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 Dibble, the archaeologist from Cardiff University, themed internet warrior facing the pseudo-archaeologist hordes.
And my co-host seat is empty, Flint.
There's a missing Australian vibe because the other 50%, some would say, of the Decoding the Gurus podcast is potentially asleep.
In America, snoozing away, possibly dreaming about the ancient civilizations and whatnot, but not here.
But he gave me his permission to represent the coding, the Guru's 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 gonna...
Not quite, but I...
Yeah, I suspect everybody in our audience is aware that...
You had, you know, a career in archaeology and have an ongoing career in archaeology and academia.
Come on, I have a career.
You had a career.
It's over now.
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 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?
Did you just get pure notoriety from it?
Well, a little bit from 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.
Right?
And 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 with 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.
But now I'm pushing 30,000 and I've started working with other YouTubers to try to collaborate a little bit.
And some of those YouTubers are scholars.
Some of them are enthusiasts.
There are 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 to associate with, but I was like, 50 people?
That's like, I was recently watching Rescue the Republic, the Brett Weinstein crank-a-phone.
And they had, you know, a huge amount of speakers.
So it's in my mind, but obviously not parallel and 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 that parallel, but it's only in the amount of people.
I have a bunch of questions, and there's also the issue about the new season of Ancient...
What is the name?
Ancient Apocalypse.
Ancient Apocalypse.
That's right.
I keep thinking ancient civilizations, but it's Ancient Apocalypse.
There's a disaster narrative.
Season two, yeah, 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.
I've seen the trailer.
I've read his book that it's based off of.
In fact, on my YouTube, I did a video with Professor John Hoops.
He corrected how I pronounced his name, that's why.
He's also someone who studies Hancock and the phenomenon of Atlantis in America.
He's an American archaeologist, meaning he focuses on South America and Mesoamerica with his research.
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 archaeology 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 going to say exactly, but it's sort of pre-empting a little bit and getting out a lot of good information about the real archaeology of these places.
Yeah, that's interesting, but of course, you don't have Keanu.
I know, I know.
My video only has 25,000 views.
Keanu Reeves, which for those of you that don't know, he's going to be on Ancient Apocalypse Season 2. 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, the thumbnail is 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 it.
Matthew McConaughey already destroyed my faith when he marketed 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.
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 have made the argument, and I agree with you, that the actual history is also fascinating and interesting and mysterious and all these things as well.
But you don't have crystal ancient civilizations powered on.
Perhaps metal ships will get to the subject of whether there's metal involved or not.
But I think that kind of Atlantis myth, it is something which everybody can understand that that's a kind of...
Cool, intriguing story.
It'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.
And maybe aliens is a more recent idea with relation to archaeology, but meaning since Erich 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 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 and 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 Beacon, like the forefollower of the scientific method, Francis Beacon in 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 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-historic side, it had a major influence on the development and structuring of universities in Europe and America.
Wow.
So, you know, a good illustration, like the actual history is very interesting because in the same way, like, I'm sure you're familiar with the history about the philosophists and Madame Lovatsky and other such figures, right?
And although they are often also inventing Atlantish 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 know, for women.
So the actual history can often be intriguing and kind of like a mystery tale around these eccentric characters.
Typically, that's not the kind of thing that people tend to focus on, right?
Like, that's not the thing that gets TikTok excited.
Speaking about Francis Bacon and New Atlantis and the structuring of universities is not going to make a viral TikTok.
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?
Six months.
In fact, this is something that really surprised me was he never really acknowledged our conversation.
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.
And so 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 it just muddles the initial release, right?
Because you would want the coverage, presumably, to be about your new series.
Which is not mentioned at all in there.
No, yeah.
I guess I have three hypotheses for the timing of it because 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 it 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 hypothesizing, conspiracy, hypothesizing Brett Weinstein.
But I have a fourth suggestion 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 over it.
And then...
It came to the point where, well, the new series is about to drop, so I better release it.
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.
Or it was ready a long time, you know, but like there was just a point where, oh, I still, you know, I haven't put that out and I, you know, issues about it because, I mean, we may as well get to this now and deal with the other points after because 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.
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 3 million or 300,000 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 record.
So I've acknowledged that mistake before.
It's 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 archaeology.
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 general with conspiracy theorists, whatever you regard Graham as being.
This is something that they do.
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 amount was wrong.
The key point of my argument is actually this.
But the simple fact of any mistake is left upon as like, so Flint will say this is a minor issue, but actually this was central and this is, you know, so this always Happens.
And it also happens in terms of finding connections between people.
So that doesn't happen in this interview, not exactly.
But pointing out that there is somebody who once interacted with someone who worked for the government or whatever is also something that happens.
So you have this issue that he spends a lot of time on at the start, kind of pointing out...
In the interview, Flint says six million.
And he also does a very dramatic thing of, but when I looked into it, of course, at the time, I believed Flint because he's an expert.
But then I was shocked to find out.
And look at the confidence with which he states this.
Can you believe?
And it's like a very dramatic response, right?
And kind of making...
So he spends a long time on that.
And then he goes on to say, 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 actually this was wrong.
But he also argues that given 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...
So I find this argument a little bit perplexing because it seemed to me 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.
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 lost 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 subscribe 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.
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 raise, 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 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 archaeological record in support of this?
And he says, yes, and he endorses that.
He wanted to point out that after that, he said, but this is crucial because archaeologists 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?
The orientation of the Sphinx or, what is it, Gobekli Tepe?
How do you pronounce that?
Gobekli Tepe, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, there.
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 counterpoint, 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, 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, he did raise that as well.
But the reality is, this is disingenuous because the way archaeologists hypothesize about those ships is they're basically rafts or canoes.
So they're not going to be distinguishable from just...
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 waterlog 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, raft...
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 archaeologists 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...
Wouldn't that just look like?
I can't disprove that.
I can't disprove that.
You are right.
The existence of submarines made out of seaweed and powered by coral is not something that archaeology is capable of disproving right now.
Well, he's got to know.
Maybe I should contact him, actually.
You're on your path to becoming a guru, you know?
Like, this is how you start.
I think I've got it.
So, the other two things.
That he highlights that I think is still worth talking about.
And I know that you've addressed them in other videos, by the way, so 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 video.
This is another...
Online alternative archaeologists.
I don't know what the way to present it, like conspiracy.
Pseudo-archeologists.
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, we're 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.
Yes.
And I think we will get to that as well, 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 cores and metallurgy evidence, right?
Because similar to what we were just talking about with the lack of evidence for ICH fleets, there also is a lack of evidence that there was metalsmithing in the ICH, right?
In previous eras where this was happening, we have traces and various environmental sources, and this is missing.
In the ICH, right?
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 amounts of metal deposits in the ICH, 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?
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 on Joe Rogan as well, Graham debated earlier, not an archeologist, 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 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.
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 them on Joe 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.
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, but 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.
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.
And the 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...
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, man, 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 did find it quite compelling because, as I said, you addressed this point in response, I think, to Dan Richards or me, it was just even actually...
Like a month ago, too.
Yeah.
And in that video, you noted that 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...
Fail 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 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 80s, one in the 80s and one in the 90s, my immediate antenna is like, why?
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 ICH,
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, because what matters is the overall weight of evidence, but this is not how pseudo-archaeologists, conspiracy theorists and whatnot think.
They think if a paper is published and if it presents a piece of evidence, it is almost always presented as like the smoking gun, or at the very least that it wedges open enough doubt that the...
Mainstream narrative is just as plausible as the alternative narrative.
As you say, we cannot definitively disprove that there was some...
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'd be really interesting.
All scientists in the world would be astounded and whatnot.
Like, if we found that, we would publish it.
Without a doubt, because that's what archaeologists do.
I think this is an interesting philosophical question.
It's something I've been struggling with.
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...
Because philosophically...
You can't disprove a negative on a level of the 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...
at 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.
I mean, 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 various potential invasions and ethnic groups.
And there's political issues because people 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 languages.
So linguistics, you mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Linguistic analysis, but using phylogenetic trees to kind of reconstruct languages based on cognates that they had 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 archaeologist 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 You know, the evidence 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, you know, in the early 20th century, there's this idea of cultural history where, in a sense, pots equal people.
So the idea is that an assemblage of artifacts, burial rites, 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.
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 archaeological evidence.
We just can't get at that kind of level of kinship on a large population structure.
And language is the same thing.
Well, a lot of people link language to a 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.
Next 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 this is an issue that extends beyond the response video.
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 politicized, 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 dibble 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,
right?
And he points to these passages in his work where he first has to regretfully make the point about that he, yes, has used the terms like negroid or caucasinoid or I don't know what the specific...
Caucasoid or whatever, yeah.
Caucasoid, yeah.
And he's like, yes.
And he acknowledges, right?
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 he 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've 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 favoring white savior style narratives.
So the two questions I guess have is, one, is he correct?
Is there 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 exceptionalist, white peoples being savior narratives infecting this area is certainly true.
But do you think that is a major force in 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 uber clear.
And he's married to a person of color.
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, Clint.
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, 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 addressed Ancient Apocalypse Season 1 that went viral, that was what sparked me on this journey in a sense, it's like three tweets out of 50 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 friggin' 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 archaeological 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 civilization,
let's say, technologies like writing and monumental architecture and art to the Aztec people, the Mayan people.
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...
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 important.
That's not evidence.
Potentially and very likely to be biased.
Flint, before you go on to the second point, can I just clarify or 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 archaeologists, people in good standing and works that are apparently regarded as quite authoritative,
that...
The way that Hancock presents it is that they agree more with him, where they are aware that there are people who argue that most of this is due to the influence of Spanish or other colonial myth-making.
But some historians and archaeologists continue to suggest that that is not a 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...
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 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 used this idea of an earlier civilization that built these mounds to say that the indigenous Americans they 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.
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-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 archaeologists 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 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 where this comes from.
Yeah.
I think he, similar to various other people.
That we cover in The Guru's Fear.
Like, you know, you can see it in Graham's work, and it 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.
That is 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 you're a maverick...
It's not the best way to be a maverick.
It's better when other people call you a maverick.
But in those responses, you can see that he feels attacked, 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.
I mean, look, I don't think Graham, unfortunately, is somebody that I'm going to be able to reason with.
I had a fairly 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 wonder how much he is aggrieved and how much he wants to be cancelled.
Because let's be honest, in today's world, being cancelled sells.
That is just the reality.
These people who are constantly cancelled, all they can do is go on podcast after podcast and brag about it.
How they're canceled.
Because they know that as soon as they are canceled, other people are going to say, "Ooh, I want to buy that book."
It's the same thing Stephanie Holmhofer in that article that 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, I think, explains a lot of this video.
He 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 cancelled.
And it's just trying to frame everything in this culture wars way that is just, that 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 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, you know, two series now on Netflix and books that are bestsellers since I was young.
Right.
So like Graham Hancock's message has got out there.
The issue is that he he has.
Received criticism.
But this is the general thing with a lot of the truth-telling mavericks.
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...
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.
But 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 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.
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 overzealous 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...
Being 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.
They're cancelling.
Yeah, 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 cancelled person carries like a lot of cachet 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 cancelled, 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 being cancelled, that's a winning message, right?
But 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.
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, look, Flint did a really good job, and this is the first time, like, I've seen a response, 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-archile.
You're like a villain now.
I'm their arch nemesis.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
100%.
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 did that.
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...
It's 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 archaeology right now.
And he recently went on Dan Richards's...
And I don't even know if he's an archaeology 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.
He's on a different continent.
So he went on Dan Richards' podcast, or YouTube, to discuss the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, because that's what he's interested in.
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 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.
And so it's so disingenuous because he made these accusations on Twitter saying Flint most likely taught with illegal...
And 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.
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 have this video on my YouTube.
It's a great video.
It's called, like, the top six penis bones from archaeology 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...
You know, 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 that 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, nah, I'm going to 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, okay, this is going to be, you know, a lot of attention.
He has a lot of motivated fans.
This is likely, you know, to cause some impact to me professionally or otherwise, right?
Like, and yeah, so that's, like, the first thing is just that.
How much of this caught you off guard and how much was, like, priced into...
You doing the debate with Graham and responding to him and that kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, I was obviously hyper aware of the situation I was getting into.
And I'd 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.
What's funny, I must have talked with you guys in early May.
And in early May, 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 and it was late June.
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, Graham discovered him and got in touch with him, and you can see there are 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 at Knossos collecting samples to do analysis on.
And I finished my day at the lab there.
And I come back to my 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 2 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...
Well, 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 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.
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.
I don't even have 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.
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 Hancock wants to boost them.
Right. There's a there's a figure, Brett Weinstein.
You may or may not know him like I know who he is.
Yeah. Yeah.
But he has a kind of Uber fan who's much more active on Twitter and will meet huge threads and he basically would target people and would kind of respond to anybody that was critical
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.
You know, there's a whole range of constellation of things that go together.
But I crossed paths with him a couple of times.
He doesn't like me.
He definitely doesn't like me.
I mean, who knows, 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 fairly pointless.
Again, responding to his points in the way that would give him...
Attention and engagement was what he wanted, right?
Or would 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 it 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.
And so, 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 listed in 2023, I think it was, as one of the top 20 spiritual leaders in the world.
Hancock.
And so, you know, he is a real celebrity.
And the problem 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 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, because 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's completely true.
But it also gives the kind of sense, like, we're working.
This is working, right?
Like, we're getting to him.
Under his skin, 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 reused.
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's had to address that.
And 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 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 a disagreement,
but I don't wish many.
Bad thing.
And I'm not going to promote people that are attacking him.
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 is very focused on attacking anybody who disagrees and whatnot.
And you'll never convince them otherwise.
No, no, no.
There's very little point to like...
To try and stop them in a way because they won't stop.
And in my experience, the only way that they kind of lose interest is when they they are unable to see like any response.
So they might still make videos or whatever, but it feeds away.
But now the issue that you raised that like if they have basically presented videos that you're completely debunked, right?
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.
Oh, well, did you not see there was this detail?
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 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 TikToker 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.
The 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, which were harsh towards Graham, right?
And I felt like he was critical of some TikToker who was making videos.
Yeah, Philip Ziba, yeah, yeah.
And then his response...
Now, first of all, I'm not saying that you can do that, right?
Because 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 a very, very cutting takedown.
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 co-host Erudite.
Kyla, yeah.
Yeah, you were talking about creating a tongue-in-cheek alliance, right?
But basically, you guys are focused on promoting Archaeology and yes, debunking and that kind of thing, but like putting forward like a positive alternative, right?
And I think that is partly why the response to Ewan Rogan was so positive because it was clear, look, he really likes archaeology.
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, I'm going to respond to Graham's point because he's like a big person and he's making these videos that get a lot of influence.
But there's a whole world of archaeology and we are interested in promoting it.
And that's why I'm interested in this in dealing with like You know, the pseudo-archaeology as well, because it undermines the field.
And that, to me, is, like, the crucial bit.
And I think, like, I'm talking to the circle because there are some channels which are purely debunking, which are effective at that.
But it seems to me, like, if that is paired with a positive vision and, like, a 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 like to do real archaeology, too.
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...
I'm not going to shy away from doing debunk stuff.
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- And 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 so I will be doing a response.
I was actually going to try to hurry and do a quick response to Graham.
And I realized, no.
It was actually due to thinking back on Mini Minuteman's Philip Ziba response.
I thought, "I want to do this right.
I want to do this in a really clear, prepared way that's going to be very cutting and defend not just myself, but to cut back."
And B, will be entertaining as well and interesting.
Because that's always got to 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 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 doing fine in your mansion, right?
You know, you're all right.
When you're world touring, you'll probably survive.
Like, I think that...
He's sitting there and he's like, oh man, Chris and Matt just bashed me again.
No, my life was ruined!
Yeah, 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 wily, 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 some questions that people suggested 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 were people asking that in regards to pushing Back or dealing with like pseudo-archaeology or bad science in general.
You're an academic.
You've also now 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 in 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.
So 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 if you know much about the US healthcare system.
But my cancer's gone now.
I know it's not good.
I've seen breaking bad.
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 want to bankrupt my family by moving back to the U.S. 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 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.
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.
But the point being that 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 a tough situation.
And so because of the fact that I might be able to start supporting myself with public writing and YouTube, and 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 is not anywhere near right now, but it is growing.
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 because I don't feel like I need to.
I was about to say, that's great to hear, but I don't mean the insecurity of academic positions are great to hear.
I know that's struggled very well myself, and you have my full sympathy, along with probably everybody that has experienced the joys of the insecurity of academia.
But I also think it's worth saying, Flint, and important to highlight, you are in.
A more financially insecure position, and you're in a field which is not known for attracting huge amounts of money, right?
And the person that you're debating with, Graham Hancock, is somebody that I would imagine is very financially stable.
Secure.
Yeah, secure.
That's a way to put it.
And I do feel like people should kind of factor in that kind of thing, that 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're engaged, you know, like in Rogan, the pushback, but it's not like you planned this out that I'll study archaeology and then in 20 years time, I'll be able to go and...
No, no, no, not in the least.
I mean, you know, like, yeah, 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.
The 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, right?
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 YouTubing anymore, right?
I know, I know.
It's very insecure in that sense, but I think it's worth pursuing, because especially in the U.S., from the U.S. context, there really aren't any celebrity archaeologists.
There's nobody.
We listen to people with British accents, right?
And there's a lot of British.
Celebrity archaeologists.
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 Eric Klein is the best.
I had him on my channel recently.
And then Sarah Parkak, 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, 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'm 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 places in the U.S. 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.
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.
And so 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.
So if we cannot demonstrate 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.
The only difference is every single lecturer...
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 can go into some depth because that's what your goal is.
But I definitely think all the tools and tricks 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 experience, 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 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 the university...
It's gender studies department and 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 that even if that were a true caricature of a particular, which I don't think it is, but even if it was, universities are full of Law departments, biology departments,
engineering departments, languages departments, the whole thing.
Universities study everything.
Yeah, and in most cases, they are not engaged in the culture war in this heavy way.
So I think I completely agree with you that it's helpful for people to engage and show the stuff that they are learning, the stuff that they are teaching, that kind of thing.
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 speciality.
And, you know, there are people that are in academia that have politically extreme views of one stripe or another, but they're 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.
Of course, yeah.
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 kind 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.
You know, that will be slower because of the way that academia works.
So, yeah, I'm just seconding.
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 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, you know, I was actually coming on here and seeing the response.
You know, after I came on here, I was walking to work.
And 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?"
And 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 you guys, 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 archaeology right now, and the history of archaeology 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.
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 these 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.
And 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 Yes, 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'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 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."
As 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 that aside, 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 know, it's like, so maybe I was, like, slightly more half-folder.
But I do think that it's worth 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, the whole format of our show is around, like, looking at content critically.
But we also try to show...
We have, like, a series that we do called Decoding Academia, where we're just basically going through...
I have some academics you can decode.
Yeah, well, that also comes up.
And they also have often grievance narratives of their own about their theories.
But, like...
Looking critically at papers, including the people you like, or looking at the content of people you like, it's not a bad thing.
It's a thing that people should be accepting of, and it can be done in a very attacking, personal, cruel way, but it can be a sign of respect and also a reasonable...
That's what academia is often promoting as a value.
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 going to ask just one last question, which will probably not be a good one to end on because it's probably got too many different perspectives on it.
But if you are giving an academic perspective, 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 difference or people having different theoretical models, whatever the case might be.
And is there an issue that like 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 caveating things, but that's often because things should be caveated.
And I wonder, just do you think that that is in some 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 seaweed submarines.
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 with regards to things like climate change or vaccines or stuff like that.
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, 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 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 and humans and environments in the past.
And I mean, on 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 caveating 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...
Uh, 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 archaeologist, why we disregard this idea as plausible to begin with.
And 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 in the Ice Age, which, by the way, is the evidence Graham always ignores.
He claims I ignored shipwrecks and stuff like that.
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 out of my meandering question.
So that is a good note to draw this second round 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 wave coming, which is like a more positive wave than the negative response that followed up recently.
And hopefully a tenured track job and a successful YouTube channel as well.
Why not like a bazillion dollars?
So I'm a glass half full person.
Everybody, please check me out on YouTube, Flint Dibble, Archaeology of Flint Dibble.
What was the name of the upcoming event at the end of this month?
Real Archaeology.
Real-Archaeology.
Real-Archaeology.com.
It's got 50 different...
I mean, we're going to have millions of people tuning in, so check it out.
We're going to 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.
Yeah. You do realize this is going to be presented as big archaeology strikes back like there.
Yeah, well, so...
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, you know, because, like, 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, you know, 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, you know, the lobster and his obsession with that, he sold the lobster tie.
And...
I kind of think, you know, that is the correct response to that if you want to defuse that being an attack.
So I'm not saying you sell big archaeology material, but I'm just saying it works.
That's all I'm saying, it works.
So make it 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.
