But it's only in the amount of amount of people. But yeah, so I have a bunch of questions. And there's also the issue about the new season of ancient. What is the ancient apocalypse? That's right. I keep thinking ancient

civilizations, but it's ancient apocalypse. There's a disaster. Now, yeah, it comes out tomorrow. So this will probably air after it comes out. I've not seen it yet. I have no knowledge of what exactly is in it just yet. Yeah. You've seen the trailer, though. I've seen the trailer. And I mean, you know, I've read his book

that it's based off of. And so in fact, on my YouTube, I did a video with Professor John Hoops. Professor John Hoops, he corrected how I pronounced his name, that's why. And he's also someone who studies Hancock and the phenomenon of Atlantis in America. And he's an American archeologist,

meaning he focuses on South America and Mesoamerica with his research. So we did a video that just came out last week, pre-bunking the season two to try to preempt some of the claims and to try to really present the real archeology of these regions and sites that we expect Graham to focus on from the trailer and from his book and podcast appearances and such.

And also I think it's a good example of trying to get accurate information out there for journalists and YouTubers. So we have a nice little bibliography, which includes scholars that they can get in touch with if they have questions about specific sites and specific topics. So hopefully the pre-bunk,

it's not necessarily pre-bunking because we don't know what he's gonna say exactly, but it's sort of preempting a little bit and getting out a lot of good information about the real archeology of these places. Yeah. That's interesting, but of course, you don't have Keanu Reeves and your.

I know. I know. My video only has 25,000 views. And like, you know, Keanu Reeves, which for those of you that don't know, he's he's he's going to be on Ancient Apocalypse season two. And according to the press release, he's going to be in several episodes. So it's like he's almost a co-host. And as soon as Netflix, Netflix is the thumbnails going to pop up and it's going to be an image of Graham Hancock and Keanu Reeves, and you know, people

are going to click on that. That's going to be another celebrity whose my esteem collapses for it. And I'm looking forward to Matthew McConaughey already destroyed my fear for any market at a multi-level marketing scheme. I did not know that. Oh, that's a shame. It is a shame. It is a shame.

But yeah, so, you know, Hollywood celebrities, not necessarily particularly themed critical thinkers. So, yeah. necessarily particularly themed critical thinkers. So true. Yeah. And, you know, I think in some respect as well, although we don't know, as you said, neither of us have seen it, but typically I think that the narrative that Graham Hancock presents and basically any alternative historian or alternative archaeologist, it is often like a very compelling and interesting and a more mysterious world.

Right. I know that you, you have made the argument and I agree with you that like the actual history is also like fascinating and interesting and mysterious and all these things as well, but like you don't have like crystal ancient civilizations powered on perhaps metal ships that will get to the subject of like whether there's metal involved or not. But you know, I think that kind of Atlantis myth, it is something which like, you know, everybody can understand that that's like a kind of cool intriguing story. Something that's not found. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Same thing with aliens. And I mean, that's what's tough. I mean, these are seductive ideas that are popular and have been popular. Maybe aliens is a more recent idea with relation to archaeology, but many since Eric von Däniken in the 60s and 70s. But the Atlantis idea, you know, that's been existing in the popular imagination ever since

the Europeans started settling the Americas, because that's what existing in the popular imagination ever since the Europeans started settling the Americas. Because that's what really brought it back to the forefront as a possibility, let's say. It was never really considered as a possibility until the Europeans found America. And some people started saying, oh, well actually it started as fiction. And that I think is the key here.

A lot of this stuff starts as fiction. So you have Plato, it's an allegory in a philosophical dialogue, but then it first gets major attention when Francis Bacon writes a fictional story called The New Atlantis. And in that story, there's survivors from the collapse of Atlantis

that were hiding out in the Pacific and were part of the indigenous Americas and some of the monuments there. And it was this fictional story, which then inspired this pseudo history that we start seeing in the 17th through 19th and then even till today, centuries. Francis Peking, like the forefeller

of the scientific method, Francis Peking, that one. Yeah, he wrote an unfinished fictional story called The New Atlantis. And it's actually kind of interesting because it's a kind of utopia story. All this twists actually the real evidence from Plato on its head. So in Plato, Atlantis is a dystopia. It's a bad place, while Athens is the ideal city. In Plato, there are no survivors, but Bacon, he turns it into a utopia with survivors that spread technology and civilization around the world. And so, you know, it into a utopia with

survivors that spread technology and civilization around the world. And what's funny is it's this unfinished story, but the way the society is set up in New Atlantis, it's on an island called Ben Salem, which I find interesting. I'm from outside of Philadelphia. There's a town called Ben Salem. The way it's all structured, it actually acted as one of the major influences for how the modern university system is set up. The way the society is structured is similar to how universities ended up structuring themselves. So that's actually one of the major influences of this new Atlantis. Besides the pseudo-history side, it had a major influence on the development and structuring of universities

in Europe and America. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, you know, a good illustration that like the actual history is very interesting because in the same way, like, I'm sure you're familiar with the history about the Theosophists and Madame Lovatsky and all those such figures, right. And although they are often also inventing outlandish stories and like kind of very Victorian in their outlook when you read them, but they're actually also often quite adventurous people, you know, like traveling around in a time when that would have been unusual, especially, you, especially for women. So the actual history can often be intriguing and kind of like a mystery tale around these eccentric characters. But typically that's not the kind of thing that people tend to focus on.

Right. Like that's not the thing that gets tick tock excited. You have Francis Bacon in New Atlantis and the structuring of universities is not going to make a viral tick to. Saying I found Atlantis under the sea or in the desert or in a jungle, that'll get the clicks on TikTok. That's true. That's true. And so I'd like to spend a little bit of time going through Graham Hancock's recent reply video to you because he took quite a long time, right? It's been like half a year or so since. In fact, this is something that really surprised me was he never really acknowledged our conversation.

He, the day it was released, he posted it on Twitter and then he started boosting this other YouTuber that was harassing me, but he didn't really address much. And then finally, to me, it's totally weird because he dropped this hour long critique of me, if you want to put it that way, on his YouTube channel. And it's gotten at this point, I think, like 400,000 views. And it's a really strange time for him to drop this critique because it's six months later

and he has a new season coming out, what, tomorrow. I know. At the time. It's like, why is he not promoting his season? Why is he instead responding to me now much later? I still don't quite understand. I have some thoughts on it, but I've not quite wrapped my head around the timing of it, and it's strange because he's never given an interview

or a presentation acknowledging our conversation until now. So it's very odd. That is odd timing given the release because a cynical perspective of it could be that you want to create a kind of controversy, like a round of coverage before the new season drops. But that doesn't seem the best way to do it because like it just muddles the initial release, right? Because you would want the coverage presumably to be about like your new series.

Which is not mentioned at all in there. No. Yeah. I guess I have three hypotheses for the timing of it. Cause it was clearly intentionally, it was a well edited video with imagery and stuff like that. So it was clearly intentionally dropped at that time. And so I only have three possible reasons for it. One, he wants to muddy the waters with me

to convince people that I am not trustworthy. So therefore they won't ask my opinion. Like journalists won't ask my opinion or other things like that. It'll sort of pre bunk in a sense, some of the critiques that he'll get with the season dropping. So that's one idea, which makes some sense, but I've been thinking that through on other levels too, maybe there's a more specific reason for it. And that could be that maybe he's going back on Joe Rogan to promote it, in which case last time

his Joe Rogan episode promoting season two dropped the same day as season two. So that would mean he's recording it right now and it drops tomorrow in relation to when we're talking now. And he figures that Joe will talk to him about that debate. So he wanted to have that out as some sort of, hey, you can look, I just released a video type situation. So that's another second possibility that crossed my mind.

The third possibility is intriguing as well. And what that is, is maybe he realizes that since I actually respond to him in an effective way that garners media attention, maybe he actually wants to hoist me up as his adversary because that boosts the drama of the whole situation and therefore implicitly still advertises his show, even though some of that is negative publicity

because it's me effectively making my points in public. And so that's the third idea. Or it could also be some combination of these three, or it could just be randomly. It's that's when he finished and that's when he dropped it. I don't know. I like this, uh, hypothesizing conspiracy, hypothesizing Brett Weinstein referred to, but I have a, I have a fourth suggestion. It's possible.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know because I don't follow Graham that's possible. I'm intrigued. Yeah. I don't know because I don't follow Graham that closely, but it seems that it would not be beyond the realm of possibilities that he prepared that was tinkering with it or waiting for the time to release it and wanted to get on with it. And then it came to the point where, well, the new series is about to drop, so I better release it like, no.

Yeah. That would be a much more innocent thing where this was just randomly the time to release it in a sense. There was not much strategic thought there other than just get it out because it's ready now and let's get it out before there's other things to do. It was a very long time, but there was just a point where, oh, I still, you know, I haven't put that out and I, you know, issues about it. Cause I mean, we may as well get to this now and deal with the other points after. Cause I watched the video, it's an hour long, as you say, it goes through a bunch of stuff, but there's really three main points that it focuses on.

focuses on one is that he accuses you of like overstating the amount of wreckages that archaeologists have found right by several orders of magnitude. Which I want to be honest, I did misread that article and misstate that I've acknowledged that elsewhere. It doesn't change my argument at all, whether there's three million or three hundred thousand known shipwrecks, a ton of underwater archaeology has been done to investigate shipwrecks. We have a good understanding of it, and if there are major ocean-going vessels that could traverse the Atlantic or Pacific, those should show up in our underwater archaeological records. So, I've acknowledged that mistake before as the only factual error that I've found in what I said on Joe Rogan in a four and a half hour conversation that covered all of archeology. So I don't feel too bad about making one factual error.

No, I would say this is a very familiar pattern that happens in, in general with like conspiracy theorists, whatever you regard Graham as being, this is something that they do where, where there is an error or like anything that can be presented as a misrepresentation of something or whatever, even if it is a very small point, it is not a central plank of your argument. You're happy to say, okay, well, yes, that, that amount was wrong. Okay. The key point of my argument is actually this, but the simple fact of any mistake is left upon us. Like, so Flint will say, this is a minor issue, but actually this was central. And this is, you know, and this, so this always happens. And it also happens in terms of finding connections, you know, between people like, so that that doesn't happen in this interview, not exactly, but pointing out that there is somebody who wants interacted with someone who worked for the government

or whatever is, is also something that happens. But so you have this issue that like he spends a lot of time on at the start, like kind of pointing out in the interview, Fin says six million. But when I and he also does a very dramatic thing of when I looked into it. Of course, at the time, I believe Flint because he's an expert. And but then I was shocked to find out and look at the confidence with which he states this, can you believe? And it's it's like a very dramatic response, right? Of course, too.

And I'm kind of making. Yeah, so he spends a long time on that. And then he goes on to say so like but to do justice, I think, to one of his points as well. So he makes a big thing about you said this amount and this, and actually this was wrong. But he also argues that given the like the biodegradable nature of ships that even if there were loads of them that you wouldn't be able to find evidence of them. Because the earliest, so I find this like argument a little bit perplexing because it seemed to be like he was saying these ships would completely disintegrate and there would be basically no chance for us to find evidence of them.

And then it sounded to me a bit like, well, then you could say there was giant helium flying machines, but there's no evidence of them. So sure, like this is the core. This is the core of Graham as a guru, right? The entire core of Graham as a guru and his audience is what he wants to do is the one point he always is convinced of and that he convinces so many people of is it's impossible to disprove his idea. That it's not possible ever to prove a negative. So therefore, it's always at least within the realm of plausibility

that there is such an advanced law civilization from the Ice Age. And so that's half of what Graham always tries to do. When critiquing season one of Ancient Apocalypse, when I wrote about it on Twitter and elsewhere, one of my favorite examples is he talks about this cosmic impact, which alters the climate of the planet and destroys the civilization.

And he's like, this cosmic impact is key because it destroys all the evidence. And then he goes around, so that's one thing. That's his evidence for why there's no evidence. But the problem is, is that cosmic impact is far from proven. Most geologists and most climatologists do not agree with the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis,

which is what this hypothesis is called. There used to be scientists that subscribed to it, but they've all realized since in the last 10 years that there's no good evidence and the evidence is against it. But what Hancock says in the show is, well, maybe what happened is this impact hit an ice cap. Therefore it didn't leave a crater

and that's why we don't find it. And so his entire goal here is to show that there's a reason why we don't have evidence and therefore you should trust me. And it's just like, this is totally a circular style argument where you're saying this could happen, but we have no evidence for this reason. That reason also doesn't have any evidence, but it didn't leave evidence for that reason.

So therefore it's plausible making the whole thing a plausible circle, if you see what I mean. And so that's like his entire goal with everything he does. And that's why he ended that video talking about the quote, which he says, you know, went around the world about him saying he has no evidence. And he says, no, it's archaeologists don't have evidence. I have evidence of. And then he doesn't talk about anything he has evidence for,

nothing that dates to his civilization. So that was actually what I was going to read is because you could take that as So that was actually what I was going to read is because you could take that as his fourth major point is he has this issue that you and others noted. And it's actually Joe Rogan, I think that that raises the issue saying, yeah, you're right, Graham, that we can't rule this out, but can we say there is no actual evidence yet from the archeological record in support of this? And he says, yes, like, and he endorses that. actual evidence yet from the archeological record in support of this. And he says, yes, like, and he endorsed that.

He wanted to point out that after that, he said, but this is, this is crucial because this is archeologists are looking in the wrong places and they aren't interested and in the trailer for his new season, he is also presenting that. Like even just in the two minutes narrative I saw, you know, he's basically suggesting that archaeologists are always unwilling to interpret evidence in the way that he is. Like he has this thing about the Sphinx, right? That the orientation of the Sphinx or what is it? Goblek e tepe? How do you pronounce that? Goblek e tepe, yeah, yeah. orientation of the Sphinx or what is it? Gobletepe? Yeah. Yeah.

There is no mainstream archaeologist or historian that agrees with his kind of analysis about the angles, but that is the evidence. So that I think is his counter point, how he would present it. point, how he would present it. Which, by the way, is disingenuous as all heck, because he says, in what they have studied, meaning in what archaeologists have studied, there's no evidence for his civilization. But all he does on his TV show is go to archaeological sites that we have studied. So why are you even going to these sites? This doesn't make any sense, right? This is playing that game again of kind of winking and,

and you know, he accused me with the shipwreck thing where he says, well, but in the ice age, we do have evidence of humans moving overseas with ships and we don't have their ships, right? Oh yes, good reason as well. But the reality is, this is disingenuous because the way archeologists hypothesize about those ships is they're basically rafts or canoes.

So they're not going to be distinguishable from just logs that we do get because organic material does preserve underwater in many different contexts it can. Our earliest example of human modified wood dates back 180,000 years ago from a water log context in Africa, for example. And so, you know, wood can preserve. But the thing is, is when you're talking about very simple craft, rafts,

just tying logs together or a dugout canoe, that type of thing, that's not going to be easy to distinguish once it's degraded some. Sure, we've not found any Ice Age ships, but that's because we don't think they built Ice Age ships. On the other hand, he's talking about a civilization capable of traveling across the Atlantic. That's going to require a very different kind of ship that should show up in the archaeological record underwater in some form or another, especially out of the 250,000 that have been documented. Well, Flint, have you considered the possibility that like, I mean, this sounds like something archeologists

wouldn't have properly looked for, but if you fashioned a submarine out of seaweed and it had some kind of internal engine made from coral, it's impossible for you to disprove that that technology would not just look like. I can't disprove that. I can't disprove that. You are right that the existence of submarines

made out of seaweed empowered by coral is not something that archeology is capable of disproving right now. Well, he's got to, maybe I should contact him actually. You're on your path to becoming a guru, you know, like this is how you start. So the other two things that he highlights that I think still worth talking about, and I know that you've addressed them in other videos, by the way, So I, I am aware in some detail. But one is that and also Dan Richards, I think he's relying on a lot of the arguments that he presented in response to your videos. This is a another online alternative

archaeologist. I don't know what the way to present it like conspiracy pseudo archaeologists, Alternative archaeologists, I don't know what the way to present it, like conspiracy. Pseudo-archaeologists. Pseudo-archaeologists. A Graham Hancock fan is maybe the way to put it. He's a Graham Hancock fan that had a very small YouTube channel until after the debate, he decided that I lied. And he found ways like these, they were talking about some of them, where he claimed that I lied. And he put out these videos, and then Graham discovered him and started boosting him and Dan's channel grew from something like 10,000 subscribers to 40,000 because

Graham Hancock has boosted him dozens of times in the last few months. And throughout these videos, Dan oftentimes slanders and harasses not just me, but Professor John Hoops and other archaeologists as well. Um, yes. And I think we will get to that as well. The, the kind of blowback and positive and negative ways of being involved with Rogan and all of the things that have followed it and continuing to engage with those communities, but to finish off the video, there's two other points.

One of them relates to white supremacy and racist tropes. And we'll get to that. But the other one is the ice course and meta metallurgy evidence, right? Because similar to what we were just talking about with the lack of evidence for a ICH fleets, there also is a lack of evidence that there was metal smithing in the ICH. In previous eras where this was happening, we have traces in various environmental sources and this is missing in the ICH. But according to Graham, according to Dan Richards, this is not the case. Actually, there are some papers, there are some experts who have found traces or significant

points of metal deposits in the Ice Age. And you just flat out ignored this, downplayed it, refused to acknowledge it and cherry picked studies that suited your narrative. So how do you respond to that charge? Yeah, that one is total BS. I did not make any mistakes at all. In a sense, it's complicated because in early books, Graham claimed that his civilizations could have used metals, which of course it's an Atlantis style civilization.

Plato talks about Atlantis having metals. But then when Anjo Rogan as well, Graham debated earlier, not an archaeologist, but a professional skeptic named Michael Shermer. And that debate went really well for Graham, which makes sense. Michael Shermer is not an archaeologist. He did not understand how to communicate archaeology or how to represent our evidence very well in a setting with somebody who is familiar with archaeology, at least enough to twist our evidence very well in a setting with somebody who is familiar with archeology, at least enough to twist our evidence and things like that. And so in that debate, Hancock mentioned how, maybe my civilization doesn't have metals.

I'm not claiming necessarily that they do, da da da da da. And so the reason I brought this up at the beginning of my day, and both this and the shipwrecks, by the way, were my most minor points. I spent like a minute on the Monjo-Rogan, no more. And Graham has still not addressed

the two main disproofs I presented, which is all the actual evidence from the Ice Age we have and the evidence for agriculture we have and the development of agriculture and the timing of agriculture after the Ice Age. And so, you know, all that evidence he's just ignored. And I'll return to that maybe in a bit when we do the overview of this.

But with the ice core stuff, what I wanted to ask Graham, and I was like, Graham, look, you sometimes go on podcasts and in one of your books, Magicians of the Gods, you claim that this civilization had technology equivalent to 18th century modern civilizations. And it's like, what technology are you talking about? Clearly you told Michael Shermer it's not metals. I'm glad, and this is what I said, I'm really glad you don't think it's metals, because

if you look at the evidence from ice cores, we can detect evidence for large scale metallurgy. And I presented this graph, published by some colleagues of mine, where they can track the development of large scale metallurgy in the Roman period and the medieval period in ice cores. And so what's confusing here is they say, well, that I didn't show a graph about the ice age. And it's like, well, there is no equivalent graph in the same way that shows both this metallurgy and the ice age.

So I couldn't show such a graph because not such a graph exists. And instead they pulled out this article from 1996, where it talks about the trace elements, which includes lead, which was the one I focused on, in ice cores, but it's not just lead, it's like zirconium and it's copper and it's cadmium and it's other things.

Any coral, burnt coral? No burnt coral, sorry. No seaweed either. And the reason why is because this is not from mining silver or mining metals that have lead as a byproduct. These are from dust being kicked up into the atmosphere. There's always metals in the ice cores. Nobody denied this. It's just that those metals during the ice age, they correlate with periods of climate change. And then they claim, but nobody's ever isotopically tested these metals for whether they were used for metallurgy, which is A, not how it's done.

You isotopically test something to provenance it. What that means is you test where those trace metals originated from. And so that article on Roman metallurgy, for example, it did isotopic studies of a bunch of different mines known to be used in Spain and Italy by the Romans. And it detected a comparable signature in those trace elements in the ice cores during the Roman period, which is really freaking cool. That's like, bam, we can prove

these trace metals come from here. And this is where Dan and Graham get it completely wrong is they have done isotopic analysis on trace metals from ice age layers of ice cores. And those have determined them to be from dust. And what I find funny is they call this speculation. These scientists speculate that it's dust. And it's like, no, they definitively demonstrate it's dust

based on a wide range of different sources of evidence. The timing of it based with climate change, the provenancing they have done, the fact that it's a series of different metals that would be explained by heterogeneous dust particles in the air rather than mining which just kicks up certain metals. And so, you know, it's like there's a range

of different evidences that show this. And they just ignore me. They're just like, no, but Flint mess represented stuff. And it's like, well, all right, I don't know what else to say. I've explained myself. Well, I I did find it quite compelling that because, as I said, you you addressed this point in response, I think, to Dan Richards or or me was just even like a month ago too.

Yeah. And in that video, you noted that like he was flashing up a paper and the title of the paper was explaining that relationship, right? Like just the title. This is something like you mentioned in the video, you know, that you would feel students, right, for failing to notice this. And this is something that I teach students to do, like, you know, read the abstracts and critically evaluate the paper and whatnot. And it just like my own cards on the table. I mean, it's quite clear that I, in general, don't have very much sympathy to Graham Hancock. I'm just steaming of his position.

But this approach where people select, like, as soon as I saw that video and saw him pointing to two studies, one from 1996. And I think the other one was from the 80s or like there was another one. Yeah. Yeah. And there's been decades, right? We're in 2024. And if you are selecting two specific studies from like the 80, one in the 80s, one in the 90s. My immediate antenna is like, why have you fixated on these two studies? And secondly, then this happens

all the time. And you would understand this completely like as an academic, but I think it's sometimes lost on non-academics that even if those academics really strongly endorsed that there was complex metalworking in the Ice Age and there were two papers that did that, but the vast majority of researchers and papers disagreed with that interpretation and showed evidence to the contrary. You cannot just select the two papers that support it and say, well, but there were two things because like what matters is the overall weight of evidence. But this is not how pseudoarchaeologists, conspiracy theorists and whatnot think. They think if a paper is published and if it presents, you know, a piece of evidence, it is almost always presented as like the smoking gun, or at the very least, that it wedges open enough thought that the mainstream narrative is just as plausible as the alternative narrative. Like we cannot, as you say, we cannot definitively disprove that there was some other form. I think we can definitively disprove

an advanced global civilization. I really strongly think that the archaeological evidence definitively disproves it. That's why not a single archaeologist believes in it. I agree, but I know that basically all of these people are operating in that small gap in the scientific method that says if it turned out tomorrow that you dug down and you find like what the hell there's a huge tank down here with all working points and it's from

200,000 years ago, it would be really interesting. All scientists in the world would be assigned to them and whatnot. If we found that, we would publish it without a doubt, because that's what archaeologists do. No, no, no, you'd bury it down and you'd... I think this is like an interesting philosophical question. It's something I've been struggling with. You know, it's funny. I got my literary agent who now represents me from being on Decoding the Gurus before.

He saw our episode and got in touch with me. And so I'm working on a book now about Atlantis. And so one of the things that I am trying to figure out how to explain adequately is how you do disprove a negative. And what I've realized is philosophically, you can't disprove a negative on a level of philosophy, a philosophy of science and things like that. On the other hand, scientifically in practice,

we discard and disprove negatives all the time. That's actually at the core of science is rejecting hypotheses where the evidence contradicts them. It doesn't even mean that when you run an experiment that that hypothesis is 100% disproven in every single context. Maybe in the gravity on Mars, some of the experiments we run

or whatever on the planet Zircon, those experiments might end up differently. But at the same time, practically speaking, with peer review and everything, what we do as scientists is we discard hypotheses that the evidence does not match. And that's just what we do all the time. Exactly. I can think of a case, and you might know the specific details of

this better. I'm only referencing it as an example about like the dangers of cherry picking, because I remember in my undergraduate course, learning about these kind of competing hypotheses about population migrations in India and like various potential invasions and ethnic groups. And there's political issues because people are claiming different ethnic legacies and whatnot there. But then population genetics provided new evidence that we didn't have before. And there was also phylogenetic trees done, but on cognates, like word language. So linguistics, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Linguistic analysis, but using like phylogenetic trees to kind of reconstruct languages based

on cognates that they had, you know, words matching across languages. And with behavioral genetics, it became that from the possible stories, there were ones that were better supported by these two new lines of evidence. So if you looked prior to that, prior to these two new lines of evidence coming out, there was a lot of debate and disagreement. And I think there still is some debate and disagreement, but the way I read it at the time was that the evidence had started to lean towards one thing more strongly as evidence lines accumulated. But that would mean

that like taking Graham Hancock or pseudo-archaeologists approach, if you look back in the 70s and find a paper which is saying we cannot distinguish between these two possibilities and there's actually evidence for both of them, it's not that that paper was wrong. It's just talking about the evidence that has existed then. We don't have the evidence to actually answer this question. And I mean, you know, that's something that archaeologists struggle with all the time. I'm teaching the history of archaeological thought, right? And so right now, and so it's the history of the discipline over time and how we interpret stuff. And in the early 20th century,

there's this idea of culture history where, in a sense, pots equal people. So the idea is that in an assemblage of artifacts, burial rights, the way people build buildings, that defines an ethnic group, a culture, right? And so it was in the 60s and 70s, particularly after World War II, where everybody was appalled by racism and nationalism,

where people realized, wait a second, just because people use the same pots does not necessarily have to do with how they're related ethnically. And so in the 70s, we really moved away from that as a field and started to say, all right, we're identifying cultures, but not necessarily peoples. And so all these debates over the populating of India

and different ethnic groups or in Greece and stuff like that, a lot of this sort of stuff we realized in the 70s, we just can't answer these questions, right? We don't have the ability to talk about ethnicity and genetic relationships without clear biological evidence. And so that got some people to come up with different ways of studying human remains, to be able to identify kinship and whatnot. without clear biological evidence. And so that got some people to come up with different ways of studying human remains,

to be able to identify kinship and whatnot. And then of course, DNA revolutionized it. And so in many ways in the 70s and 80s and 90s, what you'd have is most of us saying, well, that's a question we can't answer using archeological evidence. We just can't get at that kind of level of kinship on a large population structure.

And language is the same thing. You're talking about phylogenetic taxonomies of language. at that kind of level of kinship on a large population structure. And language is the same thing. You're talking about phylogenetic taxonomies of language. Well, a lot of people link language to genetic identity as well and kinship. But as you probably all know, the language you speak does not necessarily have to do with how closely related you are to somebody. There's all sorts of reasons why this group might have maintained a language or adapted and adopted a new language for whatever X, Y, Z reason.

And so again, it's not a clear direct marker of kinship, of relatedness, or population structure. And so it's really only with the development of DNA in the last 20 years that we can start answering those questions in a much clearer way. And I'd say even in the last five, six years, as we've gotten much better at sequencing larger numbers of genomes. Yeah, generation sequencing. Yeah. And probably the obvious, like next thing to cover, and then I

promise we'll get out of this response video. But but this is an issue that extends beyond the response video. And we actually talked about it last time. It's the issue that extends beyond the response of a new, and we actually talked about it last time. It's the issue about racism and the legacy of racism and this. Right. And now last time, I think Matt and I brought up the devil's advocate point about raising this potentially serving as a kind of a red flag, right? Like the way Rogan reacted to it, you know, in the exchange you could see he really didn't like that, right? And in general, any mention of this tends to lead at least one group of people on the more conservative side to react like it's probably the size, right? Like you're accusing him of being a racist because he's interested in exploring alternative possibilities.

Now, in the video, Hancock is also making the point that like a low flint devil has said that he is not accusing me of being a racist. In other venues, when you look at what he said or you look at this letter by the Society for American Archaeology, there's a strong implication that my work is overestimating the capacities of white colonial settlers and downplaying the cultures of indigenous people. He points to these passages in his work where he first has to regretfully make the point about that he has used the terms like negroid or Caucasianoid. Or I don't know what the specific. Caucasianoid or whatever. Yeah.

Caucasianoid. Yeah. And he's like, yes. And he acknowledges, right? Like he regrets doing that, but he's reading out those passages. But then he's pointing out, I'm saying these were probably multi-ethnic ancient civilizations because I mean, the reason that it gives for this is just like looking at statues and deciding the features that the statues are representing, right? But nonetheless, he wants to make the case that there is a strong implication in what you said, what the Society for American Anthropologists said that his work is giving fuel to racism and more specifically he's saying that it is alleging that he's racist and that he's fevering white savior style narratives. So the two questions I guess have is like one, is it correct?

Like, is there, you know, a kind of underlying strong implication that he is doing that, do you think that's a fair point? And secondly, the connection between there being clear racial and Victorian white white exceptionalist, white peoples being savior narratives, like infecting this area is certainly true. But do you think that is a major force in like modern pseudo-archaeology? Or is that more the kind of legacy of the previous era? Okay, is there a point about him being racist? I mean, I cannot say this more often than I am,

which is I've never called him a racist. I've never called him a white supremacist. I've read most of what he's written, or at least a lot of it. I've listened to him speak in a number of different settings. He's never said anything that denigrates one race over another or claims that one race of people is superior to another. So in that sense, no, I do not even think that he's a racist or a white supremacist.

Okay. Just to be really clear and over clear. And he's married to a person of color and therefore some of his children are people of color. And so, you know, I don't think he harbors that kind of opinion. Okay. That was very ambiguous, Flint. I'm not really sure what you're trying to say. Well, it doesn't matter. I've said this kind of stuff before and it just doesn't matter, but whatever.

And I'll talk about why I think he brings it up as well. But second point is that in all of my writing and speaking about Graham Hancock, which at this point has been quite a bit. I do occasionally bring up race and we'll talk about why and how in a second, but it's always a very minor little part. Like when I bring it up in my first Twitter thread that talked, that the address ancient apocalypse, season one that went viral,

that was what sparked me on this journey in a sense. It's like three tweets out of 50 and in the end, and in my article in the conversation, same thing, it's one paragraph out of 50. And in the end, and in my article in the conversation, same thing, it's one paragraph out of 15. And so it's just like, I have never foregrounded racism in a way that claims that that's the core aspect of what he's talking about. Now, okay, what are the actual issues with racism involved? A, I want to be clear that when I talk about my own field, archaeology, I also talk about the racist past in archaeology. Does that mean all archaeologists are friggin' racist? No, obviously it does not.

In fact, I have plenty of videos, I have plenty of podcast discussions talking about the colonial history of archaeology and the way that museum collections were formed, how there was grave robbing going on and how it was looting this material from indigenous populations. And I strongly believe in repatriation right now. Does that mean that people that run museums right now

and are refusing to repatriate these objects are racist? No, I'm not trying to accuse any of these frigging people of being racist except for those in the past. Okay, on the other hand, there's a few different issues here that are important and are relevant in why they get brought up. Part of it is that this is one of the actual key pieces

of evidence that he has. He doesn't have any archeological evidence as we talked about, but what he has is these myths recorded by Spanish colonists that talk about these white saviors, like Quetzalcoatl, where they label him as white, who came and introduced these civilizations, let's say, technologies like writing and monumental architecture and art, to the Aztec people, the Mayan people. And so this, therefore, is an issue.

If this piece of evidence is due to the fact that biased Spanish racists wrote it down, and this is true in a lot of different contexts, not just for Quetzalcoatl, where colonialists, they like to imagine themselves appearing with guns and stuff like that as we are gods to these primitive people. That's how they imagine themselves in a number of contexts. If you read Hernán Cortés' letters,

he talks about how he's treated as some superior type being, right? And so that's how European adventurers and explorers and conquerors imagined themselves. And then they twisted this mythology. If you look at pre-contact depictions of Quetzalcoatl, as I did, I showed these on Joe Rogan, they don't depict them with white skin,

they depict them with tan, darker skin. And so, you know, there does not seem to be any evidence for this. So therefore in my mind, that's just not evidence. Okay. That's, that's important. That's not evidence that's potentially and very likely to be biased. Before you go on to the second point, can I just check one thing about that? Because in that response video, and I've seen this kind of raised elsewhere as well,

that there are respected historians and archeologists, people in good standing and works that are apparently regarded as like quite affordative that are that agree or the way that Hancock presents it right is that they agree more with him where they are aware that there are people who argue that most of this is due to like the influence of Spanish or other colonial myth making but some historians and archaeologists continue to suggest that that is not the, I completely- I mean, I think in his case,

I think he mostly cited older literature from the 90s, and he was trying to say in the 90s, this was somewhat accepted, which is true. I will grant him that, that in the 90s, there were plentiful people. These days, very few people accept it. I'm sure there's still some that do, but we now are more keen to recognize the impacts of the people

who wrote down those narratives, which are Spanish colonialists, right? And so that's something that we are now keen to acknowledge and recognize how that has biased our understanding of the history of these regions. And so that's something where, you know, yeah, he is right. In the 90s, I'll give him that credit that that was not the case. But the problem is, is he also presents this in ancient apocalypse. He does not refer to the skin color of Quetzalcoatl, but he keeps the same story there minus the skin color, right? And he emphasizes the beard, which is also an unfortunate trope

because many different Indigenous American tribes can grow beards. But there is this bias among many white people that think that Indigenous Americans simply can grow beards, but there is this bias among many white people that think that indigenous Americans simply cannot grow beards, which some tribes, admittedly some different groups of indigenous Americans, they oftentimes cannot grow beards very thick like this. So that is still implied in there with a wink-wink when he talks about these bearded figures that come from afar. And that's an ancient apocalypse that came out in 2022. So the other reason why this discussion of racism though is very, very important is both due to the past and the present ways in which these same colonial myths get used to justify actual real world racism and white supremacy.

And I don't mean Hancock's per se, he doesn't do this. Other people do. So for example, the Spanish colonists did this all the time. They used the story of Atlantis to claim lands. Or in North America, the US government, they use this idea of an earlier civilization that built these mounds to say that the indigenous Americans that came across did not have ties to that land.

So it was okay to forcibly remove them. It was written into the legislation in the 19th century when Andrew Jackson dislocated tens of thousands of Native Americans from their land in what we call the Trail of Tears. So this has a past to it that matters, but it also has a present. tens of thousands of Native Americans from their land in what we call the Trail of Tears. So this has a past to it that matters, but it also has a present.

And I knew about this when I went on Joe Rogan, but I was waiting for it to get published. Stephanie Holmhofer has recently published an article on the ways in which pseudo-archaeology is used by modern neo-Nazi groups. Neo-Nazi groups and white supremacy groups, groups that say we are neo-Nazi groups. Neo-Nazi groups and white supremacy groups, groups that say we are neo-Nazis and we believe white people are superior,

or they don't always say they're Nazis, they say they're white supremacists, right? And so they're very overt, nasty groups. And they actually specifically use these kind of pseudo-archaeology narratives to recruit. And in fact, they've acknowledged, some of them have acknowledged, they specifically use Graham Hancock's books. They give fingerprints of the gods to people to convince them that white people

are responsible for this heritage. And so my thinking is, man, Graham, I think we're more on the same page as this. Why are you not mad at other people for misusing your books? That's who you should be mad at, not about archeologists that are talking about the misuse of this sort of evidence in the past and in the present to perpetuate racist ideas. Because like I said, I really don't think

Graham Hancock is a racist, just like I don't think the director of the British Museum is racist, despite the fact they're not returning the Benin bronzes. And so, you know, I really don't think he is, but I think his problem is, is he should be mad at actual racists that use his materials to justify their racism, because that's a real problem in our world today. And I told him on Rogan, I said, why don't you denounce these people? And he just ignored me. And so that, to me, is a serious issue. They are

the ones who are misusing his work, not me. And so that's, that's where this comes from. Yeah. I think he similar to very solid people that we cover in the gurus here, like, you know, you can see it in Graham's work. And that was very evident in the Joe Rogan episode that he has a very strong sense of grievance, right? He also has a very strong belief that he is a maverick. And he says this repeatedly. Ends it by saying he's a maverick, in fact. Yeah.

Yes. He directly in the trailer recently said that he's a maverick. And I feel like if you are the one telling people they are a maverick, it's not the best way to be a maverick. Like other better when other people call you a maverick. But in those responses, you can see that he feels attacked, right? Like regardless of the reality of it. And for him, I don't think he comes across much attacks from neo-Nazi groups or far-right groups. And I don't think he investigates them much. So from his perspective, the only places that he hears where people are talking to him about far-right and neo-Nazis and whatnot, are archaeologists bringing up this point to him. And he is saying, look, I have no interest in those

communities. I don't do anything with those communities. Why are you constantly connecting me to them? And his view is it's to discredit him in the eyes of the public, like because he's asking uncomfortable questions. I think that is the thing rather than him not wanting to alienate that particular audience or that kind of thing. That is the way that I would read it. Sugar, I mean, look, I don't think Graham, unfortunately, is somebody that I'm gonna be able to reason with. I had a very long conversation with him and that's life. I'm here to educate and to explain to the public

the context of these things. And that's what I do. And this is part of the context of his writings. Does that make him a racist? As I said, I don't think it necessarily does. But I also, I wonder how much he is aggrieved and how much he wants to be canceled. Because let's be honest, in today's world, being canceled sells. That is just the reality. These people who are constantly canceled, all they can do is go on podcast after podcast and brag about how they're

canceled. Because they know that as soon as they are canceled, other people are gonna say, oh, I wanna buy that book. It's what same thing Stephanie Holmhofer in that article that's just got published on the different ways that pseudo-archaeology is used by more outright racists. It's this concept of stigmatized knowledge.

As soon as your knowledge is something that gets canceled, it becomes attractive and it also becomes more mysterious and it becomes something that can't be disproven. They're just trying to cancel me. And so that's, I think, explains a lot of this video. He's spent about half of it on racism. And what's hilarious is he starts off and he says, I apologize for using in 1995,

the terms negroid and Caucasoid. And then he goes on and reads for like three minutes, several passages which use those terms. And that to me is just trying to give some low-hanging fruit to journalists to be like, cancel me, please cancel me. So I can now go on another podcast to say I was canceled. And it's just trying to frame everything in this culture wars way that is just that's that's I think was the goal of that whole video

is to frame it in that kind of way. Please cancel me. Please make me your enemy so that I can then go brag about being your enemy. I completely agree with like the desire to present yourself as like someone murdered trying to be silenced right. And at the same time as having objectively large platforms and interest from the biggest podcaster in the world, two series now on Netflix and books that are bestsellers since

I was young. So Graham Hancock's message has got out there. The issue is that he has received criticism, but this is the general thing with a lot of like the truth telling mavericks is like they need to present it that they are out there just asking questions. So just saying, can we not talk about these ideas?

Is it not okay, Flint, to have a discussion? What are archaeologists afraid of? And that is a very, like presenting yourself like that, as opposed to somebody who actually has had like a huge amount of success and attention for like not limited work in terms of like going to places. Like it's clear that Graham has put in time, like traveling around and visiting places and going scuba diving or whatever the case might be. In terms of like rigorous academic work, clearly not. Right. Like he clearly doesn't do that.

He's much more a storyteller and an adventurer or like a of that type, at least traveling around and like meeting with people and then retelling the stories and the cancellation narrative works for that. And you see that there is a huge appetite online, especially in the more right leaning or heterodox area for cancellation. I've been canceled. They've tried to silence me. They've tried to do this. And I think that piggybacks on that there have been cases where people have faced public cancellation. Like the problem is now that the term is so overloaded that you have like actual instances where there has been like maybe somebody painted unfairly or like an over There has been like maybe somebody painted unfairly or like an over zealous attack on people and dire consequences.

Then you have cases where there are legitimate consequences for people doing bad things. And they're both branded as cancellation. And then you have people that haven't properly been cancelled, but are claiming that, you know, and there's an entire ecosystem like people like Tucker Carlson or Elon Musk that own entire social media networks. And they're just constantly saying, we are being silenced as they selectively choose things to, you know, cancel or prohibit themselves. So there's, I agree. It's like, it's just a messy thing. But the moniker of being a canceled

person carries like a lot of cash in the alternative media. I mean, at this point, I think I'm pretty lucky in this exchange because now there's Graham Hancock fans getting in touch with my employer to get me fired. So I'm being canceled, which I think is maybe, well, I hope, I mean, I don't know, but I hope that this turns out good for me because I being canceled that that's a winning message. Right. But this is this is actually I mean, I wanted to get to this point. And I think, you know, we've covered everything that was reused in that response video. But so clearly, in response to the presentation, I would say like, from my observation, which is obviously not on the ground with you. I saw two things. One I saw like a wave of support, especially you were highlighting as well, you know, people responding positively, including people in Rogan and Hancock's audience saying, And I noticed that as well, you know, that's part of the thing that we were primarily talking about. And then I would say that there was maybe a secondary wave where you dealt with some

of the more negative consequences where you became a target for pseudo-archaic. You're like a villain. No, you're mean. And they're arch nemesis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have people like Dan Richards, as you detailed in your videos, that they're not just poking at your videos and trying to present you as somebody who's lying about the evidence or whatnot, but they're actively trying to do things like claim that you are

not making mistakes, but intentionally lying and encouraging people, you know, contact your university. I don't know if Dan Richards. Dan has said that he does not want people to contact his university, but his fans are contacting my university. In fact, they've gotten in touch with him to say that we're contacting the university. And he recently hosted this guy who is complicated. I don't know how to bring him up. so I'm not going to give too much...

because the problem is... You don't want to feed them with attention, yes. No, no, no. It's more just that this guy's a student, so I don't want to be shitting on a student, right? So he's actually a student in archaeology, and he has published blogs on Graham's website several times. And so he's a huge Graham Hancock fan, but he's a student studying archeology right now. And he recently went on Dan Richards' podcast. And I don't even know if he's an archeology student.

Maybe he's more of a geology student. But either way, it doesn't matter, but I don't know him at all. So there's nothing I can do. He's not at my university. Oh, it's like on a different continent. But so he went on Dan Richards' podcast or YouTube to discuss the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, because that's what he's interested.

And at some point, they started talking about me. And what he said was he said, you know what, you want my opinion? I think Flint should be fired. And then he said to the audience, the same audience that is getting in touch with my employer to get me fired, he says to them, look, you should be getting in touch with Cardiff University because maybe you won't get him fired because they probably won't trust random emails and stuff like that. But if you send enough emails and make enough phone calls, somebody's going to get pissed off and they're going to tell him to shut the fuck up. That's what he said. And so it's just like, what the heck? And then the next day, Graham Hancock promoted that video

or maybe it was two days later, something like that. And then two days after that, Graham Hancock made his first tweet about ancient apocalypse season two, then announced it. And so my reply was like, hey, Graham, why are you promoting this dude who's calling directly for me to be fired, and if not fired, calling for people to organize

to at least get my boss to make me shut the fuck up, as they said. And so it's just like, you know, this is like absolutely serious harassment. And Dan claimed, for example, that I broke the law. He claimed that I taught at Dartmouth College, and while there, I taught with indigenous human remains and those remains, he found some article

about the president of Dartmouth College apologizing about being slow at repatriating indigenous remains. So he said, Flint taught with illegal indigenous remains. And it's just like, dude, A, I don't teach human bones. So I've never taught human osteology. I don't do any American archaeology. I do archaeology of the Greek world and the Mediterranean. I've never even touched any indigenous remains from America ever to the best of my knowledge. And lastly, I taught at

Dartmouth College during the pandemic when it was all online. I've never even been to Dartmouth College. I've never touched a single artifact at Dartmouth College let alone bones or anything like that. Because I was teaching from Greece and Philadelphia over Zoom for students. It's so disingenuous because he made these accusations on Twitter saying, Flint most likely taught with illegal. All of my colleagues replied to him because at this time,

he had been chatting with some of us in a much more polite way. All my colleagues replied to him, because at this time he had been chatting with some of us in a much more polite way. And so all my colleagues were like, Flint doesn't do this. He doesn't study this stuff. He doesn't teach this stuff. And then a week later, he posted a YouTube video about it. So he already knew that I didn't do that. And instead he uses these images of me

holding animal remains like big cow bones or smaller dog bones or whatever. I had this video on my YouTube. It's a great video. It's called like the top six penis bones from archeology because some animals have penis bones. And we can say a lot about these animals from them. And so he has a clip of me holding a dog penis bone

in the lab here at Cardiff and claims implicitly that this is actually an indigenous human remain. And it's just like, what the hell, man, this guy's just, he's off the wall. So one thing about that Flint, so like the level of hypocrisy is somewhat stunning. Whenever you're dealing with people that are so sensitive, you know, that people are like making unfair personal attacks or whatnot. So like Graham is extremely sensitive to that, but doesn't mind promoting Dan Richards. I just find that like

very hypocritical. And then I also know that Dan Richards in one of the videos acknowledged he had made a mistake. I think he admitted that he saw that like you weren't at Dartmouth and this was an error, but then he said, however, like Flint lies about tons of stuff and smears people. So I'm going to give him a taste of his own medicine. Right? Like, isn't that the case? That's what he said at one point too. Yeah. He said that like, in a sense, he wants me to know how it feels to have false information out there about me. That's what he said, something along those lines. And it's just like, man, I have repeatedly claimed

that I'm not calling Graham Hancock a racist. I've repeatedly said that and clarified what I've said. I have repeatedly gone out of my way to say that. And you, you're just saying, now I'm gonna keep smearing you so you know what it's, it's just revenge. It's petty revenge and harassment. So on that topic, actually, I have a question for you about that.

So when you were determining about like getting involved with this and, you know, going on Rogan and whatnot, I presume you factored in that like, OK, this is going to be, you know, a lot of attention. He has a lot of motivated fans. This is likely, you know likely to cause some impact to me professionally or otherwise. The first thing is just that how much of this caught you off guard and how much was priced into you doing the debate with Graham and responding to him and that kind of thing? I was obviously hyper aware of the situation

I was getting into and I thought things through and stuff like that. It's why in advance of the debate, I locked my Twitter account for like a few weeks beforehand and I wanted to see how the debate went before I decided whether to unlock it. Since it went really well, I unlocked it immediately. And what's funny, I must have talked with you guys

in early May and in early May, it was, so it was like two or three weeks after I was on Rogan and after it came out, and things were going great. In a sense, the response was all positive. Rogan fans never really did much harassment of me at all. And so what this was was a very concerted campaign by Hancock fans to just smear me and to rally their side against me.

Because it was not until Dan started producing these videos in, it was late June when, so Dan had started making some videos, but like I said, he was a very tiny YouTube channel, so they didn't get very many views and it wasn't a big deal. But then clearly him and Graham discovered him and got in touch with him. And there's all, you can see their public tweets about this, right? And so Dan produced a new video, maybe with some of Graham's guidance, which rehashed all the claims of his earlier videos that did not get seen and in a much more clear, concise fashion and accusing me more strongly of conning Joe

Rogan is how it was called. And this was late June. I was actually on a research trip on Crete at the Palace of Minos and Knossos collecting samples to do analysis on. And I finished my day at the lab there and I come back to the little room that I'm in for that week and I check my phone and it's just full of notifications. Graham Hancock decided to boost Dan's video and he claimed and he's like, now new information

has come to light that Joe was conned and perhaps I was conned as well. And so it was that action right there of Graham deciding to boost this narrative and this harassment against me that specifically led to all the blowback I've since seen. And Graham has boosted this guy, I don't know, 15 times since late June. And he sort of stopped over the last few weeks with Ancient Apocalypse Season Two coming out. But it was that action of boosting that caused this.

So it wasn't Rogan fans at all. This has been a very concerted campaign by these Hancock fans and then promoted directly by Graham to harass me is what it really is. And so it's very much trying to muddy the waters because as Hancock says in his recent video, he starts off by congratulating me and saying that I outperformed him is what he said.

He acknowledged that he performed badly and that I outperformed him is what he said. He acknowledged that he performed badly and that I outperformed him. And so the only way to save face in that kind of situation is to claim that I'm a liar. If you see what I mean. He had no other option other than to claim I'm a liar. That's the only way to save face with his fans. And so that's what's led to this situation of it ebbs and flows, but it's of this kind of harassment. I get emails or posts or whatever saying, I'm calling your employer to get you fired,

and all this kind of nasty stuff, of course. So I figured it would be a wave that would die down. Instead, it never happened. And then since then, there's been this concerted campaign. And that I did not really predict would happen. I did not actually predict that I would come off so well in that context with Graham. So, you know, I thought I'd come off reasonably well for neutral observers, but I didn't expect to actually blow a major hole in Graham's fandom. And that's what happened. And that's why they've had to respond in this kind of

heightened, more harassing and slanderous manner. Yeah. About that as well, I'm curious for myself, Flint, you know, what they describe about like contacting your boss or your department and like kind of sending harassing emails, I would imagine that yes, people would notice right, but also, if your department are aware, as I'm sure they are, about the situation and like your public profile that- Oh, I have their full support. Yeah. Yeah. So that like- I haven't even had a permanent job there, but I have their full support. My boss encouraged me to go on there knowing that I was doing something good. And then the university itself reached out at some point asking how they could support me in the face of harassment.

There's not much they can actually do, but they don't take any of those emails seriously at all, obviously. I mean, they know that I actually represented the field. There's not been a single scholar that has had an issue with anything I said on Joe Rogan. I did my research and represented archaeology as adequately as I hope anybody could in that kind of challenging context. So, you know, like, yeah. Now, that's, that's great. I'm very glad to hear that. But I also then have a follow-up question, which is like, and this is easier said than done, but I

am curious why in that situation, it seems like people like Dan Richards. I can see why Graham Honcock wants to boost him. Right. There's a there's a figure, Brett Weinstein. You may or may not know him like I know he is. Yeah. Yeah. But he has a kind of Uber fan who's much more active on Twitter and will make huge threads and he basically would target people and would kind of respond to anybody that

was critical of Brett. I've seen this guy on Twitter, yeah. And he's also got his own interests. He also really likes Elon Musk. This is another person that he goes to bat for and he became a big fan of Ivermectin. There's a whole range of constellations of things that go together. But I crossed paths with him a couple of times and he doesn't like me. He definitely doesn't like me. And you know-

I mean, who not, Chris? Let's be honest. This is true. There's a lot of guru types that don't like me amongst- there's just a wide collection of people. But the other thing is that it quickly became apparent to me that interacting with him directly is, is like fairly pointless. Again, responding to his points in the way that would give him attention and engagement was what he wanted, right? Or would like kind of drive him to respond. And with Dan Richards and the general response of that, they seem to be good at pushing your buttons online. Well, no, I've only responded once. I've made one, well, I guess twice when that video

was released on June 20th or whatever date was, I wrote a Twitter thread reply. And then I ignored all the dozen videos about me in the intervening period, but the problem is it doesn't matter what I do because Graham Hancock will boost it, because that's what Dan Richards wants. Me responding, I don't have enough of a following or attention to actually do much to boost him. It's Hancock that does because Hancock's a legit celebrity. Yeah, so I finally after months of people coming at me saying I'm lying, I said, Look, I will make one video reply, I don't plan on going back and forth and

responding. On the other hand, with someone like Hancock, he is a real big celebrity. He was he was listed in 2023, I think it was as one of like the top 20 spiritual leaders in the world, Hancock. And so, you know, he is a real celebrity. And the problem is, is Graham is legitimized by major media platforms like Netflix, that classify his series as a docu-series, IMDB, Amazon.com puts his books in the archaeology category.

So, ordinary people don't know that he's actually a pseudo-archaeologist. They have no way of discerning that unless we speak up. And so I think it is important for us to speak up about the phenomenon that is Graham Hancock, because ordinary people, I wouldn't expect them to know the difference unless they've taken university-level archaeology courses. And so, you know, it's therefore important. And I think I'm doing something good by speaking up and actually making these points available and widely disseminated. But yeah, obviously, there's the drawback. There's a real drawback to doing so. What's your advice on how to deal with the situation? Well, so,'t, I can only speak, you know, from my point of view with it.

And I haven't experienced something like you have, right? So I'm very much backseat driving. But one thing is I didn't mean to suggest that like Dan Richards or others in the Hancock community have themselves been effective at getting you to engage in all of their talking points and whatnot. Like, cause they haven't, you haven't taken that beer, but I think it is clear. Even if you are saying to Graham, you know, you are amplifying somebody that is harassing me, that that's completely true, but it also gives the kind of sense like we're working, this is working, right? Like we're, we're getting to him. And I understand. Yeah. I don't have a great answer for that because like, I feel like the option where you just never

mention it potentially allows it to like kind of go by the, okay, you know, it's not working, but it also can give the impression that you're not able to address any of the points that are raised. I think that's what happened in those few months in June and July and August. At least some of my colleagues thought that me delaying putting out that video reply did more harm because it let them disseminate their narrative without a strong pushback among their community. And to be honest, I really think that that is their motivation, at least Graham's motivation. Graham had a huge hole in his fan base after I debated him. And like I said, I did not even go there expecting to do that well.

I thought he would do a better job gish galloping me than he did. And so I did not expect me to be able to make my points so clearly to his fans. I went there trying to reach out to the people in the middle who might not know better. So he has to he's had to address that. And I just think since I think the sign that it's working is not my replying. I think the sign it's working is the flood of comments he got on the video that he just published, if you see what I mean. That's actually the sign that he likes, which shows that he's going to continue doing it because he's getting all the

approval he wants from his fans. Yeah. And so my my advice for that kind of situation is like, ideally, what would happen is that Graham agrees that, well, look, I disagree with Flint on these points, but, you know, we've had our disagreement, but I don't wish him any bad thing. And I'm not going to promote people that are attacking him, right? That would be the ideal thing, but that's realistically not going to happen. So the reality is that there is this ecosystem and there's going to be a part of it that like, is very focused on attacking anybody who disagrees and

whatnot, and you'll never convince them otherwise. So there's very little point to like, to try and stop them either way because they won't stop. And in my experience, the only way that they kind of lose interest is when they are unable to see like any response. So they might still make videos or whatever, but it feeds away.

But no, the issue that you raised that like, if they have basically presented videos that you're completely debunked, right? Like they've shown you to be a fraud and you are not addressing it in any material, then that is very likely to be brought up by other people that, oh, well, did you not see there was this detailed- Which is what happened with that video.

That's exactly what happened. It started getting brought up on other podcasts and stuff like that. Oh, that Flint Dibble guy, he was full of shit. And so, you know, that's what that's actually what I realized when one of my friends was on a different podcast done by Barstool Sports, and they brought this up randomly on him. And he was like, and he thankfully defended me, of course, right. He's a former public school teacher, and now he does other things. And he's a big tick tocker in the in the world

of science communication, and Zeke Darwin. And so he thankfully defended me and stuff like that. And I really appreciated that. But it was that appearance on that podcast that alerted me, oh, wow, this has gone much further than I thought. I guess I really do need to make this video to respond to it. So yeah, that's why I made that one video. So this is what I was going to say though. I know that I saw that you appeared on the what is it anything else? No, no, no. It is Bridges podcast. Yes, with Milo Rossi, Minuteman on YouTube. And so I wasn't completely aware of his channel. But then after your appearance, actually, I saw his detailed brief times, right, which were harsh. Oh yeah. Right.

And I felt like he was critical of some TikToker who was making videos. Yeah. Right. And, and then his response. Now, first of all, I'm not saying that you can do that, right. Because like, obviously it's tied up in people's personality and he is very embedded in the YouTuber ecosystem and that kind of response style. So he responded to the response with like a very, very cutting take down. But in that frame, responding to criticism in that kind of direct way was effective.

I suspect that there will be people who are in that guy's audience that look at that video and go, Oh, no, he didn't rebut this guy. But I also think that you and him on that interview with destiny and cohost erudite that Kyla. Yeah. Yeah. You were talking about, you know, creating a tongue in cheek Alliance, right. But but basically that you guys are focused on like promoting archaeology and yes debunk, he's interested to share it and promote it. And that to me seems like in that promotion of the positive vision and the stuff that you do that shares archaeology and the stuff that Milo Rossi does as well,

even though he does debunkings as well, I think that is the most effective response is to be like all the stuff that you presented about the history and saying like, you know, yes pseudo archaeology as well, because it undermines the field. And that to me is like the crucial bit. And I think like, I mean, I'm talking to you because there are some towns which are purely debunking, which are effective at that. But it seems to me like if that is paired with a positive vision and promotion of something, that it's much better and also better for you. And more effective. Yes.

And that's actually kind of my goal. I mean, like my main goal, obviously, is to share and teach real archaeology. I mean, and to do it, of course, I'd like to do real archaeology too. And so, you know, I mean, and the positive thing is, like I mentioned earlier at the beginning, that make sure you go check out www.real-archaeology.com, right? Because we have this big event of that positive real archaeology. There will be some debunking of pseudo-archaeology on there, but it's mostly just real legit archaeology. And that's what most of my channel is. That's what most of my experience with the public is. That said, I'm not gonna shy away from doing debunk stuff. I think that, you know, we always talk as academics

and scholars and more uptight individuals that, oh, we're giving too much oxygen and attention to these alternative thinkers and these conspiracy theorists. And I think that was probably true about 10 years ago when it was not as big of a part of our society. But now that they are so big, I think in many ways engaging, it creates a level of drama that actually draws people towards real legit scholarly ways of thinking and presentations

of what we do in a fun and interesting way. So I'm not going to shy away from that kind of drama either. And yeah, and so I will be doing a response. I was actually gonna try to hurry and do a quick response to Graham. And I realized, no, it was actually due to thinking back on many minute man's Philip Zeba response. I thought, I wanna do this right. I wanna do this in a really clear, prepared way

that's gonna be, A, very cutting and defend not just myself, but to cut back, and B, will be entertaining as well and interesting. And so, cause that's always gotta be at the core. I've always, even as a professor, I engage with my students in a way that I firmly believe that edutainment is valuable

because the way I see it is everybody out there is smart. It's just they're only interested in certain things. And when people are interested in something, it might be baseball, it might be celebrities, they know that stuff really well. And so the best way to get students to learn or the general public is to do it in an entertaining way. So, you know, I'm always keen to do that. And you know, I do have another random unsolicited piece of advice that I think is true and maybe doesn't need told the most academics. But my other experience is that puncturing the self-importance

of conspiracy theorists and people that will present themselves as martyrs is effective because, you know, people like Jordan Peterson or whatever, they're constantly setting themselves up as these figures that are, you know, like the the universe is arrayed against them. And they're struggling just to get by. And like when you actually break it down to like, look, these things are important. Yes. But, you know, calm down. You're you're doing fine in your mansion.

Right. You know, you're you're all right. When you're world tour, you'll probably survive. I think that that helps. He's sitting there and he's like, oh man, Chris and Matt just bashed me again. No, my life was ruined. The thing which is like a constant that we know this is almost all of the people that are secular gurus can recount every negative interview that they've ever had by name and that they will bring it up unbidden years. Like you will be referenced, you know, there's a journalist in the UK, Helen Lewis, who did a critical interview with Jordan Peterson.

And it must be like seven or eight years ago now. And he occasionally brings it up saying, you know, what a terrible experience of person and how, you know, she was widely, but she was also possessed by the chaos dragon or whatever it is. And he's still harping on that. And I feel like, as you said, that appearance on Rogan went very badly for Graham. So there isn't a world in which you are not now a villain in that pantheon and you know, it would be nice if that wasn't the case. And you know, I know I need to let you go Flint, but there was there was some questions that people suggested in

from our audience. I have a second. I'm okay. Like I said, I just have to prep for class tomorrow, but I can do it after we're done. Me too. Me too. But I think some of these were better than the way that I put it. So one of the things where people asking that in regards pushing back or dealing with like pseudo archeology or bad science in general, you're an academic, you've also not got a YouTube channel and like a growing media presence. So one was, is there an issue there about like those two hats conflicting as like one grows the other, you know, like you have clear cases like Huberman becoming super popular and like his academic work just doesn't exist now I think.

And then on the other hand, is the YouTube domain or social media domains like are they good avenues for pushing back on that? Like do you think more academics should do that? Or it's a case by case basis, right? Like, you know, maybe some academics would be better just stay away from social media. Like, there's a lot of questions there, but I thought those were like kind of good points. I'd be curious what you think. So, all right. I have a really weird situation with my career in the sense that I had a cancer diagnosis in 2021, which then came back the day after Graham announced the debate in my lymph nodes. But I had at the time, and it was actually right after I got announced, I got a

Marie Curie grant from the EU. And so what that does is it gives me a renewable visa here. In fact, I'm eligible for residency soon. And so that's important. I don't know much about the US healthcare system, but my cancer is gone now. I was on a year of chemo, right? And I had surgery where they took out my lymph nodes. But just because of the risk of it coming back, I don't wanna bankrupt my family by moving back to the US for a temporary job. And then my cancer comes back.

So what I'm doing right now is I'm actually only teaching part-time. I have just have a 50% job teaching and it's great. I have a couple classes that I've not taught before, so it's good teaching experience, but I'm supplementing some of that income by YouTubing and trying to write a book and stuff like that. And so in that sense, just due to my own life situation, I feel like I might end up doing more of this public stuff and maybe less of the academic stuff. And thankfully I have been successful in having this YouTube channel grow.

I have a good agent, hopefully he sells my book soon. And then what that means is, and I'm confident he will, that was not meant as a dig in any way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the point being that like I can be more picky and choosy on the academic job market. As you might know, people in our generation,

so many really good scholars have been kicked out of our fields because there just aren't enough academic jobs. It's such a tough situation. And so because of the fact that I might be able to start supporting myself with public writing and YouTube, I don't make enough from it to support myself right now.

But maybe after a couple of years or something, I'll be getting to that point. That lets me be a lot more selective. And that means that maybe I can continue doing research while doing public stuff. I don't really know. It's going to depend on whether I get a tenure track position. It's going to depend on how successful this stuff grows and whether it becomes enough to live on, which it's not near right now. Um, but it is growing. Uh, so that's what it depends on. I'm still on the job market.

I'm still looking for jobs, but I'm not planning on applying for crappy one year, two year teaching gigs anywhere. Cause I don't feel like I need to. I mean, that's, I, that I was about to say that's, that's great to hear, but I don't mean like the insecurity of academic positions are like great to hear. I know that struggle very well myself and you have my full like sympathy along with probably, you know, everybody that has experienced the joys of the insecurity of academia. But I also think it's worth saying, Flint, and

important to highlight, like you are in a more financially insecure position and you are in a field which is not known for attracting huge amounts of money. Right. And the person that you're debating with, Graham Honcock, is somebody that I would imagine is very financially stable. And so like, yeah, secure. That's a way to put it. And I just I do feel like people should kind of factor in that kind of thing

that like you are arguing for and have an interest in a profession, which is not one which is designed to make you a celebrity or that kind of thing. And yes, you engaged, you know, like in Rogan to push back. But it's not like you planned this out that I'll study archeology and then in 20 years time, I'll be able to go and do Rogan. No, no, no, not in the least. I mean, you know, like, yeah, that's, that's what's kind of funny. And you know, now between here and Bridges and Danny Jones, I just got another invite to a larger podcast to go on

at some point in the winter. And so, you know, that's one of the, I guess, benefits of doing this is I am getting more attention, whether in the media or in the alternative media. And so it actually gives me, it's not security yet, but it gives me faith that if I keep doing this, it can be something that can be worthwhile where I can support my field as well in a different way. And continue hopefully to do my research while doing it. I frame it as I'll teach the public. I don't even know if this is where I'm going. Maybe I get a tenure track job and then I'm like,

I don't have much time for YouTube anymore. I know, I know. It's very insecure in that sense, but I think it's worth pursuing because especially in the US, from the US context, there really aren't any celebrity archeologists. There's nobody. We listen to people of British accents, right?

And there's a lot of British celebrity archeologists. They're not major celebrities, but they do a good job doing public scholarship and they publish bestselling books and stuff like that. But there's very few American ones. Maybe Klein is the best I had him on my channel recently and then Sarah Parkack who I'm hoping to get on my channel at some point she said she would but those are the only two in the US that are reasonably well known and they're not very well known outside of very

literate educated circles and so it's it's yeah something that's missing is people that can speak effectively. And so this then leads to your second question, which is, should more academics be doing this? For one, academic structures need to change. They need to reward public engagement. And I am a huge advocate. Now I don't just get invited on podcasts. I get invited to go to universities and address my colleagues about public engagement. And so I've given several talks on this. I was at Newcastle, what, last spring, and I've done it at Vienna and different, different

places in the US and stuff, either via Zoom or in person. And one of my biggest points always is, is we need to modify academia to reward public engagement in a real big way. And it's imperative because right now academic institutions are being underfunded and completely reconstructed into something different. And in particular, we're seeing a lot of funding going away from the humanities and social sciences, fields like archaeology, anthropology, psychology, history, classics, languages, they're all being cut and mangled. And the only way to really fight back against this is to start

changing public opinion about what we do and its value. If we do not start enabling ourselves to go out and speak to the public, we are going to lose this battle because the funds come from the public. If we cannot demonstrate our relevancy, our relevance to the public, we're lost. And yet we have a job where we get no reward for doing this. I don't get promotion, I don't get extra pay, I don't get extra access to grants from doing this public engagement. I get my YouTube channel growing. And so it's just like, it's a real problem

and I keep harping at this, but do I think people should try to do it? Yes, should everybody? No, not everybody's good at it. But one of the points I make, especially like when I did my solo interview on Bridges, and when I go and I talk, I try to explain to people that as scholars

who regularly teach classes, just by reading and learning about pedagogy and then practicing it in our classrooms, we actually have the experience and skill set to be able to effectively engage with the public. In many ways, it's like preparing a lesson plan. What are my learning goals? How do I go about achieving it? We have to treat the public like they are our students. It's the only difference is, is you every single lecture or video you make, you have different people watching. So you can't do scaffolding like you do across a term.

You just have to treat everything like it's the first day of class. But you still, you know, but you have, you can go into some depth because that's what your goal is. And, but I definitely think all the tools and tricks and that we use in the classroom are very effective in the public sphere as well.

And so we need to think through how to apply them to that. I think too often scholars just are so used to being that sage on the stage. And we know that from baby boomer professors, but I think that's how even younger professors are when they engage with a journalist. They just think, oh, they're just going to respect me and they'll speak off the cuff. But if we actually prepare and think through our learning goals and what our goals are in this conversation with a journalist or on a podcast or whatever, making a YouTube video for the public or whatnot, then we become very effective like we are in the classroom. So yeah. I think that exactly what you talked about, like I experienced, I think it's heightened online,

but I think it is a general thing that, you know, especially in the US, there's a very strong anti-university, like rhetoric on the right side of the political spectrum, right? And if I went by the image painted online, I would think that 90% of university is gender studies department and like postmodern theorists who don't believe that science is any better than some alternative way of knowing and that mathematics shouldn't teach one plus one equals two. And I constantly tell people, even if that were a true caricature of a particular area, which I don't think it is, but even if it was, universities are full of law departments, biology departments, engineering departments, languages departments, you know, like the whole thing.

Universities study everything. Yeah. And in most cases, they are not engaged in like the culture war in this heavy way right now. And so I think I completely agree with you that it's helpful for people to kind of engage and show the stuff that they are learning, the stuff that they are teaching, that kind of thing. And just like give an alternative image, which is like they are not these demons trying to indoctrinate all children into the woke mind virus that will take over society or this kind of thing. Right. Like just showing, no, these are normal people that are like focused on their specialty.

And you know, there are, there are people that are in academia that have politically extreme views of one stripe or another, but they were all over the place. They're in business as well. People just have political opinions. People have different opinions and different perspectives. So I think it's helpful that people come across academics and they are not just in the culture war, right? They're not just academics responding to the culture war or dealing with the culture war. And Joe Rogan is a culture war person.

And Joe Rogan is a cultural person. That's like, but the thing is that those channels are so popular and so influential in the way that they portray universities and the educated elites and all these kinds of things that it is a very negative image. And I think I agree with you that more academics who are capable or interested in doing that should be doing that. And it would be great if there was institutional support for it, though I suspect that will be slower because of the way that academia works. So yeah, I'm just seconding. But I mean, you guys are a great model. I mean, you guys are a great model of two academics who have worked to really build a good audience. And yes, you engage in the culture wars and that what you do is you apply your understanding of anthropology and psychology

to understanding these modern gurus. But at the same time, you're sharing actually the details of your field. And, and, and, you know, it was actually coming on here and seeing the response, you know, after I came on here, I was walking to work and I had, you know, in the aftermath of Rogan, I had people recognize me and I had some guy run up to me from like two blocks away and he comes up and he's like, are you an archaeologist? I'm like, yeah. He's like, oh man, I saw you on this podcast. I'm like, Rogan? He's like, no, decoding the gurus. And so, and so, you know, you guys have to your credit as two academics, you've done a really good job of building up a really sustainable audience. And I think what I start, and maybe I'm biased because I'm teaching the history of archeology right now.

And the history of archeology is sometimes like a pendulum where it swings between science and humanities. And I just gave a lecture on that yesterday. But I actually think that modern culture is oftentimes like a pendulum as well. Not about history and sciences, but I think about this kind of trust in scholars and experts and things like that and this craving for real information versus mythical fantastical

ideas, conspiracy theories, let's say. And one of the things, and maybe I'm just too much of a half glass full type person, but I strongly believe that right now we are on a swing back towards people craving real information, real science and real understanding. I've seen a lot of it in the response. I mean, yes, I've gotten this harassment, but I've also gotten a lot of people, including people who I get comments all the time from people that are former Hancock fans. And they're just like, real archaeology is actually really friggin' interesting. I really like this.

And I get this all the time from all kinds of people. And I think we are seeing this pendulum swing. And to be honest, I think in my reading of this, I'm not someone who reads modern culture too well, but this is just my own reading, my own personal opinion. I actually think it was the development of all this AI systems that really sparked it, where all of a sudden the internet this AI systems that really sparked it,

where all of a sudden the internet right now, as we know it, is just being flooded with all this crazy stuff from AI-generated images, videos, text, and whatnot. Right now, I think the pendulum was already swinging back, but I think that's accelerated it where people are getting real tired of all the BS that's out there. And they're really starting to crave on a different level, factual, interesting entertainment, rather than just all this BS. And I think that that's my honest opinion. Maybe I'm just an eternal optimist. And I think that all of us, you know, you and me and everyone else involved in trying to get out the story

of real science and real academic knowledge and scholarship I think we're all leading this right now, and I think that we should I want to do more than just real archaeology I think we should get together a group of us Sometime in the future and think about an event of like I don't know getting out all the different Academics that have larger podcasts and or former academics that have larger podcasts and YouTube channels and whatnot and try to say, Hey, we're out here doing this and providing this. You guys want to get rid of the BS online, check us out, join us, form some channels and do that kind of stuff.

Because I think we can push back and I think people want us to, if you know what I mean. Like an academic pride. But I think Flint, you may have found the one to go to the gurus fan in Cardiff. But like that aside, I like I do agree that, you know, there's a tendency towards like negativity and to present, you know, the kind of online ecosystems. There's lots of problems, right? You can see that any day you go on Twitter, like what Elon has done there, but just in general, there was always problems online. There's always horrific communities and you talked about like neo-Nazi groups and all that kind of thing. But it is also the case that online communities and niche

podcasts and that can, you know, there are podcasts that are just dedicated to scientists talking about virology. There are podcasts about history that now thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are just listening to multiple hours about niche history topics, right? Which before you probably would have just come across like in books or in university lectures. So there's plenty of things that are good. And I think there are plenty of audiences that as you say, are actually interested in credible information and looking at things critically and skeptically. And I was thinking that you were going to say like, AI developed and made people recognize that maybe academics can actually produce useful

things because AI you don't like it know, like, so maybe I was like slightly more class half fuller, but I, I do think that it's worth not, not just always being reactive to the negative stuff that's out there. And you know, we're a podcast that like is very critical. I mean, how are the whole format of our show is around like looking at content critically, but we also tried to show, we have a series that we do called Decoding Academia, where we're just basically going through- I have some academics you could decode.

Yeah, well that also comes up, and they also have often grievance narratives of their own about their theories. But looking critically at papers, including theories. But like looking critically at papers, right, including of people you like or looking at content of people you like, it's not a bad thing. But it's like a thing that people should be accepting of and it can be done in like a very attacking, personal, cruel way. But it's also like it can be a sign of respect and also a reasonable thing

to do. That's what academia is often promoting as a value, like look at work and be critical of it and learn how to critically assess and people don't always agree. And I think you had a very nice note to end on, but I'm, I'm going to ask just like one last question, which will probably not be a good one to end off because it's probably, yeah, I got too many different perspectives on it. But if you are giving an academic perspective, right, the reality is that there are often competing perspectives and

different theoretical views, there might be people who don't agree around issues and there are issues where there's consensus, but there are issues where there's divided opinion. And it can be for a whole variety of reasons, like people interpreting evidence different, so people having different theoretical models, whatever the case might be. And is there an issue that ultimately academics,

because of that, and if they accurately represent that, they can't provide these like satisfying, neat narratives, because there always is nuance and complexity and uncertainty. And like academics get rightly roasted for constantly caveatting things. But that's often because things should be caveated. And I wonder, just do you think that that is in some way way like an Achilles heel that if you accurately represent the evidence, you'll always have this issue that it's not going to be as satisfying as the ancient civilization with like seaweed submarines? I mean, so I've had conversations about this with other scientists because obviously we

deal in a world where science informs really important decisions that we make as a society, right? With regards to things like climate change, or vaccines, or stuff like that. And like, I think that my conversation on Rogan with Hancock, it opened up the eyes of some people that are engaging with pseudoscientists in some of these more important domains.

And one of my goals there, I mean, like, look, there's so much that we need to caveat about archaeology. There really, really is. But when it comes to this kind of conspiracy idea that there's a lost civilization with advanced technology, we don't have to caveat that. There's no reason to caveat that. We have enough of an abundance of evidence that we can definitively say that is not a plausible idea. Is it a completely impossible idea?

I suppose not. Is it a plausible idea? Certainly not. It is not even within the realm of plausibility. And so it's the same thing with topics like climate change and vaccines, where we have an overabundance of evidence of how vaccines have impacted human health

over the last 200 years since inoculation was first developed. And like, it is overwhelming evidence that vaccines are extremely effective. And yeah, there's all sorts of little caveats where for individual people with individual health conditions, there might be exceptions without a doubt. But at the same time, there's no reason to present it to the public in such a caveated way. And same thing with things like climate change. I actually study ancient climate change in humans and environments in the past. And I mean, from so many different ways of explaining it, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that the climate is changing and that it's

caused because of humans. And so if we keep caveatting this stuff, that leaves openings. And so I think we can't caveat everything. I think we can caveat stuff where there's actually legitimate disagreement within a field. By legitimate, I mean, like even there's a small group of people that disagree, like 10% or something or 20%. I don't know what it is. But like there's actually legitimate disagreement made. And even though there is a consensus and a faction that disagrees. But when it's really overwhelming, overabundance of evidence, overwhelming consensus among practicing scholars that focus on that topic, because we have this problem in pseudo-archaeology. There are

some scholars that are pseudo-archaeologists. The issue is none of them are actually archaeologists. One is a chemist who teaches or researches at Edinburgh, I think. Another one is a geologist. And so there's a few others, but none of them are archaeologists, not a single one. And so it's just like, you see this with vaccines and climate change, there are scientists that speak out very strongly with climate change denialism or anti-vaccine attitudes. However, they're never the scientists whose

research actually focuses on that specialization, or at least rarely. And so we lose this sort of public engagement if we over caveat. And I went into my conversation on Rogan very intentionally choosing not to over caveat, but showing how, as an archeologist, why we disregard this idea as plausible to begin with. It's because of all the evidence we have. How do you disprove a negative? By proving a positive that's mutually exclusive to it. That's how.

By proving that we actually understand humans in prehistory and the Ice Age, which by the way is the evidence Graham always ignores. He claims I ignored shipwrecks and stuff like that. Well, dude, when's the last time you ever, I'm talking to Graham now, of course, when's the last time he actually talked about the abundance of evidence for hunter gatherers in the ice age? Never, he just ignores the fact

that we have millions of artifacts from that period. And so it's just like, we have so much evidence there that we can present a clear enough picture. There's a lot we don't understand within that picture, but it's a clear enough picture of hunter-gatherers at that time living their complex lives all over the globe that there's no space there for some sort of giant, globally advanced civilization. And so that's how you prove a negative by proving a positive that is mutually exclusive to it. That's what I came up with for my book. I like that. I like that, Flint. And you actually pulled a nice positive message at the end of my meandering question.

So that is a good note to draw this second one to a close. And I appreciate you sparing the time and also going through all of the topics. And, yeah, I look forward to the book, the response to the next season that comes out. And hopefully that there's another way of coming, which is like a more positive way of than the like negative response that that followed up recently and hopefully a tenured job and a successful YouTube

channel as well. Why not like, you know, like a bazillion dollars and get up. So, so I'm a glass half full person. Everybody please check me out on YouTube. Flint Dibble, Archaeology of Flint Dibble. Oh, and what was, what was the name of the, the upcoming event at the end of this month? Real Archaeology. Real Archaeology. Real archaeology. Real archaeology. Real-archaeology.com.

It's got 50 different, I mean, we're gonna have millions of people tuning in, so check it out. We're gonna blow up the internet the weekend of October 25th through the 27th. So yeah, we'll have a lot of YouTube videos come out and live streams and podcasts and TikToks and blogs and everything, yeah.

And it's a good way to find real factual content about archaeology in a sea of misinformation about it online. S1 05.10 You do realize this is going to be presented as big archaeology strikes back. S1 05.10 Yeah, well, so I'm naming my live stream series, Big Archaeology, just to poke my nose at them. Because it's like, you know what? I'm an optimist, but I'm also just a sarcastic person who tries to enjoy life as best I can. Screw this, I'm just going to make fun of this.

Because what else are you supposed to do? I mean- That's the way to do it. If I'm bringing attention to Graham Hancock, he's bringing attention to me. Dan Richards can kiss my tuchus because he's just lying about me. So, yeah. Well, this is the one credit I'll give to Jordan Peterson is the one thing that he did

correct was whenever people were making fun of him about the lobster and his obsession with that, he sold the lobster tag. And I kind of think, you know, that is the correct response to that, if you want to diffuse that being an attack. So I'm not saying you sell big archeology material, but I'm just saying it works. That's all I'm saying, it works.

So making the punchline, and it's hard for people to attack from that perspective, but it's been a pleasure. Thank you, Chris. It was great to see you again. Yeah, I hope my brain has held up, the punchline and it's hard for people to attack from that perspective but it's been a pleasure. Thank you Chris, it was great to see you again. Yeah I hope my brain is held up and tough on Matt for not being here but that's his loss. You missed a good conversation. That's right yeah so we'll point people to your channel and that kind of thing and yeah good luck out there. Thank you and I hope we're in touch again maybe I'll try to get you guys on my channel at some point.

That would be fun. Definitely. Yeah. All right. I'm going to be back.