Randall Carlson joins Joe Rogan to explore Hall’s Cave’s Younger Dryas black mat layer (12,850–12,900 years ago) and catastrophic comet impacts ending the ice age, citing microspherules, nanodiamonds, and meltwater pulse 1B (~11,600 years ago). He links these events to Atlantis’ timeline via Plato’s Egyptian priest sources and critiques mainstream dismissal of theories like Graham Hancock’s, arguing academic resistance stems from political narratives. Carlson warns of undetected cosmic threats today—asteroids, solar storms—and humanity’s vulnerability to natural disasters, despite adaptability, while advocating for education rooted in hands-on skills and nature exposure. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, Hall's Cave is near here, and this was a site that has extinct megafauna remains in it, and it also has some Clovis tools, and it has the Younger Dryas black mat stuff in it.
So it's been on hold, and I suspect that at some point we'll get to do it.
But while I'm out here, we are going to check out a few things.
Canyon Lake Gorge, which is down towards San Antonio, is a site that in 2002, there was a heavy, heavy rain, and Canyon Lake is a reservoir.
It overflowed and it cut this canyon and reproduced all these features like recessional cataracts and plunge pools and all these kind of things that geologists assumed were kind of slow to form, but are very similar to some of the things that are on a much grander scale that we'll look at here today.
But what it is is it's kind of almost forced a revision in thinking because basically they're seeing this duplication of these forms, although on a smaller scale, but formed in two days and not thousands of years.
So for people that are not familiar with your work, I think we should probably give them a real quick refresher.
When you're referring to the Younger Dryas, you're referring to the Younger Dryas impact theory.
And this impact theory, you believe, probably ended the ice age, caused the extinction of many mammals and many species of life all over the earth and reset civilization.
The dating of it, there's the Younger Dryas itself is about a 1,300-year interval.
So to put this in perspective, go back 16 to 20,000 years ago.
We're in the middle of the late glacial maximum, when more than doubled the amount of glacial ice on the planet now.
We had North America, half of North America is buried under an ice sheet bigger than the one that now covers the South Pole.
So all of Canada up to the Arctic Circle, northern United States, you know, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Twin Cities, Seattle, all of that area was completely buried under this massive ice sheet.
Around 15,000 years ago, 14,500 to 15,000 years ago, the climate began to warm.
And this is probably because the changing geometries between the Earth and the Sun has this, it's called the Milankovitch cycles.
And it basically is just the geometric relation between the Earth and the Sun, the orbit, the tilt of the Earth's axis, and so on, brings about gradual warming and gradual cooling.
So What has been documented now is that the gradual warming began between 14,500 and 15,000 years ago.
And so the great ice sheets began to shrink back, and they lost maybe 10 to 15% of their maximum mass.
And this is when that ice-free corridor opened up between the two, you had two big ice sheets that were covering North America.
Laurentide centered on Hudson Bay, Cordilleran centered over the Canadian Rockies.
Around 16,018,000 years ago, they coalesced.
They grew together.
Then with that warming, they separated.
And that's, you probably heard the term the ice-free corridor.
The old ideas that North America was exclusively populated by the Clovis people coming across the Bering Land Bridge, which was exposed because of lowered sea levels, migrating down through Alaska and through that ice-free corridor down into unglaciated North America, and then eventually all the way down to Tierra del Fuego within a thousand years.
So now you've got this gradual warming.
Now at about 12,850 to 12,900 years ago, that process is suddenly interrupted by this massive spasm of cold, right, that basically undoes 2,500 years of warming, just undoes it.
And now the planet is plunged back into full glacial cold, and it takes like 1,300 years for the planet to resume its upward arc of warming.
So at the beginning of that is when the spike of mass extinctions took place, and that's also when the COVID culture in North America that had been very prolific.
So anyways, not to get off on that, but so it lasts about 1,300 years.
At about 11,600 years ago, it ended.
Now, what's interesting about this, about the Younger Dryas period, is that it's almost bookmarked with two catastrophes.
The catastrophe 11,600 years ago is still kind of undefined.
There's been no, to my knowledge, evidence of any kind of extraterrestrial impact.
However, there was a massive pulse of melting that occurred.
And so it's referred to as meltwater pulse 1B.
Now there was a meltwater pulse 1A that is now dated at 14,600.
And there's evidence now emerging that there was also a major melting event at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
But it was so quick before the planet jumped back into full glacial cold, it has kind of been overlooked.
So anyways, what's interesting about meltwater pulse 1B, that's 11,600 years ago.
Now that is now given as the definition between the Pleistocene, which was two and a half million years, which was differentiated from the previous Pliocene because in the Pleistocene epoch, what characterizes this epoch is the planet started lurching back and forth between the glacial and interglacial ages, right?
So at the end of the Pleistocene, we get into the Holocene.
Holocene is now the onset of the Holocene is dated 11,600 years ago.
And shortly within a millennia to two millennia after that is when we begin to see the rise of what eventually led to modern civilization.
We see the domestication of animals.
We see the major shift in lifestyles from mostly, if not all, hunter-gatherers now into an agricultural-based lifestyle.
So we see really the rise of agriculture in those two millennia after the beginning of the Holocene.
What else?
Oh, the dispersion of languages generally traces back to around roughly 10,000 years ago.
What else?
Oh, the rise of urban areas.
The first Chatal Hoyuk and Jericho and other cities like that are showing up between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago.
So basically all the accoutrements of civilization that eventually led to what we think of as modern history, 4,500 to 5,000 years ago, all sort of got launched in this post Younger dryest epoch, if you will.
So the question is, what caused these tremendous sea level rise?
And I think in one of our previous interviews, I actually pulled up a graph where you could see these two great spikes of meltwater.
Rather than it being tens of thousands of years in a smooth curve, it was two major spikes of meltwater.
So in order to trigger that melting, you had to have some kind of input of energy.
It takes energy to melt ice.
So one of the mysteries that actually began to be noticed in the early 70s was what is called the energy paradox.
Now, with the advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s, what happened is you accumulated a couple of decades of radiocarbon dating.
After a couple of decades, the geologists and the climatologists and so on, they're looking at that data and they're going, wait a second, our old models of glacial, the onset of a glaciation, glacial period, the termination of a glacial period, were tens of thousands of years, 50, 60, 70,000 years.
Radiocarbon dating is now showing it happened way, way faster than that.
For example, radiocarbon dating showed that in the central area of Canada, where it was assumed it had been a mile, a mile and a half of ice, forests were growing, like 30,000, 35,000 years ago.
Well, clearly there was no ice there when the forests are growing there, right?
The other thing was the rapidity with which the whole thing came to an end.
Rather than 15, 20, 25,000 years, it was more like 3, 4, 5,000 years.
So this is what introduced the concept of the energy paradox.
Like, where the hell did all the energy come from to melt that much ice?
And so there was a group of scientists that held a conference in 1973, didn't resolve it, held another conference in 1975, still didn't resolve it.
What they were looking at, they go, okay, well, what is the greatest concentration of available thermal energy on the planet today to melt ice?
So they said, well, it looks like it's equatorial regions over equatorial oceans.
Okay, so if we applied that much thermal energy to these ice sheets, how long would it take to melt?
20 to 25,000 years to completely melt away.
So that was the energy paradox.
And it really has not been resolved to this day.
And see, the assumption was that the energy would have applied in a uniform manner from the beginning of the start of the deglaciation to the end of the deglaciation.
But it didn't happen that way.
It happened in pulses.
So in other words, rather, even though you have a tremendously enlarged amount of energy to melt this ice, basically it didn't happen smoothly.
It was concentrated into several episodes, which means then that you have even more thermal energy to try to explain.
So it kind of got left there.
And of course, then I encountered that.
I mean, I guess, you know, going way back in the late 70s, early 80s, when I first got obsessed with the catastrophic history of this planet and geology and all of that, that's when I read these papers.
And I kind of thought, well, what's the possibility?
Either it's got to be impacts or it's got to be the sun.
What else could it be?
You know, there's no intrinsic source of that much heat to melt the ice that quick.
So I was very gratified when in 2007 the paper came out proposing that there had been an impact at the younger dryest, triggering the younger dryest.
We talked about that with Graham on here.
And that's actually what inspired Graham to come back to his original idea that he had proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods back in 95 or 96 was the two things, the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, which is back 11,500 years old, right?
And the evidence that there had been this cometary impact.
So in his Fingerprints of the Gods, he was still thinking, he had documented a tremendous amount of evidence for a catastrophe.
But what he didn't really wasn't thinking, he was thinking more in terms of the scenario or the models of Charles Hapgood, who was thinking in terms of pole shift.
Well, that idea kind of fell by the wayside because it wasn't making sense from the geophysical standpoint and a lot of reasons.
But then when 2007 came along and this paper came out, Graham was pretty much electrified when he saw that and said, well, there's the catastrophe.
You'll have microspherols, which form when you have a hypervelocity impact, you know, you've got to think an object coming in closing velocity at 10 to 20 times the muzzle velocity of a high-powered rifle.
It's coming and it slams into the earth.
It has a whole suite of consequences, one of which a lot of the material that's directly in the epicenter gets vaporized.
That vapor goes up into the stratosphere.
It begins to circulate.
As it cools, it drops back to Earth.
And it will form both microspherols and microtectites.
And microtectites are small little aerodynamically shaped forms that they're called microtectites because you really only see them under a microscope.
And likewise with the microspherols.
Then you have nanodiamonds.
Nanodiamonds are only produced under extraordinary regimes of heat and pressure.
So you've got microspherols, you've got the trinitite and the melt glass, you've got the microspherols, you've got iridium, other platinum group metals now associated with the younger dryas.
They've found iridium spikes, osmium spikes, and platinum spikes, which are all part of the platinum group metals, all of which are pretty much abundant in cosmic things like asteroids, right?
So you had the finding of that.
You know, I think in the Greenland ice cores, platinum showed up in iridium.
See, what else?
Charcoal, if there's, soot, if there's fires.
So, you know, soot has been found in conjunction with that black mat layer.
That's one of the reasons it's black is because of the amount of charcoal and soot in it.
You know, the first group, I think it was 17 scientists that signed off on that paper, 2007.
Actually, and they formed a group called the Comet Research Team, organized by George Howard, who runs the Cosmic Tusk website.
He'd be a great guest, by the way.
He's really, he knows more about the Younger Dryas than I do.
He has a good comprehension of it.
And so he does the Cosmic Tusk website, and he helped to organize this comet research team.
Now, the Comet Research Team has grown to over 50 members since 2007.
And I have been out in the field with, oh, a couple of times with some members of the group, Chris Moore, for example, who originally was one of the skeptics.
So we were out, we can circle back to this too, the Carolina Bays, which are these unique elliptical features on the southeastern coastal plain of the United States.
So we were out in the field.
It was me and him, George Howard Graham.
Hancock was with us on that one.
And Malcolm LeCompte, I don't know if you remember Malcolm.
He was the scientist that Graham brought in on our side during the great debate.
Well, you see, you've got to bear in mind, too, that what will happen under normal circumstances is you will have a melting season, summer, right?
Fall comes, things get cold again, melting stops, and then you have more ice accumulation because it's now snowing during the winter.
So really, if you say 20,000 years or 15,000 years to melt, you've got to actually cut that in half or less because you're only going to have really, especially in the northern latitudes, you're going to only have probably three or four months out of each year where actually the ice diminishes in mass.
So that's one reason why it'll straighten.
It's not like a continuous process.
But yeah, I think I've got, let's see, if I've got it right here, I'll pull this up.
But yeah, so that was the thing when I discovered that in the late 70s is when I started thinking, okay, so something unusual happened that we don't really have an explanation for.
So this is the first thing they noticed, that the rate of recession, you would assume that it's going to be faster at the southern margin, right?
And much slower because the northern margin is up by the Arctic circle, right?
What they saw that it varied little between the northwest and southern margins.
So that was the first mystery.
So then the second thing was of primary concern is the energy balance at the margin of the ice sheet required to promote the rapid late Wisconsin retreat.
The growth and development of the Laurentide ice sheet complex is still an enigma.
That was in 73.
It's still an enigma in 2002, which is why I find it so interesting, is because there are mysteries out there, and I love a good mystery.
Unexplained, it's the growth of the ice cap and its gathering grounds of Baffin Island.
So they're saying, we don't even know how it started.
The average annual rate of marginal retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet calculated from the reduction area was 260 meters per year, which is 853 feet.
So that means over the whole period of disappearance of the ice, it's on average 853 feet every year.
The ice is receding, right?
And this high figure immediately raises the question of what energy sources are available to cause such a rapid retreat.
A significant aspect of the Laurentide deglacial history is the high energy inputs required, which, you know, that was what came up in the 1970s.
They still haven't yet.
The high energy inputs.
Let's see.
So this is kind of showing here, like imagine that this is the marginal profile of the ice sheet.
And then as it recedes, it's also wasting vertically as well, because it's retreating, but it's also shrinking this way.
So when it comes down to rates of ice retreat in meters per year for the northwest, southwest, south, and northeast sectors of the Laurentide ice sheet.
And what they discovered was the rate of retreat up on the northern section was just as fast as the southern.
Other than I've seen several attempts to try to explain it through gradualistic processes, but I think that it's been one of those things that has, it's so bizarre that almost like, let's just stay away from that for the time being.
And, you know, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, they theorized way back, I think, in the 70s, that there was an extraterrestrial cause to ice ages, that the planet might get dusted with extraterrestrial, fine, extra, including nano diamonds that are so small and very reflective of heat that that maybe was not accepted back in the 70s just because it's pretty much outside.
See, they were still looking for what the Milankovitch, this what I was mentioning earlier, the changing geometry of the Earth to the Sun.
The problem with that, though, is the rates.
You know, those are slow, long, very gradualistic.
What we're seeing now is stuff is like happening like that.
But within there, see, you can say 5,000 years and you might think of a uniform process.
It's diminishing in mass uniformly each year, but that's not what happened.
Because even during the Younger Dryas, now the evidence suggests that that more or less gradualistic shrinking was interrupted, and then you had a regrowth of the ice sheet.
So the process was interrupted.
See?
So what that leads is, again, we don't really have gradualistic explanations for it.
That's why I think we have to go to a more catastrophic scenario.
Well, I think that if we look at the work of, and I've mentioned this on your show before, the work of, in fact, in one of our conversations we had, it was William Napier, who's a British astronomer, commented that we had, he was pleased that we had talked about it.
And I mentioned Victor Klube and William Napier and several of these others that were sort of called them neocatastrophists, if you will.
And they really began proposing in the late 70s and early 80s things like ice age, you know, impacts may be responsible for a lot of things.
They may be responsible for increased amounts of volcanic eruptions because a hypervelocity impact can be very damaging.
The analogy that I like to use, if you have like a .38 caliber bullet, right, and I was to throw that at you even as hard as I could and it hit you, might sting a little bit.
It's not going to do any damage at all.
But that same .38 caliber accelerated to 2,500 feet per second, a lot of damage.
Now, you take a half-mile space rock, accelerate it by a factor of 10 beyond that, and slam it into the Earth.
Yeah, it's going to have consequences that could take thousands of years, actually, to play out.
I think that you had a concentrated series of impacts right around the beginning of the Younger Dryas because that's where the proxies are found.
We still don't have an explanation for the end of the Younger Dryas.
Something interesting, though, it's one of these coincidences that I should bring up.
We talked a little bit at one point, maybe the first meeting we had, we talked about Plato and the story of Atlantis.
And a lot of, I noticed some of the negative comments were like, oh, I heard him mention Atlantis, so I just immediately turned it off because that's BS, you know.
Well, whether Atlantis really existed or not, that's a whole other interesting question.
And as a matter of fact, I just a few weeks ago did a part one of a six-part series, a live stream, where I'm like line by line dissecting what Plato actually said, going through four or five different translations, going back to some of the original Greek language that he used.
But the thing that really initially, I wasn't that interested in the Atlantis thing until I realized that he's, if you go into his dialogue, Timaeus, just before he begins the story of Atlantis, he prefaces it with referencing the myth of Phaeton and Phaeton being the son of Halios, who tried to drive his father's chariot in the path of the sun and completely failed.
And the chariot deviated off the path of the sun and it declined or deviated down to the earth and it set the world on fire.
Now, in the story of Atlantis, Solon is hearing this story from these elderly Egyptian priests who say that they have preserved that story in their sacred registers for 9,000 years.
Is that possible?
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe not.
But this is what was related, that it was preserved in their sacred registers and in their temples for 9,000 years.
And this was prior to Solon's 10-year sojourn in Egypt, right?
Solon's sojourn in Egypt happens at 600 BC.
Let me think of that.
Let me think of this.
Yes.
So basically, if you add that to the 9,000, go back from now to 600 BC.
So you have a rapid rise, what John Shaw, Canadian geologist, the late John Shaw, called a CRE, which is catastrophic rise event.
So there was a catastrophic rise event at 11,600 years ago.
Plato gives that date based on the chronology from Solon down through Dropitis, through Critias the Elder through Critias the Younger, then finally to Socrates and Plato.
Coincidence?
Perhaps.
That's what the skeptic would say.
It's just a coincidence.
I'm not quite so ready to dismiss things like that as coincidence because it's pretty amazing that he puts the demise of Atlantis, that it subsides beneath the ocean as a result of an earthquake and a rapid rise of sea level, and there's Meltwater Pulse 1B right there.
Who knows?
But what to me even makes it more interesting is because he prefaces the whole story with this Phaeton myth.
And then he says, let's see, I bet you I have it right here.
Let's see.
There we go.
Let's see if we can open this up and you can see exactly what Plato says.
I first discovered that maybe 20 years ago because when it was first discovered because of NASA photography, they were looking at it and thinking this might be a multi-ringed impact structure.
So I thought, oh, add this to the ever-growing list of impact structures.
However, subsequent research showed that it was pretty much natural.
And I think, yeah, here we go right here.
So this is, since you brought it up and asked about it, you can see here's a magma body beneath the structure.
It's volcanic.
And let's see.
Yeah, an external basaltic ring dike is displaced by a north-northeast, south-southwest fault system in the northeastern part of the structure and is cross-cut by carbonatite dikes.
So you can see there's this whole magma chamber beneath the thing.
And so what that would indicate was that this is probably the remnants of a volcanic eruption, like some sort of a caldera, like the same way that we have Yellowstone when they found that from space.
Probably pressure from below causing an updoming, right?
Now, you've got multiple layers like this.
Now you picture, you've got a circular updoming.
Now you truncate that.
If you can picture that you've got these multiple stratigraphic layers, right?
It forces it into a circular, sort of a dome-shaped uplift, and then you truncate it, you slice the top of that off, what you're going to have is multiple rings that are now exposed.
So I had eight hours, so 16 hours, but we had some chatter and things like that in there.
So maybe more like 12 or 14 hours.
So you know who Johanna James is?
No.
She is a British actress who started doing this pod.
She's really cool lady.
She's very interested in all this kind of stuff.
Very smart, extraordinarily beautiful.
And she went on and did a, she does these like 20-minute, 30-minute little vignettes of things that she's really interested in, having to do a lot with, you know, ancient cultures, all the kind of things that, you know, Graham Hancock is, you know, she reads Graham Hancock.
She became a fan of mine, and she devoted one of her little 20 or 30 minute segments to, she said, I watched all 10 hours or 12 hours of Randall Carlson's programs on Atlantis.
And so she did this like 30-minute little synopsis of it.
Really did a great job.
So we reached out to her.
I invited her on.
She came on.
We did a live stream a couple of weeks ago with her as a guest.
And just really fun lady.
She also does comedy.
Yeah.
And she's very intelligent, very gorgeous.
What can I say?
You know, and smart and interested in all this kind of stuff.
So, you know, there we go.
Anyways, so she was very interested in the whole Atlantis thing.
And so because of that, there was a lot of feedback and people wanting to know more.
And so I thought, okay, now the 10 or 12 hours I did, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to condense that down.
So a couple of weeks ago, we did the first three-hour live stream where I basically started breaking down Plato's account line by line.
What did he actually say?
Let's look at the geology.
Let's look at the geography, the oceanography, the astronomy, and see if it lines up, if it matches up.
And so I think there's one place that pretty much is not all the details, but when you look at all of the areas around the planet that have been proposed for Atlantis, I think there's one place that fits the majority of his details, and that's the sunken Azores Plateau.
And I say sunken because we know it's sunken.
And it's right along the mid-Atlantic Ridge.
In fact, since we're on this subject, and I wasn't even thinking we'd get on this subject, there's the Azores Plateau right there.
It straddles a triple plate junction, which you have the European plate, the African plate, and the North American plate here.
That's why, in a nutshell, God, where do I even begin?
So I was afraid you were going to ask that, but we could look very quickly, I guess, like give you the five-minute version, which is that there is evidence that there was a massive subsidence along the mid-Atlantic Ridge.
We actually talked about this a little bit, and I think in our very first discussion we had, which was what?
Because, and we, so we talked about this a little bit.
Geophysics shows that there's horizontal movement, lateral movement of the Earth's crust because of continental drift, but there's also vertical movement.
And that is the result of isostatic compensation.
That's called isostasy is the vertical movement of the Earth's crust.
I can show you, like I should have a slide right here that will help to really illustrate what it is.
Let me back up to, let's see.
Should be right in here.
Ah, here we go.
Okay, so now this is the shore of Hudson Bay.
Now this is where the ice sheet was the thickest, right?
Now what are you seeing there?
Hudson Bay is up here.
These are shorelines because when the ice was removed, the land started rising back.
That's the land rebounding a couple of thousand feet after the ice was removed.
Now, the ice was removed, and all of those trillions of tons of weight.
Where did it go?
In the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, you look, the thinnest crust on the Earth is the mid-Atlantic Ridge.
And if you look at it, you'll see that there are transform faults, which should show up right here.
The transform faults are these vertical fault lines that are, you would say, orthogonal or at right angles to the ridge itself.
Here you can see very clearly the triple plate junction and how the Azores Plateau.
Okay, well, since the 1940s, the first expedition in 1948, when they started doing dredge samples from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, which coincidentally, the name of the ship was the Atlantis.
They dredged core samples and they pull up the core samples from two miles down, a mile to two miles down, and they look at those core samples.
And what you had was, for example, shallow water creatures living.
They weren't living.
They were now, you know, they had been drowned.
You had creatures that typically lived under 100 feet of seawater.
And now they're a mile, mile and a half below.
And they're on the flanks of this place right here.
This goes back to the 60s, as it says right here, the possible tectonic implications of glacioeustatic.
Now, eustatic is the rise and fall of sea level correlated with the increase and decrease of glacial ice.
So if the ice is increasing, sea level is falling, and we call that eustatic sea level fall.
If the ice is shrinking, melting, sea level's rising.
So that's a eustatic rise.
So that's the meaning of that.
When you see glacio eustatic, that means the rise and fall of the sea level as a result of glacier growth or melting.
And it says here, sea level fluctuations have received only minor attention in connection with such problems as ocean floor spreading.
The purpose of this report is to point out that late Pleistocene sea level data suggests that the ocean basins have responded isostatically and by a significant amount, particularly concentrated along the mid-Atlantic Ridge.
So, and so, I mean, this is, I've got so much here, I'm just going to grab a couple of these things here.
Yeah.
So they dug up these cobbles, which are the cobbles are, so a cobble is basically a stone or anything that's lithified that's roughly between a pebble, a pebble and a boulder.
A boulder, when you get, I think, to 11 inches, about the size of a volleyball, now you're in a realm of boulders.
A cobble is in between pebbles and boulders, you know, like you've heard of cobblestone streets, you know, they're fist-sized rocks, basically.
So they say here the Atlantis cruiser and great meteor seamounts rise from a broad ridger plateau, which extends from the mid-Atlantic ridge, blah, blah, blah.
Let's see.
So about a ton of flat pteropod limestone cobbles was dredged from the summit area of one of these sunken, what they're calling the seamounts.
And a seamount is like a flat-topped mountain, right?
Like the top of the mountain has been sheared off.
Okay.
So they pulled up these limestones, right?
These limestone cobbles.
They dated them.
One of the cobbles gave an apparent radiocarbon age of 12,000 years, plus or minus 900 years.
The state of lithification, how much it is turned into rock of the limestone suggests that it may have been lithified under sub-aerial conditions.
In other words, in the atmosphere.
That's what that means.
It may have been lithified under sub-aerial conditions, and the seamount may have been an island within the past 12,000 years.
So, I mean, we could go through, again, hours of this kind of research.
And why it's been pushed off to the side is anybody's guess.
But it just doesn't fit the paradigm.
But yeah, basically, now this doesn't prove that there was any civilization there, but we can make a very strong case that a large section of the Azores Plateau was above sea level during the late glacial maximum.
See, now there we have to make a leap of faith, which is this.
And if we look right here, you'll see you can see it very clearly.
And you can see the Straits of Gibraltar here, which was anciently known as the Pillars of Heracles.
And You come here to a group of islands and then you get to the Azores Plateau.
And here, these down here are those seamounts, those truncated seamounts.
So really, all you have to do, here's the leap of faith you have to make.
You have to go.
Now, we don't, I don't get into anything like, you know, whatever, flying spaceships or crystal ray guns or anything like that.
No, I just go by what Plato says.
What he's describing is a maritime culture that had navigational abilities.
Something along the lines of the Minoan or the Phoenician culture, maybe by an order of magnitude, right?
So now, all we have to do really is assume this, which to me is not so pseudo-scientific that we couldn't even consider it, which is that somebody, some group in the ice age, had enough navigational skills to sail from Europe to islands right here.
Well, advanced in the standpoint that, yes, it was engaged in trade.
It was, you know, had a broad net of cultural connections around the world.
But if you look at this, this is, if you go right here, let's see, the position of the Gulf Stream during Quaternary glaciations.
In the present-day North Atlantic Ocean, the boundary between the subtropical and subpolar gyres runs southwest to northeast from Hadras to the Northern Sea.
So we'll get down here, right?
See, in contrast, during the last glacial maximum, approximately 18,000 years ago, the gyre boundary and associated currents were more zonal and located further to the south.
So here's a map showing basically what you would have had.
So this is the Gulf Stream.
So it's bringing up the warm equatorial waters and wrapping it right around the Azores.
So if you were going to try to, you know, theorize or hypothesize an ideal climate during the Ice Age, there it is right there.
You see, that Gulf Stream, you know, it's the Gulf Stream now, which is why you have warmth basically in the UK.
And is there any sort of plan to do an excavation or some sort of an expedition where they go underwater and look at some of that stuff and try to find some physical?
I mean, you would have had massive tsunamis that would have affected everything, you know.
And like Plato says, Atlantis subsided beneath the waves because of a great earthquake.
And we can actually show now that there has evidence of massive, traumatic, seismic events along the mid-Atlantic Ridge coincident with the rapid rise of sea level.
So a lot of the pieces fit together.
Doesn't prove anything, but to me, it makes the case that it might be worth it to go down and have a look, closer look.
My guess is that whether it's to be taken literally or not, Plato's description of the infrastructure, I would think that the infrastructure, the multi-ringed, if that was real and not just metaphorical, that that's kind of what you would look for.
In other words, I mean, we do know that these ancient peoples, you know, just from historical times, were, you know, this is what Graham documents from all over the world.
The ability to, you know, organize on a huge scale, you know, quarry 50, 100, 200 ton and larger stones, move them around with impunity, all over the world.
And that to me has always struck me as a builder.
I've had a little bit of experience moving beams and things that weigh half a ton to a ton, and I know what's involved.
If you don't have a crane, you got to do it manually.
So I'm doing that, and I'm often thinking, wait a second, what if I'm going to do 2.3 million stones that weigh this much?
And hey, does it make sense that you've got these kinds of undertakings, you know, by people that were just a generation or two before subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers?
It's also interesting how some parts of the world were so sophisticated in relationship to other parts of the world, whereas some parts of Europe weren't that sophisticated at all.
Egypt was thriving and making construction on a scale that boggles the mind today.
And we've seen even in recent times, you know, advanced technological cultures living side by side with basically Stone Age cultures.
Yes.
And if we were to, if this planet was to be subjected to some of the kinds of events like the Younger Dryas event, there would be absolutely no trace in 10,000 years of our presence here other than the Stone Age material.
If we got hit, if something hit us, if we lost the power grid for a decade, if we, you know, if we got down to, like we were talking before this podcast about the Toba volcano in Indonesia and about how 74,000 years ago it knocked the human race down to a few thousand people.
That's we saw, I'm sure you saw it because I thought of you when it happened.
I saw that volcano that erupted in the middle of the ocean when you could see it from space.
And this has been referred to as the last great subsistence crisis of Western civilization because there was famine, because you had agricultural failures.
So you have this thing that you can begin to track now, where you have primarily cold that's brought about by, I think primarily volcanism is going to be The main instigator of this.
But also, I think hypervelocity impacts will also do.
And we'll pull up some data here shortly that shows that hypervelocity impacts are way, way more common.
It was even assumed a decade, two decades, certainly a generation ago.
That these things are, we've actually been rather lucky in the last few centuries that we've not had any major impacts.
Tunguska of 1908 is considered the most recent great impact, and we can talk about that in a minute.
The evidence to me suggests very strongly that it was a piece of the torrid meteor stream, which was a byproduct of disintegration of comet Enki, which was internally.
And this gets us back to the British neocatastrophist.
No, I think it was named after an astronomer who discovered it.
Most comets are named after whoever discovers them.
So, and it's spelled a little different, E-N-C-K-E, as opposed to E-N-K-I.
But coincidence, though, Enki.
Anyways, so Comet Enki was probably part of a much bigger system, and it was probably Earth's encounter with the Torrid meteor stream that triggered the Younger Dryas impacts.
That's kind of a lot of the pieces are sort of fitting together now.
And the Torrid Meteor Stream was a much more prolific meteor stream in the past than it is now.
The Earth crosses the Torrid Meteor Stream twice each year.
Peaks late October, early November, when the stream, if you've got a picture, actually I have a graphic I can pull up in a minute, but you picture this stream circling the sun and going out to Jupiter and then circling back, coming around the sun, and it's laying into the plane of the ecliptic.
Earth's orbit crosses that stream twice.
So it crosses the stream when the stuff is coming in from out by Jupiter, and that's around Halloween.
In fact, they've been called the Halloween meteors.
Circle around the Sun, and the second time the Earth crosses each year is late June, early July.
But now that stream is coming right from the direction of the Sun.
So that makes it largely invisible, right?
Because you're looking right almost into the Sun.
See?
Now, when you look at the Tunguska event, it was June 30th, peak of the Torrid Meteor Stream.
If you look at its position in the sky, where it came from, it was perfectly positioned to be part of that torrid meteor stream.
So it was probably, most likely, nobody's proven it, but it was, the circumstantial case is very strong that it was a part of that torrid meteor stream.
And the torrid meteor stream right now, the radium, the place in space where that the meteors appear to be emanating, is almost targeted right on the Pleiades, which is the shoulder of the bull, the constellation of the bull, Taurus.
And there's a whole bunch of really interesting mythology associated with that we could dive into.
But it's particularly like, for example, have you ever heard of Mithraism?
Mithraism was the, in like first century AD, was the primary competitor to Christianity throughout the whole Roman Empire.
And Christianity won out for a variety of reasons, but Mithraism was loaded with some really potent symbolism.
And one of the things is that during the Mithraic ceremonies or rituals was called the Toroctony, the slaying of the celestial bull.
And when you look at these images, they would go underground and they would have a vault-shaped like temple with stars painted on the ceiling.
And at the end of that, they would have this carving of Mithras stabbing his sword into the slaying the bull, the celestial bull stabbing his sword into the shoulder of the bull and the blood flowing out.
And if you superimpose the constellation of the Taurus in the classical sense, the shoulder of the bull is the Pleiades.
I look at that and I go, I think what they're trying to symbolize here is that on a yearly basis, they would see this meteor stream pouring out of the shoulder of the bull.
And I could certainly pull up some stuff like that to look at.
I thought really quickly, since before we leave the Atlantis thing, A couple of the things this there is so now Solon is in Egypt sias Egypt He's talking to the ancient priests, right?
And he says thereupon one of the priests who was of a very great age said so oh Solon Solon you Hellenes are but children and there's never an old man who is a Hellene Solon hearing this said what do you mean?
The old priest said I mean to say that in mind you are all young.
There is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition nor any science which is hoary with age.
And I will tell you the reason for this.
There have been and will be again many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes.
The greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water and other lesser ones by innumerable causes.
There is a story which even you, even you Hellenes who don't know shit, you know, you're like children with your knowledge.
There's a story which even you have preserved that once upon a time, Phaeton, the son of Helios, yoked to steeds of his father's chariot because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burned up all that was upon the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt.
Now here's the key passage.
Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens and a great conflagration of things, all things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time.
So he's saying right there, he's saying, okay, this has a form of a myth, but it's not really a myth.
Behind the myth is something real.
And it's the bodies circulating in the heavens, they decline or they descend to earth and they set the earth on fire.
So he's describing right there, you see, this whole phenomenon and making it clear that there's more dimensions to what we think of as myths than just some mere fanciful, superstitious concoction to try to explain the unknown, that there really is something going on behind there.
It's really fascinating, too, when he's talking about how there's no old science and that everyone is young.
And it's really interesting when you think about someone from that long ago trying to make an account of what had happened to the earth with a relatively simplistic view of a relatively simplistic understanding of the sky, of asteroids, of volcanoes, of all these different things.
Yeah, but the way they're describing it coincides once you have modern knowledge and understanding of these things, you go, I think I see what they were trying to say.
Yeah, I mean, because Dorothy Vitaliano, who is a geologist back, I think she died in the early 90s, she was one of the, in the forerunners of looking at the Atlantis thing and deciding that it was just a myth, that it was made up.
Of course, when she was looking at this back in the 70s, she didn't have access to the data that we now have.
She was the one who coined the term geomythology and said, you know what, we really need to be taking a closer look at some of the myths of old because they actually may contain really valid information about things that happened in the past.
And, of course, since then, yeah, it's emerged into like a whole discipline in itself, looking at stories like the one we just looked at.
Phaeton is a story about a great meteor or comet or asteroid something, you know, causing destruction on the earth.
And Plato was saying, this is not just a myth.
It's literal.
You know, it really represents completely makes sense.
Yeah.
And then he goes on to say, if any action which is noble or great or in any other way remarkable has taken place, all that has been written down of old and is preserved in our temples, whereas you and other nations are just being provided with letters and other requisites of civilized life.
And then, at the usual period, the stream from heaven descends like a pestilence.
And I find the use of that term stream is interesting because we're talking about a meteor stream, right?
And we're looking at events that may have been caused by the influx of enormous amounts of cosmic material.
And I think that's the best way to explain what happened at the end of the last ice age.
A lot of the critics have tried to oversimplify it and say, well, you had just one object coming in.
That can't explain it, right?
But the idea is the models that have evolved are not just a single event, but multiple events.
Almost like, again, back to the British neocatastrophists.
The idea of sort of an impact epoch, which has to do with meteor streams will precess.
They will move.
So there will be times when the Earth is crossing the stream and other times when the Earth is more or less missing the stream.
It's just the analogy I use is you're out driving down a country road and you're all by yourself.
You're listening to some tunes.
You're kicked back.
There's nobody else on the road.
So it's relaxed.
You're not paying a lot of attention, right?
Your probabilities of getting an impact are very low.
But now you come up to an intersection, right?
Now there's cars.
It's a major intersection.
There's cars going both ways.
So now your probabilities of getting into an accident are going to increase by several orders of magnitude.
Now, to take the analogy further, you'll know that sometimes there might, if it's 3 a.m., maybe your probabilities are low.
If it's 5 p.m., your probabilities are high.
And if you just shut your eyes and you cross that intersection, boom, you might get slammed.
Same way.
Think of that.
Think of a meteor stream.
And in that meteor stream, there are pockets where the material is denser and other places where it's spread out much finer.
And there will be times of the year or times within, say, a millennia where you may have the Earth intersecting that meteor stream in a much more denser part than other centuries.
During that period, you're going to have an increased probability of something happening.
And I think this is the model that's emerging now.
That we're realizing that the structure of space in Earth's vicinity is a whole lot more complex than we had previously even imagined a generation ago.
Had it been on a collision course, it would have created one of the worst disasters in human history, said Stephen Pravdo, the NEAT project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
March 8th, you know, an asteroid large enough to have flattened the city buzzed Earth earlier this month and was not seen until after it flew harmlessly by.
So with this taken into consideration, and then you go back 11,000, 12,000 plus years, the amount of times that this has happened has probably been just off the charts.
Oh, there's no doubt something is headed our way right now.
I mean, yeah, because, see, these things, you've got to bear in mind, these things are on orbits.
And those orbits, you can track those orbits.
And anything that's going to hit us in the future is on a trajectory right now that if we could discover it, track it, we'd go, okay, this thing's going to hit us in 2029 or whatever the case may be.
Yeah, and what we're talking about with the Tunguska is that, you know, if stuff is coming what you would call the perihelion passage, where it's passed closest to the sun, and now it's coming from around the sun, yeah, you'd have to basically look into the sun to see it.
So it's gonna, it'd be very easy to Very easy to miss.
So here in June 2020, biggest asteroid to pass close and undetected this year.
But in aggregate of all of this, what we're seeing is that unlike our conceptions of near-Earth space a couple of generations ago, we realized that there's all kinds of cosmic beasts that live in the space that we inhabit.
When you're thinking about something that's going 60,000 miles an hour and it's as big as multiple football fields, how prepared are we to even deflect something like that?
So, you know, if we had a dusting, a cosmic winter, a volcanic winter, I mean, that shut down agriculture for a year or two, half the population of the Earth is going to be dead within the next year.
See, now we get into a mass extinction level event.
We had that at the Younger Dryas.
If you think of all of the megafauna, megafauna is over 44 kilograms body weight, or about 100 pounds, right?
The planet lost about half of all megafaunal species during that Younger Dryas.
Now, there was already animals disappearing leading up to it, because I think it could be attributed to whatever happened at 14,600 years ago, where I talked about earlier Meltwater Pulse 1A, right?
That's when the shit really started to seem like it started coming down.
And then it peaked, Younger Dryas, 12,850.
And then we had the impact winter for 1,300 years.
And at the end of that, it wasn't a gradual warming.
It was a catastrophic warming.
And by that time, I think whatever species had managed to survive some of the earlier events may have succumbed at that point.
You know, the controversy has come down to, was it nature?
Was it climate?
Was it human hunters?
I think it was all of that, but I think hunters was probably a minor contributor to it because for one thing, it now appears that the human population took a major crash at the same time.
Like, we see that there's evidence that the Clovis culture in North America pretty much completely disappeared right at that boundary.
Well, they weren't the only ones around the planet.
Now, if you go and you look at some of the archaeological evidence, one of the things that you see over and over again is, well, there was this cultural group in Japan or wherever.
I just read a paper on that recently.
And apparently there was some kind of social disruption and they got up and they migrated and moved away.
Well, maybe they did, but maybe they didn't move away.
Maybe they didn't survive.
And there was a tendency to think, well, you have this evidence of cultural habitation of this area for centuries or millennium, and then suddenly you don't.
And one of the things that you pointed out before is the evidence of there's certain mammals that appear to have died instantaneously, particularly mammoths.
I think that's the one I showed, which was a mammoth that was frozen into permafrost.
And it was a particular, I think 1901 was a particularly warm year that year in Siberia.
And there was a collapse of the ground that exposed this mammoth, right?
And he was sitting on his haunches and both of his hips were broken.
And he had food in his mouth and in his stomach.
He'd been eating flowering plants.
But now he was six tons in weight.
And even the contents of his stomach had not putrefied, which meant that it got frozen.
And the scientific study suggested that the entire carcass would have had to have been frozen within about 10 hours to prevent putrefaction of the material in the stomach.
So how do you freeze a six-ton mammoth in 10 hours?
Have you had a conversation with someone who's a Blitzkrieg hypothesis who is of the opinion that the vast number of these Native American animals, North American animals?
I have not, but I'm pretty much familiar with most of the papers that they've written.
And obviously, I think, like I said, I think that perhaps in the aftermath there was a role for humans.
However, when you see the assumption is, again, that, see, what we know now about the life ways of those late Ice Age peoples was that they hunted small game, they fished, they foraged.
Mammoths would have been the largest, most dangerous animal to hunt.
And when you think about the fact that if you look at the estimates for total global population back during the late Pleistocene, it ranged from 5 to 10 million.
The estimates that I've seen for the number of mammoths inhabiting the Earth was about 12 million.
So you've got at least one mammoth for every man, woman, and child, at least within the conventional interpretations on Earth.
Now, how do you exterminate not only the woolly mammoths, but the woolly rhinos, the mastodons, the ground sloths, the horses, the saber-toothed cats, the giant short-faced bear, the cave bear, on and on and on and on.
It's based upon the fact that there have been a few sites that were assumed to be kill sites.
Like, for example, at the Blackwater Draw, Clovis, New Mexico, they found a mammoth skeleton with a Clovis point between the ribs, in the ribcage.
Then they did this major extrapolation from that, said that, this goes back to Paul Martin back in the 60s, did a major extrapolation from that and said, well, oh, they were hunting mammoths.
Well, there we go.
There's the explanation.
So they came across in this blitzkrieg, like we were talking about earlier, crossed the Bering Land Bridge connecting Alaska to Siberia, came down through that ice-free corridor, slaughtering basically all of these animals in their pathway as they went.
Never mind that no indigenous group, culture that we've ever known in history has done that, right?
They were able to slaughter, and I mean, we're talking about even the megafauna of South America underwent as great a mass extinction as those in North America.
So within a thousand years from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, every megafaunal species was wiped out, or half of all megafaunal species in North America was three-quarters, roughly the same in South America, were wiped out so completely that they couldn't even viably replenish their species.
I think that that's really implausible.
And now, basically, with the evidence that there was catastrophic events that coincided precisely with the major mass extinction episodes and the fact that human populations seem to have crashed at the same time, well, what that tells us is that, you know, probably, you know, you don't have a catastrophe that's going to wipe out 12 million woolly mammoths and then leave humans completely unscathed.
We see the Clovis culture basically disappearing at the Younger Dryas boundary.
So where were the people that were able to affect this great extermination event?
If we have this estimate of TOBA, of getting people down to a few thousand people, what's the estimate of the Young-Drius impact and what it had on them?
I have not seen estimates, but I would speculate this.
One of the reasons it's escaped our attention, particularly is because there wasn't a genetic bottleneck the same as Toba.
Because basically that indicates to me, and this, again, I think the empirical data is consistent with this, the stories that we've inherited would suggest that there were dispersed survivors all over the earth.
And so if you have dispersed survivors, we could miss a genetic bottleneck entirely.
So dispersed survivors would mean that you have people that do stay alive if they have some sort of access to resources.
There's something that they could survive off of, whereas people that had been subsisting off of these animals that had gone extinct and, you know, also the climate had changed radically.
It's definitely going to be based upon that, your access to resources.
And the habitat destruction is not going to be uniform.
So there's going to be some places where the damage is less severe.
And there are going to be, you know, in ecology, when you have a major environmental destruction.
Oh, a few years ago, I went to Mount St. Helens to study how nature was recovering in the aftermath, because you had a couple of hundred square miles in the aftermath of Mount St. Helens back in May of 1980 that was just basically turned into a completely decimated lunar landscape.
But even within that, there were little pockets of ferns that survived.
And from those ferns, you see life gradually beginning to proliferate outwards.
And then with an increasing pace as the years go by.
And so now maybe a third of the area that was devastated is being reclaimed.
Forests are starting to encroach.
Another few centuries, the forest, the mountain will be pretty much reforested.
It's such a fascinating subject because I feel like we're so underprepared and under informed.
I feel so few people are even conscious of like just that closing counter slide that you showed and so many different asteroids have whizzed past us so closely and how we're so accustomed to our supply chain, we're so accustomed to supermarkets and this is the most vulnerable the species has ever been in terms of our ability to subsist.
We're almost completely dependent upon these large structures.
We're completely dependent upon supermarkets and supply chains that are coming in on trucks and boats and airplanes.
I think part of the problem is that what we've been looking at here has been kind of pushed off the radar screen because the whole emphasis for the last couple of decades now is, you know what, global warming.
That, you know, we're responsible for catastrophic climate change.
And what you don't want to really be talking about too much is that there has been repeated episodes, too many to count episodes of catastrophic climate change that we had nothing to do with.
And is there anything that we could have done differently to prepare ourselves for impacts?
Like if we, say, if this knowledge that you're talking about right here, if this had been widely distributed, say, two decades ago, could there have been some methods put into place or something?
Oh, yeah, because the DART, the mission that was just launched that's going to rendezvous with an asteroid, is to test the possibility of, see, here's the thing.
If we can find an asteroid in orbit, right, we can trace its pathway into the future.
We know, okay, we got 10 years, 20 years.
That asteroid is going to be crossing Earth's orbit at the precise moment the Earth is there.
This is how they were able to predict, you remember 1994, July, Shoemaker Levy 9, right, 21 objects slammed into Jupiter in July of 1994.
That was predicted over a year in advance, right?
So we had basically 15 months.
It took from the discovery to the point where its trajectory could be predicted was about three or four months of observations.
Over those three or four months of observations, the scientists, the astronomers were able to go, okay, it's tracing this arc of an ellipse at this velocity.
Well, we can project that into the future and we can recreate the entire ellipse and we can, by using gravitational perturbation theory and all of that, we can predict that, you know, 15 or a year from now, now this was after three months of observation, a year from now, it's going to be back out and it's going to be crossing the orbit of Jupiter.
Well, guess what?
It's crossing the orbit of Jupiter at that precise week that Jupiter is there.
So they were able to predict a year in advance right down, you know, to the day when those impacts were going to occur.
Same thing with Earth.
If we had enough lead time, that's the key.
And then the technology's in place.
The technologies would be the simplest thing, I think, and the one that makes the most sense to me, is that if you catch it early enough, a direct hit, a little nudge, could turn a direct hit into a wide miss.
Probably the best thing would be you actually just go and attach.
And I think that what the DART mission is looking at is actually attaching an object with booster, booster rockets on it, attaching that to the asteroid.
And is it the same thing like you would think about with a ship, that if two ships are going in a parallel line, if you just knock one of them slightly off course over time, it's far off.
He reached out to me like two years ago when he was still heading up Space Force and came and actually visited me in Atlanta.
I was building the restaurant, the t-shirt, the wheelhouse craft pub and kitchen.
We weren't finished yet.
He came there.
We went and had dinner together or something.
He wanted to know if I would be willing, if he organized all the base commanders, if I would be willing to come and address them and talk to them about planetary defense.
And I said, absolutely, I would.
I'd jump at the chance to do that.
So he was in the process of organizing it when the COVID pandemic started, and that just derailed the whole thing.
And then he was in the process of reorganizing it when they gave him the boot.
Well, the wokeism has accelerated at a very high rate.
I can't imagine being someone in the military that has to make pragmatic decisions and decisions, life or death decisions that are often very uncomfortable.
And you need some hard-nosed, realistic individuals implementing these.
I mean, we make all these grand plans for the future of our cities and we're worried about political problems and which party's going to control the house.
So I'm very much a proponent and an advocate of that.
I believe that it's our destiny to move into space.
And I think that if we don't, we're going to go the way of the dinosaurs eventually.
And maybe our species won't get extinct.
But the point is, and this is, I think you're seeing this, and the point of what we're talking about is that our civilization is actually way more vulnerable than we've assumed.
Well, I think this pandemic alerted people to that because something that had a very high survival rate still completely disrupted the world economy, completely disrupted us in most ways.
We did talk previously about some of this research that I've been doing out in the Pacific Northwest.
And we're zooming in on here, Eastern Washington.
And what you see here is these, what is called a channeled scab land.
Now, you can see there's these darker areas, and then there's the lighter areas.
Okay, this whole area, this whole thing that I'm circling here is the Columbia Basalt Plateau.
Basalt is a lava rock that extrudes from the earth and it solidifies.
This case, the lava rock is dark.
It's covered by 1 to 200 feet of soil called Lus.
It's a type of unique, very fertile soil that it's accumulated on top of the basalt rock.
Okay, so at the end of the last ice age, there were a series of meltwater pulses that discharged off the ice sheet and it washed away the topsoil and exposed this dark basalt underneath.
So you got this is called a scab land tract, and I'll show you some photographs of it.
You got one big scab land tract here, another one here.
You've got this, what's called Grand Coulee over here, which is a huge canyon-like feature that was cut by meltwater.
You've got another, what's called Moses Coulee.
Let's zoom in here.
You see this kind of RQA form here, kind of looks like a half circle.
Okay, that's terminal moraine.
Now, terminal moraine, if you picture this, Joe, you've got a glacier tongue coming down, and as it's coming down, oversimplified, but it gives the idea.
It's bulldozing up material.
It's pulverizing the ground underneath.
It's pulling up.
And then so this moraine here is basically exactly defines the end or the edge of this glacier lobe that reached all the way back up into here over the Canadian Rockies.
Well, sometime between 12,000, say, and 14,000 years ago, there was a series of massive meltwater pulses that discharged off the ice sheet.
And this thing here, for example, is called Moses Cooley.
And Moses Cooley is basically a giant scar in the earth that was cut within a matter of probably a week or two.
It's 800 to 1,000 feet deep and up to a mile to two miles wide, right?
It's mostly the studies because we know the peak discharges.
And we're talking here, both Moses Coulee right here and Grand Coulee up here had peak discharges of about 300 to 400 million cubic feet per second.
Now, how much is that?
Well, you can't even begin to wrap your head around what 300 million cubic feet per second means.
But if you were to take every single river on Earth, every river, you know, Mississippi, the Columbia, the Mackenzie, the Yukon, the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Congo, the Nile,
the Po, the Yellow River of China, all the rivers of Earth, add them all together, you'd still have to multiply that by at least 10 to 20 to get a discharge, a peak discharge of 300 to 400 million cubic feet per second.
The conventional reason is that over here in western Montana, there was a giant lake, and that lake was held in by an ice dam right in the area of Lake Pondere.
And the water backed up 2,100 feet deep behind the ice dam.
The ice dam gave way, and all this water spilled out and then spilled across the basalt plateau.
That's the conventional explanation.
I have strong issues about that explanation for multiple reasons.
The main reason being is that ice is very unstable.
And if we look at modern ice-dammed lakes that we've seen in the last, say, 100 years, they're typical, their peak discharges and their peak volumes are typically like only 1,000th or less.
Even the big ones are only about 1,000th the volume of this.
I believe, and others I think are starting to believe, that we're actually looking at some kind of an accelerated melting.
Because for one thing, the conventional explanations for this giant lake do not ever explain how that lake got there.
This would have been about 16 to 20,000 years ago.
And here you go.
Here you can see the two ice sheets, the Cordilleran and the Laurentide.
And this is the area where the ice-free corridor would have been that we were talking about.
This box right here shows the area of the Missoula floods, they're called.
Let's just go find us.
There we go.
So here this would have been Lake Missoula, and this would have been all of the area that we were just looking at where it's eroded.
All that water would have come down, flowed through the Columbia Gorge here.
This Portland is right here, would have turned north, and right here at Astoria, it would have drained into the Pacific Ocean.
There was so much water coming down here that it backed all the way up through Willamette Valley and formed a temporary body of water 400 feet deep where Portland now is, which would have completely submerged Portland, right?
So this is basically the configuration.
Now, there you can see this would have been the ice dam.
Let's see here.
So I could go back to the maps.
That's the lake.
So this was a very controversial over from because Jay Harlan Brett's, who was the geologist who first theorized this, let's see, here he is right here.
He was considered a crackpot because he was talking about giant floods back in the 1920s and 30s.
But of course he was proven right and ended up being the recipient of the Penrose Medal in his 90s.
He was doing research along the Columbia River and he kept seeing evidence like these gigantic gravel bars and boulders and things that seemed out of place.
And he actually, in fact, in 1910 is when he got interested in this and he saw, in fact, I'll pull this up.
I'll go back to Google Maps.
And there was a newly released map that came out that was this feature right here.
And in a minute, I'll show you some drone footage of this feature.
This new topographic map came out in 1910, and he was regularly getting maps.
He loved to look at maps.
And he was looking at this feature and he said, what the hell is the explanation for this?
And this is what started him on this quest, this thing right here.
It's called Potholes Cataract.
And Potholes Cataract is a giant erosional feature in the basalt, the edge of the basalt plateau.
And the water came from the right.
And what you have here, we'll zoom in.
You see this kind of round hole right here?
Yeah.
That is a result of what's called colking.
This is colking.
When the water gets so turbulent that it's doing this like a tornado.
And it literally can drill into the rock in a matter of days.
It can drill.
And what you see here is the evidence of gigantic turbulence.
And this is called a recessional cataract.
So as the water pours over this, picture, you've got the rock.
Okay, so the water is pouring over it.
And as it does, as it pours over, it's eroding the wall of the cataract back.
So it's receding.
And then it's going to keep receding until there's no more water.
And at the time the spigots, the flood spigots are turned off, you're now left with this fossil feature.
And I mean, we can see turbulence in modern water flows.
But the thing is to do something like this, you have to have extremely deep, extremely fast-moving turbulent water and sustained for maybe in this case, a few weeks.
Now, I know that they've found evidence of human beings in North America that predate 11,000 years.
Oh, yeah.
Do they, is there an understanding of like if this impact theory is correct and if it did greatly diminish the population of people that are living in North America, where did they concentrate?
You don't really comprehend it, though, until you've been across those landscapes and experienced them firsthand, knowing what the story is.
You come away, I mean, it's almost like an acid drip in a way.
It's so mind-stretching when you begin to see this stuff firsthand that you really realize, oh, my God, there have been forces unleashed on this planet that utterly dwarf anything that we humans have yet been able to do.
I mean, it might not have even started or it might have just started.
So you, in that one conversation that we had at the comedy club, you sparked this interest in my mind.
But I remember talking to you thoroughly blown away and then leaving that club with a completely different thought process when it comes to like the history of life on North America and the world in general and this whole impact theory that you'd been working on for so long.
Because I remember back in the day, I'd bring that book up and people would call me, you know, crazy, fringe, conspiracy-loving people who hadn't read the book.
Yes.
Most of the people who hadn't read the book.
But once Gobekli Tepe emerged, and then Dr. Robert Schock from Boston University, who started examining the water erosion and the Temple of the Sphinx, and all of these different pieces came into play where you have undeniable evidence of an advanced civilization that's making massive, complex stone structures, concentric circles, all these different structures, like 11,000 plus years ago, at a time where they thought people were just primarily hunters and gatherers.
And then watching them try to take this hunter-gatherer theory and apply it to these incredible stone structures.
Also, it gave me an understanding of science and scientists in an unflattering way.
Not that they're all like this, but there is a problem when someone proclaims a very specific thing.
They have a thing that they've been teaching.
They have a thing that they learned.
And they have a thing that they subscribe to in terms of a timeline, in terms of a.
And then any new evidence does not get treated like evidence.
It gets treated like an intruder.
It gets treated like a threat.
And you watch them argue it with, like, I remember when Graham Hancock was there with Zawi Hawass, and there was another man who was an Egyptologist and mocking.
Yeah, mocking this idea that there was an advanced civilization 9,000 years ago.
Well, now, of course, we know that's true.
Now there's no if-ands or buts.
So then you have to re-look at the old style, old kingdom construction of Egypt and how different it was than the later years and the fact that it was all under sand and that they had to excavate this stuff and that these You have two completely different styles of construction.
And the old stuff is really complex.
Not just really complex, but insanely difficult to do.
Like, how are they having these massive stones that are cut so beautifully and perfectly, and they moved into place?
What are they doing?
Like, how are they getting the stones for the king's chamber from 500 miles and away?
Because, you know, we've gotten locked into, or mainstream academia has gotten locked into these models of history and they don't want to let go because for many reasons.
And I think one of the reasons gets into actually into politics.
You know, it has to do with our conception of who we are, where we're at now.
You know, we're supposedly in the midst of the sixth great mass extinction right now that we're causing.
And like you said earlier, to recognize that there have been these gigantic catastrophes and mass extinction events in Earth history is not in any way to say, well, we just should have a free hand in doing anything or whatever.
Although some people will interpret it that way, you know.
But the thing is, is that we now have to recognize the reality that these events have happened and we have not been the perpetrators of them.
We have not been the perpetrators of these previous mass extinction events.
We've been the victims, right?
And so right now, though, the whole thing, and it gets back to the global warming thing and all of that, is that, you know, and I don't really know if we want to get into that whole discussion because it's worthy of several hours in itself.
But, you know, it's control, you know, it's and what we see now is with the whole COVID thing and global warming, we're seeing proponents of global warming saying that, oh, well, hey, if we lock people down into their homes, they're not going to be driving cars.
If they're not driving cars, they're not putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Hey, what a great thing.
Let's, you know, I mean, when you look at the net zero scenarios, I mean, I don't even want to get into that right now.
But if you get into it and you begin to look at it, you realize, well, basically what they're going to do is they're going to essentially render us impotent.
They're going to render modern civilization impotent.
Because, again, in history basically testifies to the truth of what you just said.
Because warming periods, again, I've written and actually lectured on this quite extensively.
Warming periods are usually periods of prosperity because you have an extension of the growing season.
You have periods like if you go back to the medieval warming period, which was roughly from 1000 AD to 1300 AD.
This was the period where, and when you get to Europe and you go particularly to France, take a tour and spend a week going and seeing some of the magnificent cathedrals and realizing when you're looking at these unbelievably complex structures that would have taken for the whole phenomena,
you would have had to have hundreds of thousands of trained people working because you had stone cutters, you had stone carvers, you had sculptors, you had glaziers, you had carpenters, you had astronomers, you had engineers.
They all had to be organized.
They all had to be fed and housed and clothed.
Well, you couldn't do that without surplus, right?
That surplus, we can now demonstrate, and this is something that's pretty much for the most part pushed off the radar screen, that the medieval warm period was a degree or two warmer than now.
And what you had was you had agricultural surpluses that made that period of prosperity possible.
It was preceded by what is called the Dark Ages cold period.
During this time, it was very difficult because you had agricultural failures.
You had cold spells that would cause the they say that 536 to 540 AD was the coldest four or five years of the last 2,000 years.
And you had population decline, you had increase of infant mortality, you had decrease in lifespan.
When the warmth came back into the world, the sea ice retreated north.
Now the Vikings were able to sail across the northern seas.
Iceland became populated, became colonized.
Vikings came to Greenland and were able to farm on the west coast of Greenland, where it's now permafrost, right?
In Europe, you had agricultural surpluses, so you had a huge increase in population between 1000 AD and about 1130.
You had this ability to undertake this tremendous enterprise of this magnificent, glorious enterprise of cathedral building.
The climate of the medieval warm period lasted until the late 1200s, early 1300s, and then it began to shift and became cold.
And it was the first onset of what's called the Little Ice Age.
And between about 1313, right in there and about 1340, you had a succession of agricultural failures, which led to famine, right?
That famine led to people being malnourished, which made their immune systems weak.
And they now became susceptible to infectious diseases.
And it was around 1340 that the bubonic plague swept over Europe because it was a result of the cold.
And of course, right then at that point, you see that between 1300 and 1340, that was the end of the cathedral building era.
You can find the same thing happen in the aftermath, like I said, 536 to 540 AD.
However, I'm a bit skeptical because I won't pull it up now, but I could pull up and show you probably 500 articles on the importance of the sun in warming and cooling that have been mostly ignored in the IPCC's models and projections of climate change.
And if we go into another solar minimum, like the Maunder minimum or the Sporay minimum, yeah, we're in for decades of cold weather.
And the sun seems to have—see, when these global warming models were first being developed in the late 80s and early 90s, we were just at the very beginning of deploying solar observing satellites.
And at that point, the model was the solar constant.
So if the sun's radiant output is not variable, we can just ignore it.
It's not a factor.
However, we now have like 30 years of in-hand evidence that the sun is way more variable than was assumed 30 and 40 years ago.
That being the case, yeah, the sun would now have a much more important role to play.
Because, you know, in the last 30 years, we've had massive amounts of new data from solar satellites that have been observing the sun.
And so when the computer models were first being devised in the early 90s and stuff, the assumption was that the sun was not playing a role, and so we don't need to look at the sun.
You eliminate all the natural variables until only carbon dioxide is left.
And that's pretty much where we're still at.
Because by the time you get into the 2000s and it was becoming apparent that the sun was actually a much more important factor in climate change and had been acknowledged, by that point, it had already, the whole scenario had already become entrenched.
And you now had huge amounts of money being poured in to that whole scenario.
In 2003, a flare was measured at X28, but was likely even more powerful.
The sensors became overloaded under the explosive energy being measured.
It was quite literally off the charts.
Solar flares are mostly harmless and don't pose much threat to humans on the surface of the Earth.
What could cause some problems, however, are coronal mass ejections, which are sometimes conflated with solar flares in popular parlance.
We'll jump down here.
A big blast.
In September 1859, a solar storm known as the Carrington event, named for astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed the corresponding solar flare the day before, struck Earth, causing widespread technological havoc.
Even considering the comparatively primitive technology of the time, the magnetic effects were so substantial, the aurora normally seen at polar latitudes could be seen in the tropics.
Electricity from the storm flowed through the electrical lines of telegraphs, overloading the circuits, starting fires around the world, and shocking nearby workers.
The global lines of communication were disrupted until the magnetic storm trickled out hours later.
Interestingly, some telegraph operators reported being able to send messages without the batteries attached using only the currents in the air.
If a storm of that magnitude were to strike today, the impact to technology could be catastrophic.
Power lines could receive energy from the storm and spread it out.
Because our power grid is interconnected, a spike in one regions could impact areas which might otherwise be less affected.
According to a NASA-funded National Academy of Sciences report from 2008, transformers would be damaged and the power outages would occur around the world.
Radio and satellite communications could be knocked out, resulting in a massive blackout without the benefit of being able to talk to one another.
Now that would be pretty catastrophic.
But now we have this.
A signature of a cosmic ray increase in AD 7475 from tree range in Japan.
This was likely the result of a giant solar storm.
So what we're interested in is the conclusion down here.
With our present knowledge, we cannot specify the cause of this event.
However, we can say that an extremely energetic event occurred around our space environment in AD 775.
In the future, other high-resolution records such as beryllium-10 and nitrate data, together with careful research of historical documentation around AD 75 and further surveys of undetected supernova remnants, this was probably a solar event.
Causes, so we get into another article here, causes of the AD 774, 775 carbon-14 increase, talking about the Carrington event.
Such an event would cause great damage to modern technology.
And in view of recent confirmation of super flares on solar-type stars, this issue merits attention.
A Carrington-level event would be disastrous for electromagnetic technology, causing widespread damage to satellites and transformers linking the power grid.
No assessment has been made of the technological effects of an event 20 times stronger, which the 774 event was.
So what we're realizing, again, this is my point, is we've learned a whole lot about the sun and that the sun is not necessarily the invariable star that it was assumed to be.
Now, we just talked about the effects of a Carrington-level event.
Now, he's asking the question, no assessment has been made of the technological effects of an event 20 times stronger.
You know, it's so funny because we talk about Plato and you talk about Plato's description of what Atlantis must have been like and also this idea that they were trying to make sense of the catastrophe, catastrophic forces of nature and comet impacts and all these different things.
And we look back on their limited understanding of the universe and the world and all the natural forces.
But we're kind of in a similar boat in comparison to the way people are going to look back at us.
We just don't think about it because we're wrapped up in this timeline.
And we do have all this amazing technology, like we talked about, your ability to zoom in with your laptop and show the topographic features of this landscape that indicates that it's been hit with all this water damage.
And this is why I think it's so important that we actually look at our own past and realize that our ancestors weren't these primitive, ignorant savages that we've assumed they were.
And that their legacy that's been handed down to us may turn out to be extremely valuable in trying to understand the big picture.
It also makes sense when you think about Graham's research, Graham Hancock's work, when it makes sense that these people were very advanced in terms of their ability to grasp concepts and thoughts, but they weren't as technologically advanced because they were the remnants of a civilization that had a startover from scratch or close to it.
So really intelligent people that had to go without all of the knowledge and all of the creations of people from the past because most things had been wiped out.
In fact, David Alt, who's a geologist, theorized like at least 20-some years ago that about 17 million years ago, the magma plume that's under Yellowstone may have been caused by an impact of an iron asteroid punching through the crust and causing an upwelling.
It's called pressure relief melting.
That as long as you got this overlying cap, but if you remove it, like in the case of a hypervelocity impact, it allows the upwelling.
And in fact, the whole Columbia Basalt Plateau that we were just looking at, that is the outflow, the basalt outflow from the magma plume that's now under Yellowstone.
Yeah.
So, and there's correlations.
The Deccan traps in India correlate in age with the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact of 66 million years ago that caused the extermination of the dinosaurs.
The Siberian traps are associated with the Permian-Triassic event of 245 million, which may or may not have been caused by an impact.
I think it probably was, but at that long ago, it's hard to find the evidence.
But something, that was the greatest mass extinction in Earth history.
90 to 95% of all species, terrestrial and marine, went extinct very quickly.
In fact, I think our species evolved out of the natural order of terrestrial life because we're the one species that can be sitting here having this conversation.
And I want to see us get back to being, you know, I'm of the mind I like the adventurous entrepreneurial spirit.
I can't abide by this.
Oh, we're going to get all offended because we're using the wrong pronouns or we're going to get triggered or whatever.
Look, we've got some huge things in front of us that we're going to have to contend with if we're going to have any kind of sustainable existence on this planet for generations to come.
And I think it's going to probably take a wake-up call.
But it's also the pressure that you're getting from these non-productive people that are trying to enforce like woke talk and things along those lines.
They've chosen to try to control the thinking and behavior of other people rather than controlling their own personal creative output or their own personal success and their own personal progress.
It's like it's what you concentrate on.
If you're concentrating constantly on trying to diminish other people's ability to express themselves and to try to control the way they express themselves, like it's just, it's just a Poor management of resources and a lack of understanding about your own issues with discipline and self-reflection.
And we're in the middle of that now because it's easy to do because of social media.
Because you can express yourself so readily and easily through social media.
It's very tempting for people.
Then they get wrapped up in these kind of social media exchanges with folks and it becomes an addictive part of your day and it leads you to be even less productive.
And I marveled at my dad, my grandfather, and thought, God, am I ever going to be able to work as hard as those guys did?
You know, my grandfather on my dad's side, he came over at 16 years old from Sweden on a cattle boat, couldn't speak a word of English, came here, settled up in Minnesota, and started working and worked in a sash and door company 10 hours a day building window frames.
He would then get off work and he would go and he built a house.
Now, when you're in Minnesota, all houses have basements.
So he would get off work after 10 hours and he would work till dark hand digging the basement.
Built this house, married my grandmother, moved her in, and then immediately began building another house right next door by himself.
Now, I don't know, I've done a lot of hard construction work, so I know what's involved with that.
You know, it's it's it can be extremely hard.
You know, like my father, you know, he would go, my father and my grandfather, when I'm a little kid, they're working together.
They'd be out there working.
It's 20 degrees out, 10 degrees out, so cold, and they're working outside.
Here's what they would do: they would have a kettle, right?
They would build a fire, have a kettle, and they would put the nails in the kettle and heat up the nails so that then when they're handling the nails, the nails were hot and would keep their hands from freezing.
Now, you know, where are the men like that?
I mean, they're still around, but I think that kind of an attitude towards things seems to be diminishing.
Well, I think the bold will be challenged to try to find new ways around this situation.
And I think also the meek will one day recognize that they really wish to be bold.
And that's where our best hope is.
Our best hope is that we can educate people on the value of discipline and creativity and hard work and the satisfaction that comes with accomplishing goals and projects.
And also that social media communication is terrible for real world communication.
It's terrible for the human organism.
It's not the way we're supposed to communicate with each other.
We're supposed to communicate with each other eye to eye, looking at each other, a shake of a hand, a hug.
And the other thing that's coming together sort of as a counterpart to that is a group of fellow people that I've been in, worked with over the years, business.
Me and three of him and two other boys entered the science fair contest and we won second place nationally.
So I had students that I took from very beginning level geometry up through the lower levels of calculus who then went on to do excellent academic achievement, have become doctors, scientists.
I just in fact ran into one of them just a few days ago while I was in Atlanta.
Little boy had been in my class like 20 years ago.
And now he's launched, he's an entrepreneur of a tech company that he's just launched, right?
Anyways, out of this, I realized that, you know, the way the thing that I came to believe was that modern education has got so many things wrong with it.
One, the stratification of modern education.
Like, this is to me artificial.
You know, if you look at traditional societies, when a kid, particularly, I can speak from the boys' point of view, when a boy got to adolescent, at that point you were thought of as a young man and you start, you were integrated now into adult society and you were expected to start behaving as an adult, right?
Well, you know, we don't really do that anymore.
It's like what we see so much coming now, I think, out of even the college-age kids is this like extended infantilism.
You know, they come out and they're still, you know, look, you're supposed to go to college and be exposed to challenging ideas, exposed to different points of view, you know?
Instead, they're coming out, you know, and they're like, we don't want, you know, whoever to come onto campus.
We don't want Jordan Peterson to come onto campus because he's going to expose us to ideas that we're scared of, you know.
I think we need to, one of the first things we need to do is like move away from that.
So what I would do is I would get a class, like let's say we're going to have a class in geometry.
I would take kids out to the building site and I would show them, here's how we're using geometry to lay out this building, this house.
And the exact things we just learned in the classroom, look at how we're applying those.
We'd get to a lesson on trigonometry.
I would take them out to the job site and I would say, look, here's how we're using trigonometry to design this complicated roof.
We would go back to the classroom and I would have the kids as a problem, as an exercise, figuring out what are the angles of the cuts, what are the compound miters we need to cut the lumber so it all can fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
And then we'd go back out to the job site and they would see how it's all going together, right?
I would take, in fact, and you know, one of the other things that's happened is that, you know, at the early 20th century, 80% of the American population was agricultural and rural.
20% was urban.
Now those statistics have flipped exactly.
I've known kids that were in college that had never seen the Milky Way.
Never seen the Milky Way, couldn't find the North Star if their life depended on it.
But I think that that's part of the deficiency that needs to be corrected.
And so I'll just show you a couple of quick things here while we still have some time left.
Over 120 kids tutored in classes over the next 15 years.
It is critically important to develop alternatives to the authoritarian, hierarchical, monopolistic system of indoctrination that now usurps the function of authentic education.
This is how it started, see?
And then I would take kids out.
We would do geology and nature, science out in nature.
So this group of kids I've just taken out, we've been studying what happens to streams after storms.
So I did this.
I had probably 100 kids that I took out on these kinds of field trips.
Like it says here, getting students out of the classroom into the real world of nature is vitally important to any system of education and promotes the psychological well-being of students.
And very sadly, about two years later, he passed away from his condition.
Tore me up, tore me.
And this is one thing when I got into this, I did not expect that I was going to be bonding with these kids.
I've lost three of them.
One was killed in a car accident.
Another one had problems and he hung himself.
And so it was just, you know, that was something when I went into this, I did not expect that that was going to be an element that I was going to get close to these kids and then grieve over their passing.
I really, little Mark there, Mark McGinnis, he was 12 here.
He was nine when he actually came up with the idea.
And then a couple of years later, we began to actually, hey, let's take that idea and go, you know, see if we can develop, enter a science fair contest.
And we did.
Like it says, we got second place nationally.
And then so scientists discover a major lasting benefit of growing up outside the city.
And I'll just jump to this.
You can actually see that for kids exposed to nature, it actually affects structural changes in their brain.
That kids that are growing up in a strictly urban environment now are being deprived of that.
And studies are now showing that kids that are exposed regularly to nature grow up with far less psychological problems, lower levels of divorce, suicide, drug addiction, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I think that this is the direction we have to move to start healing what has gone wrong with our society.
Do you think that maybe we've overlooked a component of development for human beings that it's not just a choice whether or not you're around nature, but it's actually a necessity?
And I consider myself extremely fortunate that I was able to grow up in a rural environment and be exposed to nature.
I mean, my boyhood growing up was hiking, camping, swimming, canoeing, horseback riding.
When I got old enough to work, we worked on the neighbor's farm.
So I had that whole opportunity to see farm life and how all of that came together.
And I look back on that now and I go, God, I took that for granted back then.
But now when I look back, I go, boy, I was so fortunate to have that upbringing.
You know, and I think, God, more kids, young people need to have that kind of an experience growing up.
So, this whole thing that we're doing with this group of very incredible people that I've been working with for some now five to 10 years, some of them longer than that, are coming together around these ideas.
And I don't know if you know Chris Martinson or does Peak Prosperity.
He'd be a good idea.
Yeah, I mean, some great people that are intimately involved in this and going to help raise money for the first prototype.
We're looking at land in eastern Tennessee as one place.
I'm also looking at land in Arizona.
I've got some people out there that I've been working with who are very much about trying to make something like this happen to create a prototype that can say, look, here's a place.
And see, another thing that I believe is that, and I did this in my classes, I said, okay, you pay for your tuition for your kid.
As long as there's room, I encouraged parents to come in and participate because I really believe that this whole artificial stratification by age is detrimental.
And you need to like, this horizontal stratification, to me, again, is debilitating.
And we need to have like a vertical integration.
So that I found this in my homeschool classes that I would sometimes have kids from the ranged from 10 to, say, 15 or 16.
And I noticed there was a natural dynamic that emerged.
The older kids would naturally become mentors to the younger kids, you see?
And we'd have adults in there.
And pretty soon it was almost like this, you know, my generation, when we came of age, it was the generation gap.
Well, that was my generation, you know, coming of age, the baby boom generation.
We were the first to have that, right?
Well, what brought that about?
What brought that about was the way that American education evolved because prior to World War II, most schools in America were the one-room schoolhouse.
Coming out of World War II is when you begin to have these large institutionalized consolidation of schools.
Like it really accelerated in the 50s.
My father was in a one-room schoolhouse until he got to high school, like in 1944, I think it was 43.
At that point, they had just built a brand new high school that had like 800 kids, which was exceptional at that point.
But when you go back and you look at it, what you see is the schools got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And the bigger they got, the more impersonal they got.
Now, when I started homeschooling, I was working with some of the teachers in the Waldorf system.
Now, here's what they do.
They come in, the Waldorf kids come in at the kindergarten age, and they'll have a teacher who stays with them all the way up until through middle school.
Now, you have a small class of 10 or 15 kids, you have a single teacher.
Think about the dynamic in the relationship.
That teacher's going to know those kids.
I found that when I was teaching courses in math, and I would have six, seven, eight kids.
If one of them wasn't getting it, I knew instantly.
And I never left anybody behind because we didn't have to.
And I also found that, oh, if this child was not getting it, this student over here was more than eager to show, to jump in there and say, oh, and help them.
I found that that was also something very important.
And my memory, and you probably had the same experience, my memory was, you know, when I was particularly middle school, bullyism was rampant.
You know, I got my first year in middle school.
I got bullied mercilessly.
And then eighth grade, when I went to eighth grade, I finally, I had gone through adolescence and I had also spent that summer between seventh and eighth grade working on the farm.
So what we did on the farm was hauling in hay bales.
Now, we'd have 80 acres of alfalfa.
It would get cut and hay bales back in those days.
And so you go out there and you'd have to lift the hay bales up onto the wagon and in the wagon, another, one of the other boys would drive the wagon.
Sometimes one of the girls on the farm girls would be driving the tractor.
Go back to the barn, unload that, and then you go back out and you do this all day.
So by the end of the summer, I had gotten way stronger, right?
I had calluses on my hands from doing that.
So I went back to eighth grade and the same guy, remember, he started right in bullying me.
And about a month into school, we were in gym class together.
I come out and I've just got my underwear on.
He comes out and starts whipping me with a wet towel.
And I kind of lost it and didn't realize, you know, he was still, his dominance of me was at that point purely psychological.
But it shocked me how easily I whooped his ass.
But it was totally because I'd spent the summer primarily doing this hard physical work.
So, but yeah, so, you know, but bullyism was very endemic to that whole stratification because what I observed was the bullies were always the kids, the boys primarily, that have been held back, right?
You're a year older, two years older, you're bigger, but you're also got this insecurity about, you know, this feeling of inferiority because now you're been placed in your, you know, your peers are these younger kids.
It's just almost like an open invitation to become a bully.
But see, I particularly like with math, I found that everybody, for math particularly, you got to, see, people, I don't know how many times I heard, like a parent would come to me and say, well, you know, little Mark thinks he's no good at math.
He just, he's, you know, he's been in public school and, you know, he's fallen way behind.
And I said, yeah, that's what happens.
That's what happened to me in eighth grade.
I fell way behind and I got behind a year, right?
Well, I got, so I work with Mark, you know, and get him in a different environment.
And then he'd come to me and say, Mr. Carlson, I didn't know I liked math.
You know, I have letters from both kids and parents saying, yeah, I didn't even know I liked math.
Now I love math.
And the reason is, is because you go back to square one and you explain something and you take it step by step.
And what happens with math particularly, you get left behind.
And I think one thing that's solely lacking, sorely lacking in school is the concept that there's jobs that are available outside of what we think of as mainstream occupations.
Like there's not like I'm not encouraging kids to become social media influencers.
I'm not encouraging kids to become TikTokers or YouTubers, but you know how much money those fucking people make?
Like if you're encouraging people to become lawyers, like at what point in time do you encourage them to play video games professionally?
Because there's a lot of fucking money in playing video games.
And I'm not saying they should do that, but I'm saying there is a disdain for even becoming a stand-up comedian.
Like I remember when I was thinking about being a comedian, no one encouraged me, like maybe a couple of my friends.
But outside of that, like my parents didn't encourage me.
No one thought it was a good idea.
They were like, what are the odds you're going to make it?
Like this is the perspective.
Because there's no real structure in terms of someone showing you and teaching you.
And it's not a class you can take where you can graduate.
And then eventually you go on to apprentice as, you know, with a more successful comedian.
There's so many different things that a person could do creatively with their life in terms of art, music, whatever you want to do.
There's a lot of different avenues for life that people are thriving in.
But schools never encourage these things.
And they look at these kids that are their class clowns or the loudmouths or the ones that don't want to pay attention.
And they just assume that kid's fucked.
And that's what I assumed about my own self.
I would see that and I would go, well, obviously I'm not that intelligent and I'm not that curious.
But that wasn't what the case was.
It was just I wasn't interested in what they were selling.
I had an English teacher that was really fun, and she gave you perspectives and thoughts on life itself that was just different than the way most, and everybody would talk about her.
Like, you got to get, I forget her name, I think it was Mrs. Hanson, but everybody wanted to get her class because she was interesting.
But to let people know if they want to get more into your research or read any of this stuff or watch any of those videos, particularly the videos we were talking about earlier on Atlantis, where's the best place?