Joe Rogan Experience #1772 - Randall Carlson

Joe Rogan 0:00 (drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Randall Carlson 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays)

Joe Rogan 0:13 Randall Carlson, how are you, sir?

Randall Carlson 0:15 I'm doing well, Joe.

Joe Rogan 0:16 It's great to see you. It really is.

Randall Carlson 0:17 It's, it's even greater to see you.

Joe Rogan 0:19 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.

Randall Carlson 0:27 Well, you know, Joe, I drove 1,000 miles to get here.

Joe Rogan 0:30 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 0:30 That's how much I'm...

Joe Rogan 0:32 That's a long drive. How long did that take?

Randall Carlson 0:34 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...

Joe Rogan 0:39 Yeah. I was worried about that.

Randall Carlson 0:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:41 We've had some ice storms out here, for people that don't know.

Randall Carlson 0:43 Yeah. Right. We had it...

Joe Rogan 0:44 So...

Randall Carlson 0:45 It was nasty for a while, but...

Joe Rogan 0:46 And you're gonna be out here. You're doing some exploring. You're doing some cave exploring as well?

Randall Carlson 0:50 Well, we were gonna go to s- see Halls Cave, which is a, um...

Joe Rogan 0:55 Pull that microphone up to you.

Randall Carlson 0:57 Halls Cave-

Joe Rogan 0:58 Maybe get the, get the, the arm.

Randall Carlson 0:59 Like this?

Joe Rogan 0:59 There you go. Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:00 How's this?

Joe Rogan 1:00 Perfect.

Randall Carlson 1:01 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-

Joe Rogan 1:20 W- black mat stuff meaning the, uh, whatever the impact was? What, what was settled?

Randall Carlson 1:24 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.

Joe Rogan 2:01 Mm.

Randall Carlson 2:01 Thomas Stafford was the lead archeologist on the job, on the, on the project, and he had agreed to set it up for us, but then they got, like I said, the elderly couple that owns the cave, they got cold feet, so.

Joe Rogan 2:14 So is this because of the recent strains of COVID? Is this like...

Randall Carlson 2:17 No. This woulda been...

Joe Rogan 2:19 So two years ago you were-

Randall Carlson 2:19 We were gonna go, let's see, well, two years, was it last summer? We were planning to go a year, uh, a year ago last summer.

Joe Rogan 2:28 Mm.

Randall Carlson 2:28 So it's been on hold, and I suspect that at some point, we'll, we'll get to do it. But n- while I'm out here, we are gonna check out a few things. Canyon Lake Gorge, which is down towards San Antonio, is a site that, uh, 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, um, uh, recessional cataracts and plunge pools and all these kinda things that geologists assumed were kind of slow to, to form, um, but are s- very similar to some of the things that are on a much grander scale that we'll look at here today. Um, 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.

Joe Rogan 3:24 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.

Randall Carlson 3:46 All over the Earth.

Joe Rogan 3:47 And reset civilization.

Randall Carlson 3:49 Pretty much. Yeah. In a nutshell, that's kinda it.

Joe Rogan 3:51 And that is somewhere around 11,000-

Randall Carlson 3:54 Well-

Joe Rogan 3:55 ... 12,000 years ago?

Randall Carlson 3:55 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.

Joe Rogan 5:35 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 5:35 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-

Joe Rogan 6:39 You mean Clovis?

Randall Carlson 6:40 Clovis. What did I say?

Joe Rogan 6:41 You said COVID. (laughs) It's, we all have COVID on the brain.

Randall Carlson 6:45 God. I know. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 6:46 No worries.

Randall Carlson 6:47 The Clovis culture, yeah, the Clovis culture, they disappeared.

Joe Rogan 6:52 Maybe I heard... He did say COVID, right? It might have been Clovid. I don't know. Clovid? (laughs) I think, I think he-

Randall Carlson 6:58 I think you're thoroughly confused, well-

Joe Rogan 6:59 Either way, it's okay. I just... Maybe I'm hearing it.

Randall Carlson 7:02 Yeah, well, (laughs) it could be, or I, maybe I, I should take a little break here and take my afternoon nap, but-

Joe Rogan 7:07 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 7:07 ... my after-lunch nap. Ah. You know, that's part of my religion now, is I take an afternoon nap every day.

Joe Rogan 7:14 It's good religion.

Randall Carlson 7:15 It's a pretty good religion.

Joe Rogan 7:15 And solid.

Randall Carlson 7:16 Yeah, that's my, my ritual nap every day. So anyways, not to get off on that, but, uh... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:21 Okay.

Randall Carlson 7:21 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.

Joe Rogan 13:35 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 13:36 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-

Joe Rogan 14:40 When did they first start discovering, uh, nuclear glass? The, uh, trinitite? Is that how you say it?

Randall Carlson 14:45 Trinitite.

Joe Rogan 14:46 Trinitite?

Randall Carlson 14:46 Trinitite.

Joe Rogan 14:47 Trinitite? When did they first started, uh, finding that stuff?

Randall Carlson 14:48 Well, the first discovery of that, you know, it's- it's- it comes from, uh, Trinity-

Joe Rogan 14:52 Trinitite, the bomb, yeah.

Randall Carlson 14:53 ... Trinity, New Mexico, so-

Joe Rogan 14:54 But I mean-

Randall Carlson 14:54 ... summer of 19- July of 1945.

Joe Rogan 14:57 What I mean, in, uh, core samples, when they were examining...

Randall Carlson 15:00 Let's see. When would that have been? Um...

Joe Rogan 15:01 Because that's one of the pieces of evidence that they point to, correct?

Randall Carlson 15:04 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.

Joe Rogan 15:22 And when they do core samples, they do find an associated, uh, supply of the stuff?

Randall Carlson 15:28 Yeah. It- it... yes, yes. There's a variety of proxies that will indicate, um, impacts. The melt glass is one of them, right?

Joe Rogan 15:37 So that's trinitite?

Randall Carlson 15:39 Yes. Um, you'll have microspherules.

Joe Rogan 15:43 Mm.

Randall Carlson 15:43 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.

Joe Rogan 17:26 Meaning there were some sort of massive fires-

Randall Carlson 17:29 Yes.

Joe Rogan 17:29 ... that were associated with the impact?

Randall Carlson 17:31 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?

Joe Rogan 18:51 Oh, during the phone call, right?

Randall Carlson 18:52 During the phone call.

Joe Rogan 18:52 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 18:52 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."

Joe Rogan 19:06 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 19:07 So-

Joe Rogan 19:07 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-

Randall Carlson 19:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 19:17 ... 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.

Randall Carlson 19:26 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."

Joe Rogan 20:26 Didn't you come up with the idea while you were on acid?

Randall Carlson 20:31 Well, (laughs) what a great i- ... (laughs) Well, I would say that-

Joe Rogan 20:35 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 20:35 ... h- was a factor. Yes, I would.

Joe Rogan 20:37 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 20:37 Uh-huh. Okay.

Joe Rogan 20:39 Nothing wrong with great ideas on acid, ladies and gentlemen.

Randall Carlson 20:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 20:41 Kary Mullis, didn't he come up with, uh, partially the idea for the PCR test? Was that while he was on-

Randall Carlson 20:47 I think that's, I think that's right. I, I think ... I couldn't swear do it-

Joe Rogan 20:49 It was either PCR test or s- some great discovery.

Randall Carlson 20:53 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.

Joe Rogan 21:08 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 21:08 The Wisconsin Laurentide Ice Sheet. The Laurentide was the big one, right? Dispersal centers, and this is the key, problems of rates of retreat.

Joe Rogan 21:16 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 21:17 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-

Joe Rogan 21:38 Is that a new v- phrase, before present?

Randall Carlson 21:40 Uh, it's, I've seen it in the literature going back 20 or 30 years.

Joe Rogan 21:44 I, I thought-

Randall Carlson 21:44 And geologists use that-

Joe Rogan 21:45 Okay.

Randall Carlson 21:45 ... whereas historians and archeologists tend to use BC.

Joe Rogan 21:48 Right.

Randall Carlson 21:48 Right? But if you're talking about something that happened 50 or 500,000 years ago, saying BC doesn't make sense.

Joe Rogan 21:55 Right. It seems silly. You have to do extra math.

Randall Carlson 21:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 21:57 Right.

Randall Carlson 21:57 So, this is the first thing they noticed, that the rate of recession, you would assume that it's gonna be faster at the southern margin, right? And s- much slower, 'cause the s- the l- the northern margin is up by the Arctic Circle, right? What they saw, that it varied little between the north or northwest and southern margins. So, that was the first mystery. Um, so then the second thing was, what they... Of primary concern is the energy balance at the margin of the ice sheet required to promote the rapid late Wisconsin retreat. Uh, 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.

Joe Rogan 22:39 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 22:40 Um, which is why I find it so interesting, is because there are mysteries out there and I love a good mystery.

Joe Rogan 22:46 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 22:47 Uh, unexplained is the growth of the ice cap in its gathering grounds of Baffin Island. So, they're saying we don't even know how it started.

Joe Rogan 22:54 When you said 2002, did you mean 2022 or do you mean 2002?

Randall Carlson 22:59 No, I meant 2022. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:01 Okay, okay. No worries.

Randall Carlson 23:02 Thank you, Joe, for keeping me on track.

Joe Rogan 23:05 Listen, you have so much information in your head, some of it's gonna spill out the sides.

Randall Carlson 23:10 Uh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:11 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 23:11 So, hope someone does spill out the side, uh... Yeah, so here was the question. 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 they... 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... Yeah. Uh, the high energy inputs, uh, 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, 'cause it's retreating-

Joe Rogan 24:10 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 24:10 ... but it's also shrinking this way.

Joe Rogan 24:12 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 24:12 So, uh...... 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. So like, what the hell is going on here?

Joe Rogan 24:32 It's happening simultaneously.

Randall Carlson 24:33 It's happening simultaneously, yeah. Uh-

Joe Rogan 24:36 Is there, um, a competing theory?

Randall Carlson 24:39 I've never seen it.

Joe Rogan 24:41 You've never seen any competing theory on the rapid recession of the ice caps?

Randall Carlson 24:44 I have not.

Joe Rogan 24:45 Interesting.

Randall Carlson 24:45 I have not. 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.

Joe Rogan 24:59 It's interesting that there's resistance to it because we know that there are asteroidal impacts and comet impacts. We know all that stuff's real. We know-

Randall Carlson 25:08 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:09 ... we're in the middle of space and it happens all the time.

Randall Carlson 25:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:11 We can just look at the moon-

Randall Carlson 25:12 Right.

Joe Rogan 25:12 ... with its lack of atmosphere and we know there's craters all over it. So, we know things get hit constantly, and we're dealing with this immense period of time. It just seems logical.

Randall Carlson 25:22 It seems logical.

Joe Rogan 25:23 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 25:23 And, you know, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, they theorized way back, I think, in the '70s that, that there was an extraterrestrial cause to ice ages, that the planet might get dusted with, with extraterrestrial fine extra... Including, uh, nano diamonds that are so small, um, and very reflective of heat that-

Joe Rogan 25:44 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 25:44 ... that maybe, um, was not accepted back in the '70s just because it's, uh, pretty much outside... See, they were still looking for what the Milankovitch, this is what I was t- 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 (snaps fingers) happening like that.

Joe Rogan 26:07 How quick are we talking about when talking about this recession of the ice caps from the time where there's a mile high sheet of ice to what we see?

Randall Carlson 26:16 5000 years.

Joe Rogan 26:17 5000 years.

Randall Carlson 26:18 But within there, see, you can say 5000 years and you might think of a uniform process.

Joe Rogan 26:22 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 26:23 It's, it's diminishing in mass uniformly each year, but that's not 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 p- the process was interrupted, see?

Joe Rogan 26:42 Hm.

Randall Carlson 26:42 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 some... Uh, a more catastrophic scenario.

Joe Rogan 26:53 And this catastrophic scenario, we're not talking about one individual event. We're talking about possibly multiple impacts.

Randall Carlson 27:01 That's what I would definitely lean towards. I would-

Joe Rogan 27:04 And this is over a course of how many years?

Randall Carlson 27:06 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.

Joe Rogan 28:25 Is there an estimate of how many impacts there were?

Randall Carlson 28:30 Not yet.

Joe Rogan 28:31 Not yet?

Randall Carlson 28:31 Mm-mm. I think there was probably in the range of about 10 impacts.

Joe Rogan 28:35 So, 10 over the course of a few thousand years?

Randall Carlson 28:38 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-

Joe Rogan 31:16 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 31:17 ... to 600 BC, that's 2,600 years.

Joe Rogan 31:20 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 31:20 Add that to 9,000, what do you get?

Joe Rogan 31:22 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 31:22 11,600.

Joe Rogan 31:24 You get around the time of the Younger Dryas Impact.

Randall Carlson 31:25 The end of the Younger Dryas.

Joe Rogan 31:27 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 31:27 Meltwater Pulse 1B.

Joe Rogan 31:29 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 31:29 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.

Joe Rogan 32:23 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 32:24 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...

Joe Rogan 32:53 Have you seen that geological formation in, I, I believe it's Africa? The, the rings.

Randall Carlson 33:00 The recast structure? Yes.

Joe Rogan 33:01 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 33:02 Yes.

Joe Rogan 33:02 What are your thoughts on that?

Randall Carlson 33:04 That it's natural.

Joe Rogan 33:05 You think it's natural?

Randall Carlson 33:06 I think it's natural.

Joe Rogan 33:06 Yeah?

Randall Carlson 33:06 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.

Joe Rogan 33:17 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 33:18 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.

Joe Rogan 33:51 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 33:52 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.

Joe Rogan 34:11 I see. And how do they, how do they find that?

Randall Carlson 34:13 Oh, geophysical surveys.

Joe Rogan 34:15 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?

Randall Carlson 34:25 It was probably pressure from below-

Joe Rogan 34:28 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 34:28 ... causing an updoming, right? Now, you've got multiple layers like this.

Joe Rogan 34:35 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 34:35 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?

Joe Rogan 34:44 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 34:45 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-

Joe Rogan 34:54 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 34:54 ... that are now exposed.

Joe Rogan 34:57 Okay.

Randall Carlson 34:57 So that's-

Joe Rogan 34:58 So it makes sense if it's in that area where this volcanic activity takes place.

Randall Carlson 35:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:03 And that this is a natural, uh, possibility.

Randall Carlson 35:06 Yeah. Now I know that Jimmy has-

Joe Rogan 35:08 Oh, I see.

Randall Carlson 35:08 ... looked at that.

Joe Rogan 35:09 Corsetti, yeah.

Randall Carlson 35:09 Yeah. And, uh, I don't know Jimmy personally. I, I like the guy without knowing him. You interviewed him, right?

Joe Rogan 35:17 Yeah, very nice guy.

Randall Carlson 35:17 Yeah, that's what I thought.

Joe Rogan 35:18 Yeah, yeah.

Randall Carlson 35:19 I'd like to get him out in the field with me and show him some stuff firsthand. I think he-

Joe Rogan 35:22 I bet he would love that.

Randall Carlson 35:23 I think he would.

Joe Rogan 35:24 Yeah, he's a giant fan of your work.

Randall Carlson 35:26 I'd like to hear that. Well, I'm a fan of his work, but I don't happen to agree on this one.

Joe Rogan 35:29 Well, I mean, I don't even know if he agrees. I think he's just-

Randall Carlson 35:32 I-

Joe Rogan 35:32 ... speculating.

Randall Carlson 35:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:33 He's not dogmatic. Like he doesn't have like a-

Randall Carlson 35:35 Right.

Joe Rogan 35:35 ... a rigid perspective on this.

Randall Carlson 35:37 Yeah, you... Here you can see there's the recast structure. What is interesting though is look at this. You've got the, uh, this structure up here, the Termini-ter... Tenoumer. I forget how you pronounce that.

Joe Rogan 35:48 How do you say that?

Randall Carlson 35:49 Ter- ten... I knew how to pronounce it. But anyways, that's a, that's an impact crater there. There's one here. We can actually, if we go back, the, the Tenoum- Tenoumer crater in Mauritania, that's impact. And the Temimichat. I-

Joe Rogan 36:06 That's it.

Randall Carlson 36:07 So what's interesting though, check this out. There's one, there's two, and here's the recast structure. They fall in a perfect alignment.

Joe Rogan 36:19 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 36:19 Now what's the explanation there? I don't know.

Joe Rogan 36:22 Could just be coincidence, right?

Randall Carlson 36:24 Could be coincidence, yeah. Could be coincidence.

Joe Rogan 36:25 The... One of the things that he said about the recast structure was that around it, the white appears to be salt.

Randall Carlson 36:32 ... which could be. And I mean, see, the rim rock of this is Late Cretaceous, about 90 million years old. So at that point, it was below the ocean, right?

Joe Rogan 36:40 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 36:40 So it's been uplifted. I think this thing is about 14 or 1,500 feet above sea level-

Joe Rogan 36:45 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 36:45 ... if memory serves me correct. So it's been eroded. You see, this whole thing here is, like, an erosion. You had a massive amount of water that came down over this, and most likely is what exposed this thing to the surface. It was probably buried. Um, let's see here. Um, oh. So right there is, you know, from Plato, that's the ringed city of Atlantis-

Joe Rogan 37:13 Mm-hmm, right.

Randall Carlson 37:13 ... to scale.

Joe Rogan 37:14 The concentric rings?

Randall Carlson 37:15 The concentric ring. So thi- this is the actual scale superimposed onto the Richat Structure.

Joe Rogan 37:20 So it's much smaller-

Randall Carlson 37:22 Much smaller.

Joe Rogan 37:22 ... in scale.

Randall Carlson 37:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:23 But Plato's scale was based on what?

Randall Carlson 37:25 The stade. It was based on the stade, which is roughly 607 feet.

Joe Rogan 37:32 Hm.

Randall Carlson 37:32 It's where we get the word stadium from.

Joe Rogan 37:34 Oh, wow.

Randall Carlson 37:34 Yeah, because that's, that was the length of a s- a stadium in Ancient Greece.

Joe Rogan 37:38 So when you look at Plato's version of this. Sorry to take you on this detour, but I was just curious. When you look at, uh, Plato's version of, um, Atlantis, is there an area of the world that seems likely? Yeah?

Randall Carlson 37:54 Yeah. Yeah. You better watch my six-hour presentation.

Joe Rogan 37:58 Okay, I will.

Randall Carlson 37:59 Yeah. No, but, but, uh, I, I look ... (clears throat) It's detailed. That's why even in six hours, you know, I can't really spell it. I ... In my podcast I did, the first nine episodes, two hours each, were devoted to, I thought, "Well, let's kick it off with Atlantis."

Joe Rogan 38:17 18 hours of Atlantis?

Randall Carlson 38:18 18 hours of it. The last, episode nine, was devoted to the Richat Structure.

Joe Rogan 38:24 Wow.

Randall Carlson 38:24 So I had eight, eight, eight hours, so it was 16 hours, but we had some chatter and things like that in there, so maybe more like 12 or 14 hours. So, um, you know who Johanna James is?

Joe Rogan 38:35 No.

Randall Carlson 38:36 She is a, uh, British actress who's started doing this pod- ... She's really cool lady. Um, she's very interested in all this kind of stuff. Very smart, extraordinarily beautiful, and, um, she went on and, and did a, uh ... 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, um, programs on Atlantis." And so she did this, like, 30-minute little synopsis of it.

Joe Rogan 39:22 Hm.

Randall Carlson 39:23 Really did a great job. So we reached out to her. I invited her on. She came on. We did a livestream a couple of weeks ago with her as a guest. And, um, just really fun lady. She's, uh, also does comedy.

Joe Rogan 39:36 Really?

Randall Carlson 39:37 Uh, yeah. And she's very intelligent, very gorgeous. Um, what can I say, you know? And smart, and interested in all this kind of stuff, so, you know, there we go. Anyways, um, 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 e- the, the 10 or 12 hours I did, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to condense that down." So couple of weeks ago, we did the first three-hour livestream 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, it straddles a triple-plate junction, which you have the European plate, the African plate, then the North American plate here.

Joe Rogan 41:01 What, it's up near Nova C- Nova Scotia?

Randall Carlson 41:03 Yeah, it's far north. It is. But notice over here, it's really almost at the same latitude as Spain.

Joe Rogan 41:09 Hmm.

Randall Carlson 41:10 See? And I would say that if there's any place on the planet that is most consistent with Plato's account, that's it right there.

Joe Rogan 41:21 Why is that? Without doing a 18-hour presentation. (laughs)

Randall Carlson 41:26 (laughs) Oh, come on, Joe.

Joe Rogan 41:28 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 41:28 Can't we have pizza brought in?

Joe Rogan 41:30 We can. All right.

Randall Carlson 41:31 No. That's why, in a nutshell ... God, where do I even begin? So ... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 41:36 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 41:37 Uh, I was afraid you were gonna ask that, but w- we could look very quickly. I guess, like, give you the, the, the five-minute version, um, which is that, uh, there is evidence that there was a massive subsidence along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. We actually talked about this a little bit in, I think in our very first, uh, discussion we had, which was what? Seven, eight years ago?

Joe Rogan 42:04 At least.

Randall Carlson 42:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:05 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 42:06 Yeah. 'Cause ... 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. Uh, let me back up to, uh ... 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. So, here's sea level, ri- land is rising back.

Joe Rogan 43:09 And the land is rising because of a lack of weight of the ice?

Randall Carlson 43:12 Yes.

Joe Rogan 43:13 Oh.

Randall Carlson 43:13 Right. So, you're sitting on a soft, cushiony chair right now-

Joe Rogan 43:16 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 43:16 ... right? Are you?

Joe Rogan 43:18 Yep.

Randall Carlson 43:18 Okay. So, your ass is causing isostatic depression of that cushion on your chair.

Joe Rogan 43:23 Right, right, uh, yeah.

Randall Carlson 43:24 And if you sit up, you'll have isostatic compensation.

Joe Rogan 43:27 Mm.

Randall Carlson 43:29 Right?

Joe Rogan 43:29 So, that's what that is, along many, many, many lines.

Randall Carlson 43:32 Yes, those are all shorelines.

Joe Rogan 43:34 Wow.

Randall Carlson 43:34 Here's another view of it.

Joe Rogan 43:36 Wow.

Randall Carlson 43:36 Here, here's another view.

Joe Rogan 43:38 Wow.

Randall Carlson 43:39 That's the land rebounding couple of thousand feet after the ice was removed. Now, the ice was removed, and all of those m- 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 w- you would say, orthogonal or at right angles to the ridge itself. Here, you can see very clearly the, the, the, the triple plate junction and how the oi- Azores Plateau... Okay, well, since the 1940s, the first expedit- expedition in 1948, there was a, uh, when they started doing, uh, dredge samples from the o- uh, from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, which coincidentally, the name of the ship was, uh, The Atlantis. They'd dredge core samples and they'd pull up the core samples from two miles down, a mile to two miles down, and they'd 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 like, uh, that had, 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, of this place right here.

Joe Rogan 45:08 So, these are fossils that they're finding?

Randall Carlson 45:10 Yes.

Joe Rogan 45:10 So, and they're finding fossils that ordinarily you would find in some place that was very shallow?

Randall Carlson 45:16 Very shallow. Very shallow, yes.

Joe Rogan 45:18 Or relatively shallow, 100 feet.

Randall Carlson 45:20 A hundred feet, yes. Um, so this is, this is the basic idea 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, 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, the mean- the meaning of that. When you see glacioeustatic, that means the rise and fall of the sea level is the result of glacier growth or melting, mkay? Uh, 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, um, and, uh, so y- I mean, this is... I, I've got so much here, I'm just gonna grab a couple of these things here. Yeah. So, they, they dug up these cobbles, which are, uh, the cobbles are, um... So, a cobble is basically a stone or anything that's lithified that's roughly between, um, a pebble, a pebble and a boulder. A boulder, when you get, I think, to 11 inches about, about the size of a volleyball, now you're in the realm of boulders. A cobble is in between pebbles and boulders. You know, like, you've heard of cobblestone streets-

Joe Rogan 46:59 Mm-hmm, yeah.

Randall Carlson 47:00 ... you know, they're fist-sized rocks, basically. So, so they say here, "The Atlantis cruiser and great meteor seamounts rise from a broad ridge or plateau which extends from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge..." Blah, blah, blah. Let's see, um, so about a ton of flat pteropod limestone cobbles was dredged from the summit area of one of these sunken mo- 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, 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.

Joe Rogan 48:05 Wow.

Randall Carlson 48:07 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.

Joe Rogan 48:17 Mm.

Randall Carlson 48:18 But yeah, basically... Now, this doesn't prove that there was any civilization here, 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.

Joe Rogan 48:31 Does it coincide with Plato's account of trade and of travel and of the way...

Randall Carlson 48:38 Well, we have no way of knowing. See, now there we have to make a leap of faith, which is this. If... And, and if we look right here, you'll see, uh...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 pseudoscientific 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.

Joe Rogan 49:53 And what would be the reason why they would go there? Like, what was so exceptional, supposedly, about Atlantis?

Randall Carlson 49:58 Well, I'll show you one thing-

Joe Rogan 49:59 Was it it was a hub of trade? It was supposed to be a very advanced civi- city, right?

Randall Carlson 50:04 Well, advanced in the standpoint that, yes, it was engaged in, in trade. It was, uh, it was, had a- a- a- it was, um, you know, had a, a, a broad net of, 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. Um, in the present-day North Atlantic Ocean, the boundary between the subtropical and subpolar gyres runs southeast, south- southwest to northeast from Hadrus 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.

Joe Rogan 50:56 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 50:57 So, if you were gonna try to, try to, uh, you know, uh, theorize or hypothesize an ideal climate during the Ice Age, there it is right there.

Joe Rogan 51:08 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 51:10 You see?

Joe Rogan 51:11 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 51:11 That Gulf Stream, you know, it's the Gulf Stream now that is why you have, you know, warmth-

Joe Rogan 51:16 Right.

Randall Carlson 51:16 ... basically in the UK, right?

Joe Rogan 51:18 And, and is there any physical evidence other than the, the cobblestones or anything? Yeah?

Randall Carlson 51:25 Plant remains.

Joe Rogan 51:26 Plant remains?

Randall Carlson 51:26 Dredged, dredged-up plant remains, yes.

Joe Rogan 51:29 Whoa.

Randall Carlson 51:29 Yeah, yeah. Plant remains that would have been growing, you know, in a climate un- you know, not consistent with, with the Ice Ages.

Joe Rogan 51:38 What about re- anything that would indicate human settlement?

Randall Carlson 51:42 No, not yet. Although I've heard some things, I haven't seen confirmation. I think it's gonna take submersible.

Joe Rogan 51:51 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 51:52 You know, we're just at the very beginnings of, of submarine archeology.

Joe Rogan 51:55 And how deep is this area again?

Randall Carlson 51:57 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.

Joe Rogan 52:12 So, that's where all the action would be.

Randall Carlson 52:15 Most likely, yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 52:18 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-

Randall Carlson 52:28 Well, I-

Joe Rogan 52:28 ... to find some physical evidence?

Randall Carlson 52:29 Not yet, but I was thinking, Joe, that-

Joe Rogan 52:31 You and I?

Randall Carlson 52:32 ... you and I-

Joe Rogan 52:32 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 52:33 ... could see what-

Joe Rogan 52:34 Okay.

Randall Carlson 52:34 You ready to take a ride?

Joe Rogan 52:36 Well, do you know James Cameron? Maybe we could borrow his submarine.

Randall Carlson 52:38 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-

Joe Rogan 52:45 Really?

Randall Carlson 52:45 ... because I don't like to count chickens. You know what I'm saying?

Joe Rogan 52:47 I get it.

Randall Carlson 52:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:49 James Cameron, if you're out there, I'm with you, brother.

Randall Carlson 52:51 Yeah, yeah. When we're not-

Joe Rogan 52:54 Let's go find it.

Randall Carlson 52:54 When we're not recording, I'll-

Joe Rogan 52:55 That guy's a wild man. He, he-

Randall Carlson 52:57 I know.

Joe Rogan 52:57 Literally, I mean, he's... First of all, he's one of the most successful movie pro- producers in the history of the human race, right?

Randall Carlson 53:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:03 But yet he's so crazy, he gets in a submarine and goes to the bottom of the fucking ocean.

Randall Carlson 53:09 Right. See, and here's the thing. Y- you know, you gotta th- And, and a lot of what I'm docu- uh, documenting here is how catastrophic some of these events were.

Joe Rogan 53:18 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 53:19 I mean, you would have had massive tsunamis that would have affected everything.

Joe Rogan 53:23 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 53:23 You know? And like Plato says, Atlantis subsided beneath the waves because of a great earthquake. And we can actually show now that, um, that there is evidence of massive traumatic seismic events along the mid- Atlantic ridge coincident with the rapid rise of sea level.

Joe Rogan 53:45 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 53:46 So, a lot of the pieces fit together. Um, 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.

Joe Rogan 53:56 Like, all they would need is some pottery, right? All they would need is something.

Randall Carlson 54:00 My guess is that whether it's lo- to be taken literally or not, Plato's description of the infrastructure, I would think that the infrastructure, the multi-ring, if that was real and not just metaphorical, um, that that's kind of what you would look for.

Joe Rogan 54:17 Some of it.

Randall Carlson 54:18 Yeah. In other words, I mean, we do know that these ancient peoples, you know, just from historical times, where, you know, and this is what Graham documents from all over the world, these people had extraordinary engineering skill.

Joe Rogan 54:30 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 54:31 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, um, 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 gotta do it manually. So I'm doing that and then I'm often thinking, "Wait a second, what if I'm gonna do 2.3 million (laughs) stones that weigh this much?"

Joe Rogan 55:03 Right. Like the temple, like, uh, Giza?

Randall Carlson 55:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:06 They would. Yeah.

Randall Carlson 55:06 I mean, that's a hell of a lot of-

Joe Rogan 55:08 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 55:08 ... work and social organization that's required.

Joe Rogan 55:11 And math.

Randall Carlson 55:12 Yeah. And, hey, uh, does it make sense that you've got these kinds of, uh, undertakings, uh, you know, by, by people that were just a generation or two before subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers? Uh, I, I just have a hard time with that.

Joe Rogan 55:30 It's, it's definitely interesting.

Randall Carlson 55:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:32 You know? It, it, it, it's, 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.

Randall Carlson 55:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 55:46 Egypt was thriving, uh, and making construction on a scale-

Randall Carlson 55:51 Yes.

Joe Rogan 55:51 ... that we... that boggles the mind today.

Randall Carlson 55:53 And, and we've seen even in recent times, you know, higher advanced technological cultures living side by side with basically Stone Age cultures.

Joe Rogan 56:00 Yes. Yes.

Randall Carlson 56:01 And if we were to... if this planet was be, subjected to some of the kinds of events like the Younger Dryas event, there would be abs- really no trace in 10,000 years-

Joe Rogan 56:12 Right.

Randall Carlson 56:13 ... of our presence here, other than the Stone Age material.

Joe Rogan 56:17 Right. Like, all of our hard drives, all of our phones will all be deteriorated and disappear.

Randall Carlson 56:21 Right. All plastic is gone.

Joe Rogan 56:22 Yeah. Gone. Everything's gone.

Randall Carlson 56:24 Gone. Cars, gone.

Joe Rogan 56:25 I was trying to have a conversation with my kids about this. We, we were talking about books and, uh, how even books are going away, and books are becoming hard drives.

Randall Carlson 56:34 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:35 And, and I'm saying, "Do you know, like, if something happened, everything we know would be gone so quickly?"

Randall Carlson 56:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:42 It's a real problem because it's so convenient to ke- like, uh, I have, my phone has a terabyte of data on it, which is astounding.

Randall Carlson 56:50 I know.

Joe Rogan 56:51 It's astounding that you could have that much data on your phone. But if that phone dies, all that stuff's gone. So-

Randall Carlson 56:59 All of that stuff is gone, yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:00 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-

Randall Carlson 57:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:13 ... Indonesia-

Randall Carlson 57:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:14 ... and about how 74,000 years ago, it knocked the human race down to a few thousand people.

Randall Carlson 57:18 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 57:19 That's... Uh, we saw... I'm sure you saw it 'cause I thought of you when it happened. I saw that, um, volcano that had en- errupted in the middle of the ocean-

Randall Carlson 57:26 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 57:26 ... when you could see it from space.

Randall Carlson 57:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:26 Fascinating, fascinating eruption.

Randall Carlson 57:26 (laughs) And here's the thing, Joe. I mean, if we were to have, like, if you go back to 18... You heard the year, about the year without a summer, 1816?

Joe Rogan 57:26 No.

Randall Carlson 57:26 Tambora plus several other unknown volcanoes erupted within about a five-year span. Tambora was the big one, Indonesia, and it disgorged huge amounts of ash and, and, and fine sediment into the atmosphere, which circled the globe and basically, the summer of 18... This was in 1815. The following summer, there was basically no summer. They, they were having Fourth of July, uh, commemoration in I- in, erupted in the middle of the ocean when you could see it from space. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:28 Fascinating, fascinating eruption.

Randall Carlson 57:31 And here's the thing, Joe. I mean, if we were to have, like, if you go back to 18... You heard the year, uh, about the year without a summer, 1816?

Joe Rogan 57:41 No.

Randall Carlson 57:41 Tambora plus several other unknown volcanoes erupted within about a five-year span. Tambora was the big one, Indonesia, and it disgorged huge amounts of ash and, and, and fine sediment into the atmosphere, which circled the globe, and basically, the summer of 18... This was in 1815. The following summer, there was basically no summer. They, they were having Fourth of July, uh, commemoration in I- in New England and it was snowing out.

Joe Rogan 58:17 Wow.

Randall Carlson 58:17 Fourth of July. And this has been referred to as the last great subsistence crisis of Western civilization because there was famine, because you had, uh, agricultural failures. So you have this, this, this, this thing that you can begin to, to, to track now where you have primarily cold that's brought about by, I think, primarily volcanism is gonna be the, the, the, the, uh, the m- the main instigator of this. But also I think velo-

Randall Carlson 58:48 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?

Joe Rogan 59:17 Sure. Yeah.

Randall Carlson 59:18 So, s-

Joe Rogan 59:18 That's the one over Siberia.

Randall Carlson 59:20 Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:20 It impacted, uh, in the sky above-

Randall Carlson 59:23 Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:23 ... the forest and flattened-

Randall Carlson 59:25 Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:25 ... massive amounts of trees. Yeah.

Randall Carlson 59:26 Massive. Yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:27 That was one that, uh, erroneously they, they'd, uh, associated with Tesla for some reason. They thought that Tesla was doing something wacky.

Randall Carlson 59:33 No.

Joe Rogan 59:34 Yeah. Well, that's the tinfoil hat brigade.

Randall Carlson 59:36 No, the evidence to me suggests very strongly that it was a-

Joe Rogan 59:39 Impact.

Randall Carlson 59:39 ... piece of the Taurid meteor stream-

Joe Rogan 59:42 Oh.

Randall Carlson 59:42 ... which was a byproduct of disintegration of Comet Encke, which was in turn... And this gets us back to the British neocatastrophists.

Joe Rogan 59:50 Is Encke named after the Sumerian Enki?

Randall Carlson 59:52 No. Uh, I think it was named after, uh, uh, an astronomer who discovered it. Most comets are named after whoever discovers them.

Joe Rogan 59:59 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 59:59 So, and it's spelled a little different. E-N-C-K-E as opposed to E-N-K-I. But coincidence though, Encke.

Joe Rogan 1:00:08 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 1:00:08 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.

Joe Rogan 1:00:20 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 1:00:21 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.

Joe Rogan 1:01:23 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 1:01:23 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."

Joe Rogan 1:03:32 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 1:03:33 And I could certainly pull up some stuff like that to look at. I thought really quickly since... before we leave the Atlantis thing, um, couple of the things this... there is... so now Solon is in Egypt, Sais, 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, uh, '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.'"

Joe Rogan 1:04:31 Wow.

Randall Carlson 1:04:31 "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, the... 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 body circulating in the heavens, they decline or they descend to earth and they set th- the earth on fire." So he's describing right there, you see-

Joe Rogan 1:05:30 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:05:30 ... this whole phenomen- and making it clear that there's more dimensions to what we think of as myths than just some mere fanciful superstitious, you know, concoction to try to explain the unknown, that there really is something going on behind there. That's, to me, really, uh, significant.

Joe Rogan 1:05:49 It's really fascinating too when he's talking about how there's no old science and that everyone is young and he's... i- it's, 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-

Randall Carlson 1:06:12 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:12 ... of... on, on... a relatively simplistic understanding of, of the sky, of, of asteroids, of volcanoes, of all these different things.

Randall Carlson 1:06:21 All these things, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:22 Yeah, but, but the way they're describing it coincides... once you have modern knowledge and understanding of these things, you go, "I s- I think I see what they're trying to say." That is so interesting.

Randall Carlson 1:06:33 Yeah. Isn't it though?

Joe Rogan 1:06:34 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:06:34 I mean, because Dorothy Vitaliano, who was a, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, geologist back... I think she died in the early '90s. She was one of the... in the forerunners of looking into the Atlantis thing and deciding that it was... uh, that it was a... that it was just a, a myth, that it was made up. Of course sh- when she w- was looking at this back in the '70s she didn't have access to the data that we now have, okay? 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, 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, s- you know, causing destruction on the-

Joe Rogan 1:07:30 Ugh.

Randall Carlson 1:07:30 ... Earth. And Plato was saying, (clears throat) "This is not just a myth."

Joe Rogan 1:07:34 Right.

Randall Carlson 1:07:34 "It's literal."

Joe Rogan 1:07:35 Wow.

Randall Carlson 1:07:35 You know? It really represents...

Joe Rogan 1:07:38 Completely makes sense.

Randall Carlson 1:07:39 Yeah. And then he goes on to say, um, "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."

Joe Rogan 1:07:51 Mm.

Randall Carlson 1:07:52 "Whereas you and other nations are just being provided with letters and other requisites of civiliza- 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 you'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 s- oversimplify it and say, "Well, you had just one o- object coming in that, uh, that can't explain it," all right? But the ideas, the s- the models that have evolved, there's not just a single event, but multiple events. Almost like, again, back to the British neo-catastrophists, the idea of sort of a, of a, of an impact epoch, which has to do with meteor streams will precess. They will move. So there'll 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 know, you're all by yourself, you're listening to some tunes, you're kicked back, there's nobody else on the road. So, you know, it's relaxed, you're not paying a lot of attention, right? You're, you're, you're 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 gonna increase by several orders of magnitude.

Joe Rogan 1:09:33 Oh.

Randall Carlson 1:09:33 Now to take the analogy further, you'll know that sometimes there might... If, if it's 3:00 AM, maybe your probabilities are low. If it's 5:00 PM 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, 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'll be times of the year or times w- within, say, a millennia, where you may have the Earth intersecting that meteor stream in a much more denser part than, than o- other centuries. During that period you're gonna have an increased probability of something happening. And I think this is the, the model that's emerging now, that we, we're, we're realizing that, that the s- structure of space i- in Earth's vicinity is a whole lot more complex than we had previously even imagined a generation ago.

Joe Rogan 1:10:37 It completely makes sense, but it is horrific to think that the history of the human race and its survival is dependent upon, in a lot of ways, luck.

Randall Carlson 1:10:47 It is. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought I would run through this just... I call this Close Encounters, not... This is not by any means comprehensive, but I've been tracking this shit for decades now. So I call this Close Encounters, and we'll just... I'm just gonna go through very fast just to give the impression of what we're talking about here.

Joe Rogan 1:11:08 Okay.

Randall Carlson 1:11:09 Okay. We started out, uh, yeah, this 88, that's when I started tracking this stuff.

Joe Rogan 1:11:14 1988?

Randall Carlson 1:11:15 Yeah. March 23rd, 1988, W- we... Earth just dodges big asteroid. Now we'll just go through and you can see. 1989, (clears throat) giant asteroid makes close pass by Earth. 1991, near miss of Earth by small asteroid. Now, of course, a small asteroid can still do a hell of a lot of damage. Tunguska was a small asteroid. 1994, (clears throat) asteroid comes within 65,000 miles of Earth. '96, it was a close call for planet Earth. (clears throat) 2000, study raises number of dangerous asteroids. Later in that year, asteroid estimates too low. Asteroid makes close approach. Scientists worry over asteroids. Huge asteroid nearly misses Earth January 7th, 2002. January 7th, large asteroid passes close to Earth.

Joe Rogan 1:12:07 Oh, an asteroid large enough to wipe out France-

Randall Carlson 1:12:10 (clears throat) Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:12:10 ... will just pass Earth at a distance of a half a million miles, so that's twice the distance to the moon.

Randall Carlson 1:12:17 "Had it been on a collision course, it would have created one of the great... one of the worst disasters in human history," said Stephen Pravdo, the NEAT project manager at NASA's-

Joe Rogan 1:12:26 Wow.

Randall Carlson 1:12:26 ... Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Joe Rogan 1:12:27 And this is just 2002.

Randall Carlson 1:12:28 Yup.

Joe Rogan 1:12:29 Had it hit.

Randall Carlson 1:12:30 Yeah. March 8th, you know, an ar-

Joe Rogan 1:12:33 Another one.

Randall Carlson 1:12:34 ... an asteroid large enough to have flattened a city buzzed Earth earlier this month and was not seen until after it flew harmlessly by.

Joe Rogan 1:12:41 Oh my god. That's the thing about the sun, right, like, that it was coming from the sun so it was coming from that same area?

Randall Carlson 1:12:46 In, in, in Tunguska, yes. Now this, uh, uh, I just... Uh, unless you're looking in the right place for it, you're not gonna necessarily see it.

Joe Rogan 1:12:54 I like the article too, Highlighting Cosmic Blind Spot.

Randall Carlson 1:12:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:59 That's a terrifying thought.

Randall Carlson 1:13:00 Yeah. And then the same year, June 14th, asteroid 2002 MN gives Earth its closest shave in years, uh, an asteroid the size of a football pitch. Well, that would be, you know, 100 yards in, in diameter, which is-... quite a bit bigger than the Tunguska.

Joe Rogan 1:13:18 That one's close, 75,000 miles.

Randall Carlson 1:13:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:21 That's really close.

Randall Carlson 1:13:22 That's really close.

Joe Rogan 1:13:23 Well inside Earth's orbit, or the moon's orbit, rather.

Randall Carlson 1:13:26 Yeah. Sa- same event. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:13:28 Asteroid the size of a football field.

Randall Carlson 1:13:30 ... August 7th, near miss asteroid whizzes past Earth. This is 800 meters wide.

Joe Rogan 1:13:35 Mm.

Randall Carlson 1:13:36 Now, that's many times bigger than the Tunguska. This, this 800 meters could wipe out an area bigger than the state of Texas.

Joe Rogan 1:13:45 (exhales)

Randall Carlson 1:13:46 And it would have global effects.

Joe Rogan 1:13:47 So, eight football fields?

Randall Carlson 1:13:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:49 And it can kill an entire state, and probably put the entire Earth-

Randall Carlson 1:13:54 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:13:54 ... into some sort of a nuclear winter?

Randall Carlson 1:13:56 Yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:13:57 Here's another one.

Randall Carlson 1:13:58 2003, "Closest asteroid yet flies past Earth."

Joe Rogan 1:14:01 88,000 feet.

Randall Carlson 1:14:03 2004, January 13th, "Earth almost put on impact alert. Near miss raises rocky questions." Yes, it does. March 18th, "Asteroid soars past Earth oh so closely." 2005, February 4th, "Asteroid 2004 MNN a really near miss."

Joe Rogan 1:14:24 Mm.

Randall Carlson 1:14:25 "Comet strike surprisingly more likely."

Joe Rogan 1:14:28 So this is, we're just barely getting by.

Randall Carlson 1:14:31 We-

Joe Rogan 1:14:32 We're like a guy in an action movie where they're shooting at him and he never gets hit.

Randall Carlson 1:14:35 And he never gets hit. (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:37 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 1:14:37 Pretty much. So you can see, I'll just-

Joe Rogan 1:14:39 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:14:40 ... just keep going here.

Joe Rogan 1:14:41 Well, for-

Randall Carlson 1:14:42 In, in one day.

Joe Rogan 1:14:42 ... for folks that are just listening, he's highlighting article after article after article, headline after headline. "Asteroid just buzzed Earth, came closer to the, than the moon."

Randall Carlson 1:14:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:51 And then here we go in 2013.

Randall Carlson 1:14:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:54 Fly by Earth.

Randall Carlson 1:14:56 You see, we go from February 15th, now there's another one that year, September 16th. Um, that one, that one was 1300 feet in diameter. So, 10 times more diameter than Tunguska. Uh...

Joe Rogan 1:15:11 40,000 miles an hour.

Randall Carlson 1:15:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:17 (exhales)

Randall Carlson 1:15:17 Halloween asteroid resembling a skull.

Joe Rogan 1:15:19 Oh my God, it does. Look at that.

Randall Carlson 1:15:21 Yeah, doesn't it?

Joe Rogan 1:15:22 That's terrifying.

Randall Carlson 1:15:23 (laughs) In campus R.

Joe Rogan 1:15:24 To have a flying skull. So this is a very, very common thing.

Randall Carlson 1:15:29 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:15:29 And we're just getting-

Randall Carlson 1:15:30 And it just...

Joe Rogan 1:15:30 Oh my God, 27,000 miles?

Randall Carlson 1:15:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:33 One-eighth the distance between the Earth and the moon.

Randall Carlson 1:15:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:38 So, it's really common.

Randall Carlson 1:15:41 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:15:42 And now we're just looking at when we could record it, when they can track it and measure it, which is within the last 100 years or so.

Randall Carlson 1:15:50 Last 25 or 30 years.

Joe Rogan 1:15:51 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:15:52 Really?

Joe Rogan 1:15:52 So, with this taken into consideration, and then you go back, you know, 11,000, 12,000 plus years, the amount of times that this has happened has probably been just off the charts.

Randall Carlson 1:16:06 Hundreds of times. Hundreds of times. Yeah. Here we go.

Joe Rogan 1:16:12 Snuck up on us. "Scientists stunned by 'city killer' asteroid that just missed Earth." City killer initially, but probably kill a whole lot more afterwards.

Randall Carlson 1:16:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:20 We were talking about Tonga earlier, um, the, the volcano that killed most people.

Randall Carlson 1:16:27 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:16:27 It got the human race down to a few thousand-

Randall Carlson 1:16:29 Toba.

Joe Rogan 1:16:29 Pe- excuse me, Toba.

Randall Carlson 1:16:31 Yeah, 74,000. Right?

Joe Rogan 1:16:32 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:16:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:33 Well, 74,000 years ago.

Randall Carlson 1:16:34 Go, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:34 I think it got people down to a few thousand. They don't really know how many, but-

Randall Carlson 1:16:38 Right. Genetic bottleneck.

Joe Rogan 1:16:40 But it's the same sort of effect, right? Because of the volcano spraying ash into the sky.

Randall Carlson 1:16:45 Yes. Uh, uh, volcanic winter would be very similar to an impact winter.

Joe Rogan 1:16:51 (exhales)

Randall Carlson 1:16:51 Very much so.

Joe Rogan 1:16:54 So this is, it's astonishingly, astonishingly common.

Randall Carlson 1:16:59 Yes. But-

Joe Rogan 1:17:02 600 miles in diameter? Oh, Jesus.

Randall Carlson 1:17:05 Four asteroids are buzzing the Earth in flybys today.

Joe Rogan 1:17:09 Three of them were discovered within the last 24 hours. This is 2019.

Randall Carlson 1:17:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:14 Wow. So it's, it's actually possible that something is headed our way right now and we don't even know about it?

Randall Carlson 1:17:22 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, uh, 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. So yeah, it, the, there... Yeah, so look at this.

Joe Rogan 1:17:57 "2,000 feet wide whiz past our planet tomorrow." And this is 2019.

Randall Carlson 1:18:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:04 NASA admits we're not going to know when a space rock flies at Earth. The, there's the other, there's a problem also with the gravity of the sun, correct? Like they don't quite see things that are headed our way just because of the mass of the sun, the way it affects...

Randall Carlson 1:18:18 Yeah. And what we're talking about with the Tunguska is that, you know, if, 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.

Joe Rogan 1:18:35 (exhales)

Randall Carlson 1:18:35 So it's gonna, it, it'd be very easy to...

Joe Rogan 1:18:38 Very easy to miss.

Randall Carlson 1:18:40 So here we go, "In 2020, biggest asteroid to pass close and undetected this year."

Joe Rogan 1:18:48 "Biggest asteroid of 2021 is going to zoom past Earth tonight, flying as fast as 100,000 kilometers per hour."

Randall Carlson 1:18:55 That's 60,000 miles per hour. 60,000 miles per hour.

Joe Rogan 1:19:00 (exhales) "Huge asteroid to pass Earth," and this is-

Randall Carlson 1:19:02 Look at the date on there.

Joe Rogan 1:19:03 ... 2021, 12/8. Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:19:05 That was just not even two months ago.

Joe Rogan 1:19:08 Yeah. One that's 850 feet wide. "NASA asteroid warning, Eiffel Tower sized asteroid narrowly missed Earth in December." Jeez.... asteroid, this is January 11th, it's a couple of weeks ago.

Randall Carlson 1:19:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:26 January 11th, an asteroid estimated to be a kilometer wide will pass Earth on January 18th. It will pass within 1.2 million miles of our planet.

Randall Carlson 1:19:38 Which is far enough that we're completely safe. But see-

Joe Rogan 1:19:41 Sort of. (laughs)

Randall Carlson 1:19:42 ... 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 realize that there's all kinds of cosmic beasts-

Joe Rogan 1:19:53 Right.

Randall Carlson 1:19:53 ... that live in the space that we inhabit.

Joe Rogan 1:19:56 Yeah, because that 1.2 million miles is far, but it's not if you think about how vast space is.

Randall Carlson 1:20:03 Right. Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:20:06 Oh, boy.

Randall Carlson 1:20:07 S- yeah. And there you can see-

Joe Rogan 1:20:09 You-

Randall Carlson 1:20:09 ... from this graph-

Joe Rogan 1:20:10 Okay, look at this chart. Now, this chart's terrifying. Near-Earth asteroid discoveries, and then you look at the difference between 1980, where we had very little understanding of this, and 2022. Well, this is, this goes to 2020, I guess, was the end of the chart?

Randall Carlson 1:20:24 Around 2020, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:20:26 So at the end of the chart-

Randall Carlson 1:20:26 Little, probably more like 2018, I think, when this chart was done.

Joe Rogan 1:20:30 And because of s- scientific discoveries and, uh, uh, th- the ability to measure, it's off the charts.

Randall Carlson 1:20:37 Mm-hmm, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:20:38 It's crazy.

Randall Carlson 1:20:39 It is.

Joe Rogan 1:20:40 Oh my God. $5 billion asteroid. So, uh, what, what is in, in this asteroid? What is it-

Randall Carlson 1:20:47 Well, they got all kinds of-

Joe Rogan 1:20:49 Rare metals?

Randall Carlson 1:20:49 ... precious metals in 'em.

Joe Rogan 1:20:50 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:20:51 Which is very interesting 'cause that opens up some, some possibilities for the future, if we, the human species, are up to it.

Joe Rogan 1:20:59 If we can figure out how to mine them?

Randall Carlson 1:21:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:01 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:21:02 And there's, there's companies already forming around this idea. I wouldn't be surprised if Elon is thinking along these lines.

Joe Rogan 1:21:09 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?

Randall Carlson 1:21:23 At this point, we're not.

Joe Rogan 1:21:25 We're just not.

Randall Carlson 1:21:25 We're not. We're sitting ducks. We're, we're screwed.

Joe Rogan 1:21:31 Ugh.

Randall Carlson 1:21:32 We're screwed. So-

Joe Rogan 1:21:34 Do you have canned food in your house?

Randall Carlson 1:21:35 (laughs) Yeah, I got about six months' worth.

Joe Rogan 1:21:38 Do you?

Randall Carlson 1:21:38 I do, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:40 Phew. That's not quite enough, is it?

Randall Carlson 1:21:43 Probably not. It could... yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:44 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 1:21:44 Because really, we've got about six months' worth of food before our food starts running out.

Joe Rogan 1:21:50 And for the world?

Randall Carlson 1:21:51 For the world.

Joe Rogan 1:21:52 Yeah.

Randall Carlson 1:21:52 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.

Joe Rogan 1:22:06 (sighs)

Randall Carlson 1:22:06 That's not an exaggeration. So-

Joe Rogan 1:22:10 Well, also you have to deal with the, the mammals dying as well, right? 'Cause they're gonna be without food.

Randall Carlson 1:22:16 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.

Joe Rogan 1:24:30 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.

Randall Carlson 1:24:42 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.

Joe Rogan 1:24:52 And they found-

Randall Carlson 1:24:53 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 1:24:53 ... large populations of them that seem to have died at the same time.

Randall Carlson 1:24:57 Yeah, mass death, mass mortality events. Um, you know, yeah. That's-

Joe Rogan 1:25:03 You showed some images (thumping) also of what it looks like mammoths with broken legs-

Randall Carlson 1:25:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:25:08 ... that, that look like they'd just been blown away by an impact.

Randall Carlson 1:25:12 Could have been.

Joe Rogan 1:25:13 Or-

Randall Carlson 1:25:13 Could have been.

Joe Rogan 1:25:13 Or the, the-

Randall Carlson 1:25:14 Something-

Joe Rogan 1:25:15 ... r-

Randall Carlson 1:25:15 Like the, the Beresovka mammoth, I think that's the one I showed-

Joe Rogan 1:25:18 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 1:25:18 ... which was, um, a mammoth that was frozen in the permafrost and was a partic- I think 1901 was a particularly warm year that year in, 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 a six, 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? That's, that's where it gets the... That's the conundrum.

Joe Rogan 1:26:08 And a six-ton mammoth that had just been eating flowering plants.

Randall Carlson 1:26:11 Yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:26:12 Which is crazy.

Randall Carlson 1:26:13 That's crazy. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:26:14 So something had to happen. Horrific.

Randall Carlson 1:26:16 Something had to happen. Yeah. Something happened.

Joe Rogan 1:26:18 And quickly.

Randall Carlson 1:26:19 And quickly. And this poor woolly mammoth got buried and got frozen. And we know he got buried quick because he had an erect penis.

Joe Rogan 1:26:28 Hi.

Randall Carlson 1:26:29 (laughs) Well, because that was-

Joe Rogan 1:26:31 (laughs)

Randall Carlson 1:26:31 ... that's what happens when you suffocate.

Joe Rogan 1:26:33 Oh, wow.

Randall Carlson 1:26:34 Yeah. Like, suddenly entombed.

Joe Rogan 1:26:37 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 1:26:37 And his whole body is now under pressure, see? So, um, yeah. Very interesting conundrum.

Joe Rogan 1:26:44 Uh.

Randall Carlson 1:26:44 There's a lot of those conundrums that are not readily explained through gradualistic scenarios.

Joe Rogan 1:26:50 Have you had a conversation with someone who's a Blitzkrieg hypothesis, who is of the opinion that the, the vast number of these Native American animals, North American animals, rather-

Randall Carlson 1:27:01 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, uh, 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 range from five to 10 million. The estimates that I've seen for the number of mammoths inhabiting the Earth was about 12 million. So you got at least one mammoth for every man, woman and child, a- at least one of the conventional interpretations-

Joe Rogan 1:28:01 Mm-hmm.

Randall Carlson 1:28:02 ... on