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Jan. 7, 2026 - Skeptoid
22:18
Dr. Flint Dibble Interview: Our Resident Expert for Málaga to Nice!

Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble will be our resident expert on the real history (and the fake history) at our ports of call when Skeptoid Adventures sails from Málaga, Spain to Nice, France this April. He is perhaps best known for his 2024 destruction of pseudo-archaeologist Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan Experience. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Skeptoid Adventures Begin 00:05:24
Hey everyone, I'm Brian Dunning with Skeptoid and Skeptoid Adventures, and I'm here today with Flint Dibble, who is joining us on our 2026 adventure to Malaga, Tunis, in the Mediterranean aboard the world's largest sailing ship.
How are you doing this morning, Flint?
Yeah, I'm doing great.
I'm glad to have signed on for this.
I'm really excited.
Yeah, the timing was weird.
It was like super late in the process that we ended up adding you, but we're absolutely delighted that you can join us.
I don't know how much my audience knows about you.
I don't know how much your audience knows about me.
But really quickly about myself is I'm the host of the Skeptoid podcast since 2006, which was really kind of sad.
That's 1,020 episodes over 19 going on 20 years.
We have started doing these Skeptoid adventures.
We're a nonprofit, and these adventure trips are a fundraiser for us, as well as great content.
So we try to go to places in the world where there are mysteries, where there's misinformation, but that are also really kind of fun, amazing trips.
So we've done Death Valley, we've done the Bermuda Triangle.
This one, I'm going to let you talk about this trip and the kind of stuff that we're going to find here.
So tell my audience who you are and what you bring to this trip.
So my name is Flint Dibble, and I'm an archaeologist, and I specialize on the archaeology of the Mediterranean world.
So that's up the alley here because we're going to be hitting up a bunch of different places in the Western Mediterranean between Spain and France and the Balearic Islands.
And so for me, one of my, well, okay, so I'm an environmental archaeologist and I'm an archaeological scientist for my day job.
But I also host a YouTube channel and I sort of aggressively, not aggressively, assertively combat fake archaeology and particularly the strands that relate to Atlantis.
So kind of, you know, the lost civilization from an ice age type thing, the type of thing that Graham Hancock and other people like him, you know, that they try to sell you in book and podcast and TV show format.
And so I guess I became more well-known or well-known to the public because Graham Hancock agreed to debate me on the Joe Rogan podcast.
And, well, I got him to admit he has no evidence for any of his ideas that he's been selling for 30 years now, 30 plus years.
And so that was kind of a good experience in a sense to try to get out the word and to show people and academics and intellectuals that, you know, we can actually go out and aggressively and assertively not confront, but dispute what these conspiracy theorists and these purveyors of misinformation are putting out into the world.
And I mean, it might seem like archaeology is small beans when we're talking about vaccines or when we're talking about climate change or any things that affect our health in our world, but it actually makes a big difference because, you know, these kind of ideas of the lost civilizations in Atlantis, they've been used to sort of dispossess Indigenous people from their land.
For example, Andrew Jackson cited this when embarking Native Americans on the Trail of Tears.
And so it has a big impact on how people view indigenous cultures and such.
And so the Western Mediterranean is perfect for this because this is an area where, I mean, it's underwater where these claims are made.
But near where we're going, especially where we're going off from Malaga, there's a new movie that's about to come out called Atlantica, which is based on some dodgy claims that have been made repeatedly about there being Atlantis near the, off the coast of Spain, not too far from where the I didn't know about that.
Is this like a sort of pseudo-documentary or is it like a dramatic thing?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a pseudo-documentary.
It's this guy, Michael Donnell, and he's made this.
He's made these claims before.
He made them, I think, first in 2018 and they were refuted, then they resurfaced again, and then he's remaking them yet again with AI images and other hoaxy type claims about satellite imagery that doesn't work and all this kind of stuff.
And so, yeah, so this is something that's been sort of big news all year because he premiered the Atlantica documentary, if you want to call it that.
I call it a fiction film.
But he premiered the pseudo historical documentary Atlantica at the, you know, the world-renowned Cosmic Summit, you know, this fringe sort of conference that all these fringe people go to.
And so these, these islands, all three of them we're going to.
So Majorca, Menorca, Corsica, but also Sardinia, they have these megalithic cultures from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, which build these really, really, really cool, like you could think of them kind of like Stonehenge, though they date a couple thousand years later.
But these kind of megaliths have been the, I don't know, the fodder for conspiracy theorists and pseudo-archaeologists for generations.
You know, it's the idea that Stone Age people can't move big stones that seems to sort of draw in everybody's mystery and wonder and attention.
Yeah.
Have you personally been to these places before?
No, I've not been to, I've been to Nice.
That's the one of the places that we're going that I've actually been.
But no, I've not personally been to the rest of the.
Reconsidering Ancient Perspectives 00:08:25
Yeah, I haven't either.
And I'm just like kind of falling over myself with excitement saying that's going to be super, super cool to see.
So I'm really stoked about that.
There's a lot of great archaeology there.
I like that one thing that we have in common in our background is that we're both veterans of Joe Rogan.
And one day on board the ship is an all-at-sea day.
And we're going to have a whole sort of mini-skeptical conference on board just for our group on the ship's conference center, which it actually has being relatively small for a giant sailing ship.
And during that, you and I will have an extended conversation then about our respective experiences on Joe Rogan.
But we had just the 10-second version is we had very opposite experiences.
You were extraordinarily well prepared and I was extraordinarily unprepared.
I was on 10 years before you were, 2014.
And I honestly didn't know Rogan that well.
I mean, I had, you know, I had included him on a list of celebrities promoting harmful pseudoscience because I had a list of things that he'd said.
And here's all the episodes where he said them and the time counts and everything.
And talking to him over email before I went on, our plan was for him to say how he had since moved away from all of those positions.
And I thought, boy, this is going to be great content.
And of course, I went on, and it was the opposite of that.
He denied ever having said any of these things.
And because we'd had such a friendly, you know, pre-show relationship, I did not bring any of those references with me.
And so I just, not only was I unprepared, I looked and came off as very unprepared.
And he just mopped the floor with me.
Same as he did with Phil Plate when Phil Plate went on with it was Rogan and Phil Plate on Pendillette's podcast.
Yeah, I mean, that's why I made sure, like, you know, my philosophy about combating pseudosciences is, I think, different than a lot of the people in the skeptics community.
I feel like a lot of people come at it from the Carl Sagan point of view, which is, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Tell me what your evidence is in this kind of good faith, sort of questioning way, thinking that they'll be able to just debunk whatever's said.
And I firmly believe that that's the wrong approach in today's world.
I think that what that invites is a Gish gallop, which for those who don't know about Dwayne Gish and, you know, the creationist debates, a Gish gallop is where they dispew so much crap and fake stuff that you can't keep up.
And so I firmly believe that if we want to actually directly engage with conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists, we have to go in there expecting my friend and colleague when he saw through my strategy before I went on there.
What he said is what your strategy is, is an honest gallop.
So you're doing the Gish gallop, but with all facts and just trying to just take control of the narrative with factual information before they even have a chance to get on their, you know, get a foot forward.
And so, you know, so my main demand before agreeing to the debate was that I get to go first, for example.
And so, like, you know, I went there and I just prepared a very strong opening, you know, salvo with some sort of nudie porn from ancient Athens and erotic art and stuff like that to try to show people what archaeology really is.
And then, and, you know, and that caught the attention of all the young men that watch Rogan and it sort of helped out.
Of course, we'll talk about this.
But they are obviously a very well-oiled and large media machine at this point.
So they've had their salvos back at me trying to frame me as a liar, which, you know, has been successful and unsuccessful in various ways.
Because if people just listen to them and they don't listen to my rebuttals, well, they get convinced that I'm a liar.
I remember that well.
This was just about a year ago, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was a year and a half ago, was the episode.
It was about a year ago that Rogan started calling me a liar.
Yeah, I remember that because right after it happened, I remember both Rogan and Graham Hancock saying things like, Flint made a lot of really good points and he had a lot of really good information.
And yeah, we need to reconsider these perspectives we've been hanging on to.
And then give it a few weeks and it completely flip-flops.
Nope.
He lied about everything.
He was dishonest, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that always happens.
I wasn't directly involved, but I had some of my best friends were directly involved when James Randy was still doing the Million Dollar Challenge, where people claiming to have psychic abilities or supernatural powers would come in and under very controlled conditions, they would be tested.
And of course, they always all always failed.
And afterward, they would say, you know, I guess, yeah, I guess I didn't have the power I thought I did.
And then give it 24 hours or give it a week and they flip-flop again.
And they've now rationalized it back to themselves, just the way Hancock and Rogan did with you.
They say, oh, you know, the conditions were, you know, they had negative energy that was blocking my powers.
Whatever it was.
There's always some excuse that they can come up with.
And, you know, you give people enough time, they'll forget the original event and you just keep repeating your lie enough until it becomes truth, which is, you know, they're masters of that.
They're masters of just repeating the same thing over and over again until it sounds like truth to people.
I've been slowly documenting this on Rogan's podcast with pseudoarchaeologists.
One of the things I find funny about Rogan is he's actually a reasonably smart guy.
Like he's charismatic and intelligent.
And like, you know, when he had Jimmy Corsetti on for the very first time as the pseudo-archaeologist, Jimmy Corsetti's talking about how the eye of the Sahara is Atlantis and he's showing these Google Earth images to Rogan and he's saying, this is all washed away water erosion that you're seeing on the sand.
And Joe's like, no, sand dunes are formed by wind, man.
And Jimmy's like, no, this is water.
And Rogan's like, no, dude, this is wind.
This is how this stuff is formed.
Fast forward a year and a half, Jimmy Corsetti's back on Rogan having the exact same conversation, showing the exact same sand dunes on Google Earth.
And he's like, this is water erosion.
And Joe is like, yeah, that's water erosion.
And so it's just like a perfect case study of how you repeat a lie often enough, and it sounds and becomes truth.
I wonder, did he bring up the scablands in Washington State? from the Missoula flood?
Not in that, no.
They have another ones, yeah.
Because that is, in fact, huge ranges of hills and everything formed by water.
But of course, a very rare and extraordinary event caused that.
Hey, check this out.
Ah, you're a skeptoid sailing cap.
Whenever we do these skeptoid adventures, we really try and have super high-quality swag.
Everyone has swag that they give out at conferences or whatever.
And most of it's junk.
And a lot of times people don't even take it home.
They leave it in their hotel room.
They throw it away.
And so we said, no, we want really good stuff.
So like when we're in the desert, we brought people these super high quality hydro flask water bottles that are, you know, like 75 bucks.
And when we were in Bermuda Triangle, we got these shirts, which are, they're like super lightweight.
They're water wicking.
They have the sun protection built in.
And they've turned out to be like everyone's favorite shirt.
They fit really well.
They're comfortable.
And everyone wore them on the trip.
One thing I'm supposed to be doing this weekend is designing the mission patch for this adventure.
So we always have patches made up.
So like this is one from Death Valley.
And this is one from the Bermuda Triangle.
And these are all, you know, nice, you know, whatever you call them, embroidered patches and everything.
So we'll have one for this as well.
And not sure what we're going to do for the swag yet.
We always keep that a secret anyway.
Navigating by Stars 00:07:58
The guests don't find out until they arrive.
But that makes it something fun.
It's a super amazing ship.
Any guests on the ship can help sail it.
If they're doing something, raising the anchor, setting the anchor, dropping the sails, doing anything like that, you can go up and help.
And they have people who will assist you and guide you in what to do.
And so you've actually got, you know, when they're dropping the sails, they've got, you know, guys going up the rat lines and going out on the yard arms and dropping the sails down.
You can go do that.
I'm not.
You can go up to the crow's nest.
You can sit up there.
You can go out on the bowsprit.
You can lay on the netting.
You can go to the helm.
They let you steer the ship.
It's super cool.
That alone makes it a bucket list trip.
And I think that hitting these sort of sites in person that have been the subject of so much pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology, and then having the man Flint Dibble himself here with us to give us a straight story.
I think it's going to be certainly our most extraordinary skeptoid adventure trip yet.
And super happy that you're joining us.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
I mean, you know, if you, you know, from all, what, six of the stops, it includes prehistory from 400,000 years ago all the way to Napoleon Bonaparte's house.
And so it's just like, you know, it's got everything in between.
It has Carthaginians and Phoenicians and Romans.
It's got those Bronze Age megaliths.
And then, of course, it has some beautiful Genoese castles.
So it's, you know, it's got everything in terms of real history and archaeology that you could really think of.
What is 400,000 years old?
In Nice.
In Nice itself, there's a Paleolithic site in a Paleolithic museum right where the ship ends up pulling in.
And so there's a site there, a museum called Terra Amata.
And so it goes through some of the really early Paleolithic evidence from that area of France.
There's some other areas we're going to be near, but it'll probably be a little too inland to head up in Spain that also has even older Paleolithic archaeology, Homo Hyde Aborigensis and stuff like that.
Yeah.
How old are those, those, like the Lasco, the cave paintings in France?
How old are those?
Is that what we're talking about?
Yeah, those are about 15,000 to 20,000 years old, something like that.
Some of them go as late as 30,000, as early as 30,000 years.
And you're talking about 400,000 years old.
Yeah, so stone tools may be some of the earliest evidence of fire.
You know, it's funny, a lot of the pseudo-archaeologists are claiming that this new site in Britain shows the earliest fire ever, which it shows really good, clear evidence of fire.
But at the same time, there's plenty other sites like this one, Terra Almata, near Nice, which seems to show possible evidence of fire just as early, 400,000 years ago.
So we can talk about even how pseudoscientists twist the headlines that we see every day because they do that all the time.
Wow.
Oh my gosh.
I didn't even know this.
I'm supposed to be the one running the trip and I don't know what's going on.
Well, that's why I got the archaeology covered.
You got to help out with all the rest of this stuff.
I can do that.
I'll be carrying people's luggage for them and stuff.
So anyway, let's give some specifics.
If people want to check out the trip and please join us, the more the merrier, and that's why the trip exists.
You can just go to skeptoid.com slash adventures and you'll see a link to it there.
There is a timing issue.
This ship always sells out.
So we're going to sell cabins until there's no more cabins left to sell.
We don't know when that's going to be because other people are on the ship as well.
Our group doesn't fill the entire ship.
It's only 200-something passengers.
So it's very small, but we're not going to be all 200 of them.
January 10th, though, is the time at which we have to buy the rooms full price.
So everything is non-refundable after July, January 10th.
So consider that to be the deadline.
You can still buy tickets after that, but it's not refundable and you have to pay full price up front rather than just a deposit now.
So here's the URL.
Check it out.
Please come with us.
Flint, make your appeal.
Yeah, come on.
We're going to see some surfs, some suns, some castles, some megaliths, some Roman ruins, and we're going to have some good food on the ship as well.
And all aboard this really, really phenomenal Royal Clipper, which has just got to be one of the coolest ships in the world.
It's in the Guinness Brookly World Records for you.
Yeah, it is the world's largest active full-rigged ship, meaning it's got square sails on all of its masts.
And this one has five masts, which is pretty darn big anyway.
So it's a pretty darn cool ship.
Yeah, and I think also the kind of community that you gathered that I have as well that are fans of my channel, we're pro-science people.
And so it's going to be very much pro-science, pro-environmentalism.
We're going to try to experience the beauty of the world while we sort of at the same time lightheartedly, but also seriously mock the pseudoscientists out there.
Speaking of science and sailing is this being a sailing ship, we're going to be doing celestial navigation.
We're going to be doing how to use a sextant.
And so how to navigate by the sky during the day and at night.
This is also right in the middle of the Lyrid meteor shower.
So we're all going to be out there on deck at night doing our celestial navigation practice and during a meteor shower.
So again, that's going to be another one of these just lifelong memories that we all get to form on this adventure.
That's very cool.
Yeah.
You got to put that stuff on the website, man, because I didn't even know that.
I know the website.
I've just not been able to keep up with the website, but I need to.
Because, yeah, that sounds fantastic.
That's exactly what I think also helps get people to understand the past.
You sort of learn how to navigate how people navigated by the stars, and that gives you a greater appreciation.
You know, one of the finds that just came out, we're not going to hit it up, but we're going to be right near Malta.
And there was a find earlier this year about sort of hunter-gatherers made it to Malta, and they must have been navigating by stars or something like that because of the distance, it's at least an overnight journey.
And so that's pretty impressive to think back how long ago people were actually navigating by the stars in the Mediterranean.
And it certainly seems like it's now, well, I forgot how old that evidence is.
I'm guessing it's like six, seven thousand years old, but I could be wrong.
It might be a little older than that.
I need to check.
Yeah, I just did an episode, a two-part episode on ancient Polynesian navigation, and it was absolutely astonishing.
The mental databases that these navigators developed for the whole art and science of wayfinding was just staggering.
And they had so many different lines of evidence to tell where they were.
And this is the problem with pseudoscience because we should be having an appreciation for the smarts and intelligence of our ancestors and the ancestors of peoples around the world because they were able to, you know, navigate by stars in ways that we could never even think of.
They're able to move enormous stones in ways that boggle our minds because we're so used to our modern technology that does everything for us with the GPS or a crane or whatever.
And so it's just like, you know, we have to have an appreciation for the kind of advanced technology that people had back then, which is navigating by stars, organizing a group of people to move these kind of large stones, that kind of stuff is so impressive, let alone the kind of infrastructure and bureaucracy it took to manage, say, the Carthaginian or the Roman Empire or the Genoese colonies and stuff that we'll be hitting up as well.
The Trip of a Lifetime 00:00:27
Yeah.
Well, let's wrap this up.
I think we've given enough teaser info here.
I hope you all can come with us.
I'm certainly looking forward to this as the trip of my lifetime to date, anyway.
And I hope it can be the same for all of you.
Yeah, I'm excited to see everybody there.
So let's rock on.
Okay.
See you on the high seas.
I'd have pretend I said something clever as an outro
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