Joe Rogan Experience #1772 - Randall Carlson

1. 0:00 – 3:24

   Randall returns: Texas field plans, caves, and rapid-formed flood landscapes

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      (drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. RCRandall Carlson0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays)

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      Randall Carlson, how are you, sir?

   4. RCRandall Carlson0:15

      I'm doing well, Joe.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      It's great to see you. It really is.

   6. RCRandall Carlson0:17

      It's, it's even greater to see you.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:19

      I was so looking forward to this podcast. I was s- s- I'm, I'm just, I'm so excited about this subject, so whenever you're in town, uh, I'm happy.

   8. RCRandall Carlson0:27

      Well, you know, Joe, I drove 1,000 miles to get here.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:30

      (laughs)

   10. RCRandall Carlson0:30

       That's how much I'm...

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:32

       That's a long drive. How long did that take?

   12. RCRandall Carlson0:34

       Uh, we did two days. It's, it's a 14.5-hour drive. But we got slowed down because of the weather, you know, the last...

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:39

       Yeah. I was worried about that.

   14. RCRandall Carlson0:40

       Yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:41

       We've had some ice storms out here, for people that don't know.

   16. RCRandall Carlson0:43

       Yeah. Right. We had it...

   17. JRJoe Rogan0:44

       So...

   18. RCRandall Carlson0:45

       It was nasty for a while, but...

   19. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       And you're gonna be out here. You're doing some exploring. You're doing some cave exploring as well?

   20. RCRandall Carlson0:50

       Well, we were gonna go to s- see Halls Cave, which is a, um...

   21. JRJoe Rogan0:55

       Pull that microphone up to you.

   22. RCRandall Carlson0:57

       Halls Cave-

   23. JRJoe Rogan0:58

       Maybe get the, get the, the arm.

   24. RCRandall Carlson0:59

       Like this?

   25. JRJoe Rogan0:59

       There you go. Yeah.

   26. RCRandall Carlson1:00

       How's this?

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:00

       Perfect.

   28. RCRandall Carlson1:01

       Good. Um, yeah, Halls Cave is near here, and this was a site that has, uh, extinct megafauna remains in it, and it also has some Clovis remain- Clovis tools, and it has the Younger Dryas black mat stuff in it. So basically-

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:20

       W- black mat stuff meaning the, uh, whatever the impact was? What, what was settled?

   30. RCRandall Carlson1:24

       Yes. So, right. So when you had the impact, or I think impacts plural, you had this dusting of stuff, and a lot of fires. So the fires produced soot, charcoal. So at that layer, you have this black mat layer, and below it, you have megafauna, and above it, they're mostly gone. Below it you have the Clovis culture. Above it, they're mostly gone. Um, so Halls Cave was a repository, and, um, we were gonna go in it. The, it's belongs to an elderly couple that's on private property, but then when the COVID hit, they got worried about letting people in there, so it's been postponed.
2. 3:24 – 7:21

   Younger Dryas refresher: abrupt climate reversal, ice sheets, and the Clovis disruption

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:24

      So for people that are not familiar with your work, I think we should probably give them a, like a real quick refresher. When you're referring to the Younger Dryas, you're r- referring to the Younger Dryas impact theory, and this impact theory, you believe, probably ended the Ice Age, caused the extinction of many m- mammals and m- many species of life all over the Earth.

   2. RCRandall Carlson3:46

      All over the Earth.

   3. JRJoe Rogan3:47

      And reset civilization.

   4. RCRandall Carlson3:49

      Pretty much. Yeah. In a nutshell, that's kinda it.

   5. JRJoe Rogan3:51

      And that is somewhere around 11,000-

   6. RCRandall Carlson3:54

      Well-

   7. JRJoe Rogan3:55

      ... 12,000 years ago?

   8. RCRandall Carlson3:55

      Okay. The dating of it, there, there's... The Younger Dryas itself is, uh, about a 1,300-year interval. So to put in this in perspective, go back 16 to 20,000 years ago, we're in the middle of the late glacial maximum when more than double the amount of glacial ice on the planet now. We had North America, half of North America's c- 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, 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 we s- what, 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, um, 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 to 18,000 year ag- years ago, they coalesced. They grew together. Then with that warming, they separated, and that's... You probably heard the term the, uh, ice-free corridor.

   9. JRJoe Rogan5:35

      Yeah.

   10. RCRandall Carlson5:35

       The old idea is 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, uh, North America, and then eventually all the way down to Tierra del Fue- Fuego within 1,000 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, of warming. So at the beginning of that is when the, the, the spike of mass extinctions took place, and that's also when the COVID culture in North America (clears throat) that had been very prolific-

   11. JRJoe Rogan6:39

       You mean Clovis?

   12. RCRandall Carlson6:40

       Clovis. What did I say?

   13. JRJoe Rogan6:41

       You said COVID. (laughs) It's, we all have COVID on the brain.

   14. RCRandall Carlson6:45

       God. I know. (laughs)

   15. JRJoe Rogan6:46

       No worries.

   16. RCRandall Carlson6:47

       The Clovis culture, yeah, the Clovis culture, they disappeared.

   17. JRJoe Rogan6:52

       Maybe I heard... He did say COVID, right? It might have been Clovid. I don't know. Clovid? (laughs) I think, I think he-

   18. RCRandall Carlson6:58

       I think you're thoroughly confused, well-

   19. JRJoe Rogan6:59

       Either way, it's okay. I just... Maybe I'm hearing it.

   20. RCRandall Carlson7:02

       Yeah, well, (laughs) it could be, or I, maybe I, I should take a little break here and take my afternoon nap, but-

   21. JRJoe Rogan7:07

       (laughs)

   22. RCRandall Carlson7:07

       ... my after-lunch nap. Ah. You know, that's part of my religion now, is I take an afternoon nap every day.

   23. JRJoe Rogan7:14

       It's good religion.

   24. RCRandall Carlson7:15

       It's a pretty good religion.

   25. JRJoe Rogan7:15

       And solid.

   26. RCRandall Carlson7:16

       Yeah, that's my, my ritual nap every day. So anyways, not to get off on that, but, uh... (laughs)

   27. JRJoe Rogan7:21

       Okay.

3. 7:21 – 14:40

   Meltwater pulses and the ‘energy paradox’: why did the ice melt so fast?

   1. RCRandall Carlson7:21

      So it lasts about 1,300 years. And about 11,600 years ago, it ended. Now, what's interesting about this, about the, um, Younger Dryas period is that it's almost bookmarked with two catastrophes. The cas- catastrophe at 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 they... 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 ha- 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, the rise of what eventually led to modern civilization. We see the domestication of animals. We see the, the major shift in, in lifestyles from mostly, if not all, hunter-gatherers now into a agricultural-based lifestyle. Um, so we see really the, the rise of agriculture in those two millennia after the beginning of the ho- of the Holocene. Uh, what else? Oh, the dispersion of languages generally traces back to around roughly 10,000 years ago. Uh, what else? (clears throat) Um, oh, the rise of urban areas. Uh, they first sh- Çatalhöyük and, and Jericho and other cities like that are showing up between 8 and 9,000 years ago. So basically, all the accouterments of civilization that eventually led to, you know, what we think of as modern history, 4,500 to 5,000 years ago, all sort of got launched in this post- uh, Younger Dryas, uh, epoch, if you will. So the question is, is what caused these tremendous sea level rise? And if... I think in one of our previous interviews, I, I actually pulled up a graph where you could see that 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, uh, 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, 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, of, you know, glacial... the, the onset of a glaciation, glacial period, the termination of 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 central area of Canada, where it was assumed that there'd 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? Um, the other thing was (coughs) 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 did... He- 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 apply 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- 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, uh, uh, 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 into 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, um, I kind of thought, "Well, what's the possibility?" It's either it's gotta be impacts or it's gotta 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 Dryas, triggering the Younger Dryas and the- the... you know, we talked about that with Graham on here.

   2. JRJoe Rogan13:35

      Yeah.

   3. RCRandall Carlson13:36

      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- the discovery of Göbekli Tepe which, you know, is back 11,500 years old, right? And, um, the evidence that there had been this cometary impact. So, in his, uh, Fingerprints of the Gods he was still thinking... He was- he was... had- had- had documented tremendous amount of evidence for catastrophe, but what he didn't really... wasn't thinking... he was thinking more in terms of the- 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. It was an impact and why didn't I think of that?" He probably did, but... so that's what caused him to circle back to-

4. 14:40 – 17:31

   Impact proxies and evidence: melt glass, microspherules, nanodiamonds, and platinum spikes

   1. JRJoe Rogan14:40

      When did they first start discovering, uh, nuclear glass? The, uh, trinitite? Is that how you say it?

   2. RCRandall Carlson14:45

      Trinitite.

   3. JRJoe Rogan14:46

      Trinitite?

   4. RCRandall Carlson14:46

      Trinitite.

   5. JRJoe Rogan14:47

      Trinitite? When did they first started, uh, finding that stuff?

   6. RCRandall Carlson14:48

      Well, the first discovery of that, you know, it's- it's- it comes from, uh, Trinity-

   7. JRJoe Rogan14:52

      Trinitite, the bomb, yeah.

   8. RCRandall Carlson14:53

      ... Trinity, New Mexico, so-

   9. JRJoe Rogan14:54

      But I mean-

   10. RCRandall Carlson14:54

       ... summer of 19- July of 1945.

   11. JRJoe Rogan14:57

       What I mean, in, uh, core samples, when they were examining...

   12. RCRandall Carlson15:00

       Let's see. When would that have been? Um...

   13. JRJoe Rogan15:01

       Because that's one of the pieces of evidence that they point to, correct?

   14. RCRandall Carlson15:04

       Yes. So, I think maybe, you know, the Tunguska event of 1908, I think maybe in '60s or '70s they may have found glass associated with that. Um, certainly by the '50s and '60s they were finding glass associated with impact craters.

   15. JRJoe Rogan15:22

       And when they do core samples, they do find an associated, uh, supply of the stuff?

   16. RCRandall Carlson15:28

       Yeah. It- it... yes, yes. There's a variety of proxies that will indicate, um, impacts. The melt glass is one of them, right?

   17. JRJoe Rogan15:37

       So that's trinitite?

   18. RCRandall Carlson15:39

       Yes. Um, you'll have microspherules.

   19. JRJoe Rogan15:43

       Mm.

   20. RCRandall Carlson15:43

       Which form when you have a hyper-velocity impact. You know, you've got to think, you're, you know, 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 s- 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. It... as it cools, it drops back to Earth and it will form both microspherules and microtektites. And microtektites are small, little, um, aerodynamically shaped forms that you... they're called microtektites 'cause you really only see them under a microscope, and likewise with the microspherules. Um, then you have nanodiamonds. Nanodiamonds are only produced under extraordinary regimes of heat and pressure. So, you've got microspherules, you've got the trinitite, uh, and the melt glass, you've got the microspherules. You've got, um, iridium, other platinum group metals now associated with the Younger Dryas. They 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, uh, platinum showed up and iridium. Uh, let's see, what else? Charcoal if there's... if... or soot if there's, um... if there's, uh, fires. So, you know, soot has been found in conjunction with that black matte layer. That's one of the reasons it's black, is because of the amount of charcoal and soot in it.

   21. JRJoe Rogan17:26

       Meaning there were some sort of massive fires-

   22. RCRandall Carlson17:29

       Yes.

   23. JRJoe Rogan17:29

       ... that were associated with the impact?

5. 17:31 – 26:53

   Debate dynamics: critics, growing research teams, and why catastrophes face resistance

   1. RCRandall Carlson17:31

      Yes. Yes, that's right. So, you know, there... the critics came out, savaged it. You know, the first group, I think, was 17 scientists that signed off on that paper, 2007. Actually, the- the... and- and they formed a group called the Comet Research Team organized by George Howard who runs the, uh, Cosmic Tusk website. He'd be- he'd be a great guest, by the way. He's really... he- he knows more about the Younger Dryas than I do. He's- he's... and he- he has a good comprehension of it and, uh... so he does the Cosmic Tusk web- 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...... uh, field with, oh, a couple of times with, with some members of the group. Chris Moore, for example, who, um, or- originally was one of the skeptics. So, we were out, we can cut 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, and h- him, uh, S- 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, the great debate, right?

   2. JRJoe Rogan18:51

      Oh, during the phone call, right?

   3. RCRandall Carlson18:52

      During the phone call.

   4. JRJoe Rogan18:52

      Yeah.

   5. RCRandall Carlson18:52

      That was Malcolm LeCompte. He was there. Um, so Chris Moore, you know, had a chance to, uh, have extensive conversations with him, and he basically said, "Well yeah, I originally came on as a skeptic. I was gonna debunk this, and then I began seeing the evidence, and now I'm a believer."

   6. JRJoe Rogan19:06

      Mm-hmm.

   7. RCRandall Carlson19:07

      So-

   8. JRJoe Rogan19:07

      Well, it's, it's tie- it ties neatly together, right? It really does. It seems like that, it's the thing that makes the most sense when you look at all the physical evidence-

   9. RCRandall Carlson19:17

      Mm-hmm.

   10. JRJoe Rogan19:17

       ... when you look at how quickly things changed. I did not know that e- that the amount of melting would have taken that long though. That, that's pretty extraordinary.

   11. RCRandall Carlson19:26

       Well, (clears throat) you see, you gotta bear in mind too that, um, what'll happen in, under normal circumstances is you'll 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 gonna have really, especially in the northern, uh, latitudes, you're gonna 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 str- it's not like a continuous process. Um, but yeah, I, I think I've got the... 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, that we don't really have an explanation for."

   12. JRJoe Rogan20:26

       Didn't you come up with the idea while you were on acid?

   13. RCRandall Carlson20:31

       Well, (laughs) what a great i- ... (laughs) Well, I would say that-

   14. JRJoe Rogan20:35

       (laughs)

   15. RCRandall Carlson20:35

       ... h- was a factor. Yes, I would.

   16. JRJoe Rogan20:37

       (laughs)

   17. RCRandall Carlson20:37

       Uh-huh. Okay.

   18. JRJoe Rogan20:39

       Nothing wrong with great ideas on acid, ladies and gentlemen.

   19. RCRandall Carlson20:41

       (laughs)

   20. JRJoe Rogan20:41

       Kary Mullis, didn't he come up with, uh, partially the idea for the PCR test? Was that while he was on-

   21. RCRandall Carlson20:47

       I think that's, I think that's right. I, I think ... I couldn't swear do it-

   22. JRJoe Rogan20:49

       It was either PCR test or s- some great discovery.

   23. RCRandall Carlson20:53

       Uh-huh. So, this is, uh, yeah, this was, uh, this was the energy paradox research here. This was one of the guys who was the, John T. Andrews. You can see, 1973.

   24. JRJoe Rogan21:08

       Mm-hmm.

   25. RCRandall Carlson21:08

       The Wisconsin Laurentide Ice Sheet. The Laurentide was the big one, right? Dispersal centers, and this is the key, problems of rates of retreat.

   26. JRJoe Rogan21:16

       Mm-hmm.

   27. RCRandall Carlson21:17

       So, this is when they begin to say, "Hey, there's a problem here, guys." You know? So, uh, let's see here. Uh, and this was one of the bizarre things. See, if you go, the average marginal recession, that's the ice shrinking back. Between 12,000 and 7,000 years before present, BP is before present-

   28. JRJoe Rogan21:38

       Is that a new v- phrase, before present?

   29. RCRandall Carlson21:40

       Uh, it's, I've seen it in the literature going back 20 or 30 years.

   30. JRJoe Rogan21:44

       I, I thought-
6. 26:53 – 32:53

   Multiple impacts, comet streams, and Plato’s ‘Phaeton’ as a catastrophe memory

   1. JRJoe Rogan26:53

      And this catastrophic scenario, we're not talking about one individual event. We're talking about possibly multiple impacts.

   2. RCRandall Carlson27:01

      That's what I would definitely lean towards. I would-

   3. JRJoe Rogan27:04

      And this is over a course of how many years?

   4. RCRandall Carlson27:06

      Well, I think that (clears throat) if we look at the work of... And I've mentioned this on your show before, the work of... In fact, um, in one of our conversations we had it was, um, William Napier, who's a, a British astronomer, commented, uh, that we had... He was pleased that we had talked about it, and I mentioned that Victor Kloop and William Napier and several of these others that were sort of, uh, called the neo-catastrophists 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, uh, uh, increased amounts of volcanic, volcanic eruptions because, you know, hyper velocity impact can be very damaging. You know, 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 gonna do any damage at all, but that same .38 caliber accelerated to, you know, 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 gonna have consequences that could take, you know, thousands of years actually to, to play out.

   5. JRJoe Rogan28:25

      Is there an estimate of how many impacts there were?

   6. RCRandall Carlson28:30

      Not yet.

   7. JRJoe Rogan28:31

      Not yet?

   8. RCRandall Carlson28:31

      Mm-mm. I think there was probably in the range of about 10 impacts.

   9. JRJoe Rogan28:35

      So, 10 over the course of a few thousand years?

   10. RCRandall Carlson28:38

       Yes. Although they were probably concentrated. 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, uh, the end of the Younger Dryas. Something interesting though, it's one of these coincidences that, um, I should bring up. We, we talked a little bit at one point, maybe the first, first, uh, meeting we had. Uh, 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 'cause that's BS, you know. Well, whether Atlantis really existed or not, that's a whole nother interesting question. And, um, as a matter of fact, I'm... I just, uh, 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, um, before he begins the story of Atlantis, he prefaces it with, uh, the, the... By referencing the myth of Phaeton. And Phaeton being the son of Helios who tried to drive his father's chariot in the path of the sun and completely failed, and the, 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. (clears throat) 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, this is what was related, that they, that they... It was preserved in their sacred registers and in their temples for 9,000 years. And this was prior to Solon's 10-year, um, uh, sojourn in Egypt, right? Solon's sojourn in Egypt happens at 600, uh, uh, 400, 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-

   11. JRJoe Rogan31:16

       Mm-hmm.

   12. RCRandall Carlson31:17

       ... to 600 BC, that's 2,600 years.

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:20

       Yeah.

   14. RCRandall Carlson31:20

       Add that to 9,000, what do you get?

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:22

       Yeah.

   16. RCRandall Carlson31:22

       11,600.

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:24

       You get around the time of the Younger Dryas Impact.

   18. RCRandall Carlson31:25

       The end of the Younger Dryas.

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:27

       Yeah.

   20. RCRandall Carlson31:27

       Meltwater Pulse 1B.

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:29

       Mm-hmm.

   22. RCRandall Carlson31:29

       So you have a rapid rise, what John Shaw, John... Canadian geologist, the late John Shaw, uh, 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 Dropides, through Critias the Elder, to 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.

   23. JRJoe Rogan32:23

       Mm-hmm.

   24. RCRandall Carlson32:24

       Who knows? But what's, 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 betcha I have it right here. Let's see. Um, there we go. Let's see if we can open this up and you can see exactly what Plato says. And let's see here. If we zoom down, uh, to...

7. 32:53 – 51:18

   Richat Structure and Atlantis candidates: volcanic geology, alignments, and the Azores Plateau case

   1. JRJoe Rogan32:53

      Have you seen that geological formation in, I, I believe it's Africa? The, the rings.

   2. RCRandall Carlson33:00

      The recast structure? Yes.

   3. JRJoe Rogan33:01

      Yeah.

   4. RCRandall Carlson33:02

      Yes.

   5. JRJoe Rogan33:02

      What are your thoughts on that?

   6. RCRandall Carlson33:04

      That it's natural.

   7. JRJoe Rogan33:05

      You think it's natural?

   8. RCRandall Carlson33:06

      I think it's natural.

   9. JRJoe Rogan33:06

      Yeah?

   10. RCRandall Carlson33:06

       I think it's very interesting. I, I first discovered that maybe 20 years ago because it was when it was first discovered because of NASA photography.

   11. JRJoe Rogan33:17

       Mm-hmm.

   12. RCRandall Carlson33:18

       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, uh, subsequent research showed that it was pretty much natural. And I think... Yeah, here we go right here. So this is, um... Since you brought it up and asked about it, you can see here there's a, uh, there's a magma body bene- beneath the structure. It's, it's volcanic.

   13. JRJoe Rogan33:51

       Mm-hmm.

   14. RCRandall Carlson33:52

       And, uh, let's see. Uh, 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.

   15. JRJoe Rogan34:11

       I see. And how do they, how do they find that?

   16. RCRandall Carlson34:13

       Oh, geophysical surveys.

   17. JRJoe Rogan34:15

       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?

   18. RCRandall Carlson34:25

       It was probably pressure from below-

   19. JRJoe Rogan34:28

       Mm-hmm.

   20. RCRandall Carlson34:28

       ... causing an updoming, right? Now, you've got multiple layers like this.

   21. JRJoe Rogan34:35

       Mm-hmm.

   22. RCRandall Carlson34:35

       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?

   23. JRJoe Rogan34:44

       Mm-hmm.

   24. RCRandall Carlson34:45

       It forces it into a circular, sort of a dome shape uplift, and then you truncate it. You slice the top of that off, what you're gonna have is multiple rings-

   25. JRJoe Rogan34:54

       Mm-hmm.

   26. RCRandall Carlson34:54

       ... that are now exposed.

   27. JRJoe Rogan34:57

       Okay.

   28. RCRandall Carlson34:57

       So that's-

   29. JRJoe Rogan34:58

       So it makes sense if it's in that area where this volcanic activity takes place.

   30. RCRandall Carlson35:03

       Yeah.
8. 51:18 – 58:47

   Could there be evidence underwater? Submersible archaeology, tsunamis, and what would ‘prove’ it

   1. JRJoe Rogan51:18

      And, and is there any physical evidence other than the, the cobblestones or anything? Yeah?

   2. RCRandall Carlson51:25

      Plant remains.

   3. JRJoe Rogan51:26

      Plant remains?

   4. RCRandall Carlson51:26

      Dredged, dredged-up plant remains, yes.

   5. JRJoe Rogan51:29

      Whoa.

   6. RCRandall Carlson51:29

      Yeah, yeah. Plant remains that would have been growing, you know, in a climate un- you know, not consistent with, with the Ice Ages.

   7. JRJoe Rogan51:38

      What about re- anything that would indicate human settlement?

   8. RCRandall Carlson51:42

      No, not yet. Although I've heard some things, I haven't seen confirmation. I think it's gonna take submersible.

   9. JRJoe Rogan51:51

      Yeah.

   10. RCRandall Carlson51:52

       You know, we're just at the very beginnings of, of submarine archeology.

   11. JRJoe Rogan51:55

       And how deep is this area again?

   12. RCRandall Carlson51:57

       Well, you see, right now, it, it is, um... The Azores are actually islands that are above sea level. Um, and the major part of the plateau is a mile to a mile-and-a-half underwater.

   13. JRJoe Rogan52:12

       So, that's where all the action would be.

   14. RCRandall Carlson52:15

       Most likely, yes. Yes.

   15. JRJoe Rogan52:18

       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-

   16. RCRandall Carlson52:28

       Well, I-

   17. JRJoe Rogan52:28

       ... to find some physical evidence?

   18. RCRandall Carlson52:29

       Not yet, but I was thinking, Joe, that-

   19. JRJoe Rogan52:31

       You and I?

   20. RCRandall Carlson52:32

       ... you and I-

   21. JRJoe Rogan52:32

       (laughs)

   22. RCRandall Carlson52:33

       ... could see what-

   23. JRJoe Rogan52:34

       Okay.

   24. RCRandall Carlson52:34

       You ready to take a ride?

   25. JRJoe Rogan52:36

       Well, do you know James Cameron? Maybe we could borrow his submarine.

   26. RCRandall Carlson52:38

       Well, I don't want to say this, but, uh, I've actually had somebody contact me who's two steps removed. I won't get into that-

   27. JRJoe Rogan52:45

       Really?

   28. RCRandall Carlson52:45

       ... because I don't like to count chickens. You know what I'm saying?

   29. JRJoe Rogan52:47

       I get it.

   30. RCRandall Carlson52:48

       Yeah.
9. 58:47 – 1:21:09

   Near-Earth threats: asteroids, the Taurid stream, Tunguska, and the ‘cosmic blind spot’

   1. RCRandall Carlson58:47

      hyper velocity impacts will also do, and we'll, we'll pull up some data here re- uh, shortly that shows that hyper velocity impacts are way, way more common than was even assumed a decade, two decades, certainly a generation ago. That these things are... We've, 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'll... we can talk about that in a minute. You've heard of that, right?

   2. JRJoe Rogan59:17

      Sure. Yeah.

   3. RCRandall Carlson59:18

      So, s-

   4. JRJoe Rogan59:18

      That's the one over Siberia.

   5. RCRandall Carlson59:20

      Yes.

   6. JRJoe Rogan59:20

      It impacted, uh, in the sky above-

   7. RCRandall Carlson59:23

      Yes.

   8. JRJoe Rogan59:23

      ... the forest and flattened-

   9. RCRandall Carlson59:25

      Yes.

   10. JRJoe Rogan59:25

       ... massive amounts of trees. Yeah.

   11. RCRandall Carlson59:26

       Massive. Yes. Yes.

   12. JRJoe Rogan59:27

       That was one that, uh, erroneously they, they'd, uh, associated with Tesla for some reason. They thought that Tesla was doing something wacky.

   13. RCRandall Carlson59:33

       No.

   14. JRJoe Rogan59:34

       Yeah. Well, that's the tinfoil hat brigade.

   15. RCRandall Carlson59:36

       No, the evidence to me suggests very strongly that it was a-

   16. JRJoe Rogan59:39

       Impact.

   17. RCRandall Carlson59:39

       ... piece of the Taurid meteor stream-

   18. JRJoe Rogan59:42

       Oh.

   19. RCRandall Carlson59:42

       ... which was a byproduct of disintegration of Comet Encke, which was in turn... And this gets us back to the British neocatastrophists.

   20. JRJoe Rogan59:50

       Is Encke named after the Sumerian Enki?

   21. RCRandall Carlson59:52

       No. Uh, I think it was named after, uh, uh, an astronomer who discovered it. Most comets are named after whoever discovers them.

   22. JRJoe Rogan59:59

       Mm-hmm.

   23. RCRandall Carlson59:59

       So, and it's spelled a little different. E-N-C-K-E as opposed to E-N-K-I. But coincidence though, Encke.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:00:08

       Mm-hmm.

   25. RCRandall Carlson1:00:08

       Anyways, um, so Comet Encke was probably part of a much bigger system and, uh, it was probably Earth's encounter with the Taurid meteor stream that triggered the Younger Dryas impacts.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:00:20

       Mm-hmm.

   27. RCRandall Carlson1:00:21

       That's kind of... A lot of the pieces are sort of fitting together now. And the Taurid meteor stream was a much more prolific meteor stream in the past than it is now. Um, the Earth crosses the Taurid meteor stream twice each year. Um, peak's late October, early November when, uh, the stream... If you got a picture... I actually 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.... the 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.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:01:23

       Mm-hmm.

   29. RCRandall Carlson1:01:23

       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 Taurid meteor stream. If you look at its position in the sky where it came from, it was perfectly positioned to be part of that Taurid meteor stream. So it was probably, most likely, I don't... nobody's proven it, but it was... the circumstantial case is very strong that it was a part of that Taurid meteor stream. And the Taurid 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, th- the constellation of the bull, Taurus. And there's a whole bunch of really interesting mythology associated with that, th- that we could dive into, but it's, um... particularly like, for example, have you ever heard of Mithraism? Which Mithraism was the... in the, 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, um, Mithraic ceremonies or r- or rituals was called the Tauroctony, the slaying of the celestial bull. And when you look at these images, they would go underground and they would have a vault-shaped, uh, like, temple that... with stars painted on the ceiling. And at the end of that, they would have this, uh, this carving of the... of Mithras stabbing his sh- uh, sword into the... slaying the bull, the celestial bull, stabbing his, his sword into the shoulder of the bull and the blood flowing out. And if you superimpose the, uh, constellation of the, 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 s- trying to symbolize here is that on a yearly basis, they would see this meteor stream pouring out of the shoulder of the bull."

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:03:32

       Mm-hmm.
10. 1:21:09 – 1:46:54

    Planetary defense: DART, lead time, and a Space Force connection

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:21:09

       When you're thinking about something that's going 60,000 miles an hour and it's as big as, you know, multiple football fields, how w- uh, I mean, how prepared are we to even deflect something like that?

    2. RCRandall Carlson1:21:23

       At this point, we're not.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:21:25

       We're just not.

    4. RCRandall Carlson1:21:25

       We're not. We're sitting ducks. We're, we're screwed.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:21:31

       Ugh.

    6. RCRandall Carlson1:21:32

       We're screwed. So-

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:21:34

       Do you have canned food in your house?

    8. RCRandall Carlson1:21:35

       (laughs) Yeah, I got about six months' worth.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:21:38

       Do you?

    10. RCRandall Carlson1:21:38

        I do, yeah. Yeah.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:21:40

        Phew. That's not quite enough, is it?

    12. RCRandall Carlson1:21:43

        Probably not. It could... yeah.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:21:44

        (laughs)

    14. RCRandall Carlson1:21:44

        Because really, we've got about six months' worth of food before our food starts running out.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:21:50

        And for the world?

    16. RCRandall Carlson1:21:51

        For the world.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:21:52

        Yeah.

    18. RCRandall Carlson1:21:52

        So, you know, if we had a dusting, a cosmic winter, a volcanic winter, uh, I mean, that, that shut down agriculture for a year or two, half the population of the Earth is gonna be dead within the next year.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:22:06

        (sighs)

    20. RCRandall Carlson1:22:06

        That's not an exaggeration. So-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:22:10

        Well, also you have to deal with the, the mammals dying as well, right? 'Cause they're gonna be without food.

    22. RCRandall Carlson1:22:16

        Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna have... 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 (clears throat) about half of all megafaunal species during that Younger Dryas. Now, there was already animals disappearing leading up to it because I think could be attributed to whatever happened at 14,600 years ago, where I talked about earlier, Meltwater Pulse 1A. Right? That's when the, the shit really started to s- 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 (clears throat) by that time w- 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, uh, 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, um, y- know, some of the archeological evidence, one of the things that you see over and over again as well, there was this cultural group in Japan or wherever, I just have r- 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. Well, people must have picked up and moved. But maybe that's not the explanation. Maybe it's more a case of (laughs) they got wiped out.

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:24:30

        And one of the things you pointed out before is the evidence of... There's certain mammals that appear to have died instantaneously, particularly mammoths.

    24. RCRandall Carlson1:24:42

        Yes. Yeah. R- wilding rhinos. Yeah, a lot of, there's been a lot of, uh, what you might call flash-frozen, um, animals found in the tundra.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:24:52

        And they found-

    26. RCRandall Carlson1:24:53

        (clears throat)

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:24:53

        ... large populations of them that seem to have died at the same time.

    28. RCRandall Carlson1:24:57

        Yeah, mass death, mass mortality events. Um, you know, yeah. That's-

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:25:03

        You showed some images (thumping) also of what it looks like mammoths with broken legs-

    30. RCRandall Carlson1:25:08

        Yeah.

Episode duration: 3:05:45