Joe Rogan Experience #1897 - Graham Hancock & Randall Carlson
Joe Rogan (host), Randall Carlson (guest), Narrator, Graham Hancock (guest), Guest (Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson, brief clip/voiceover) (guest), Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Joe Rogan and Randall Carlson, Joe Rogan Experience #1897 - Graham Hancock & Randall Carlson explores ancient cataclysms, lost civilizations, and forbidden technologies reexamined today Joe Rogan hosts Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson to discuss Hancock’s Netflix series *Ancient Apocalypse*, which argues that a sophisticated Ice Age civilization was destroyed by a series of cataclysmic events, especially the Younger Dryas comet impacts. They describe geological and archaeological evidence—such as massive flood features, ancient megaliths, underground cities, star-aligned monuments, and sunken structures—that they believe mainstream academia misdates or dismisses.
Ancient cataclysms, lost civilizations, and forbidden technologies reexamined today
Joe Rogan hosts Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson to discuss Hancock’s Netflix series *Ancient Apocalypse*, which argues that a sophisticated Ice Age civilization was destroyed by a series of cataclysmic events, especially the Younger Dryas comet impacts. They describe geological and archaeological evidence—such as massive flood features, ancient megaliths, underground cities, star-aligned monuments, and sunken structures—that they believe mainstream academia misdates or dismisses.
Carlson details catastrophic flood geomorphology in North America and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, while Hancock connects these events to abrupt climate shifts, mass extinctions, sea-level rise, and myths like Atlantis, suggesting a global prehistoric civilization whose survivors seeded later cultures like Göbekli Tepe and Egypt.
They heavily criticize academic gatekeeping and ‘cancel culture’ within archaeology, arguing that institutions protect outdated paradigms and suppress dissenting views, while alternative researchers, independent scientists, and new tools like LiDAR and ice-core analysis are opening cracks in the orthodox narrative.
The conversation also links ancient civilizations to psychedelics, altered states, and non-conventional technologies—ranging from shamanic knowledge and DMT research to claimed modern rediscoveries of resonance-based, Tesla-inspired energy systems—framing this era as a paradigm shift in how we understand history, consciousness, and planetary risk.
Key Takeaways
The Younger Dryas era likely involved multiple large cosmic impacts that reshaped Earth.
Carlson and Hancock describe layered worldwide evidence—nanodiamonds, melt-glass, iridium, massive flood channels, and abrupt climate shifts—consistent with fragments of a disintegrating comet striking or air-bursting over ice sheets 12,800–11,600 years ago, causing megafloods, extinctions, and dramatic sea-level rise.
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Our current archaeological timeline for civilization may be far too short.
Göbekli Tepe (c. ...
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Many key landscapes for ancient civilizations remain barely investigated.
Hancock highlights that vast zones like the Amazon (5+ million km²), submerged continental shelves (~27 million km²), and the Sahara are largely unexamined archaeologically, even as LiDAR and sonar already reveal geoglyphs, pyramids, and urban layouts, suggesting our global prehistory is radically incomplete.
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Academic conservatism and reputational risk slow acceptance of disruptive evidence.
Examples like the Clovis-first dogma, Robert Schoch’s Sphinx weathering data, pre-Clovis North American sites, and bans on Hancock filming at Serpent Mound illustrate how careers, textbooks, and institutional authority incentivize resisting or marginalizing inconvenient findings rather than testing them openly.
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Myths and ancient maps may encode real memories of Ice Age geography and disasters.
They link Plato’s Atlantis date (11,600 years ago) and worldwide flood myths to known meltwater pulses, and point to early modern maps (Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus) that appear to depict Ice Age shorelines like the Grand Bahama Bank and Antarctica, arguing these could derive from much older, now-lost charts.
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Psychedelics and altered states may have been foundational to early civilizations and religions.
The guests connect Egyptian blue lotus, DMT-rich acacia, Greek mystery rites, and Amazonian ayahuasca to the genesis of religious experience and knowledge systems, suggesting that shamanic science and entity encounters shaped early ‘lost’ civilizations and that modern clinical research is rediscovering their power.
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Preparing for cosmic hazards is technically possible but politically neglected.
The Taurid meteor stream still intersects Earth’s orbit twice yearly, contains hundreds of kilometer-scale objects, and has produced events like Tunguska; yet space agencies focus little on it, even though recent missions (like DART) show we can nudge dangerous bodies if we choose to coordinate and invest.
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Notable Quotes
“I'm trying to overthrow the paradigm of history.”
— Graham Hancock
“Once we take this into account, the whole story of history is going to change completely.”
— Randall Carlson
“Our past belongs to us. It belongs to all of us. And everybody, whether they're an academic or whether they're a man in the street, they've got something to contribute to the idea of our past.”
— Graham Hancock
“If there was an ancient technology, it should be possible to recover it.”
— Randall Carlson
“We live in a hazardous cosmic environment. It just happens that we live at a time in the human story where if we chose to do so, we could actually do something about it.”
— Graham Hancock
Questions Answered in This Episode
If the Younger Dryas impact evidence is as strong as claimed, what specific data or tests would finally convince mainstream skeptics—or definitively falsify the hypothesis?
Joe Rogan hosts Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson to discuss Hancock’s Netflix series *Ancient Apocalypse*, which argues that a sophisticated Ice Age civilization was destroyed by a series of cataclysmic events, especially the Younger Dryas comet impacts. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How do we reliably distinguish between intentional ancient engineering (e.g., Bimini Road, Serpent Mound alignment) and coincidental natural formations or chance alignments?
Carlson details catastrophic flood geomorphology in North America and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, while Hancock connects these events to abrupt climate shifts, mass extinctions, sea-level rise, and myths like Atlantis, suggesting a global prehistoric civilization whose survivors seeded later cultures like Göbekli Tepe and Egypt.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What would a rigorous, large-scale research program in the Amazon, submerged coastlines, and the Sahara need to look like to fairly test the ‘lost civilization’ model?
They heavily criticize academic gatekeeping and ‘cancel culture’ within archaeology, arguing that institutions protect outdated paradigms and suppress dissenting views, while alternative researchers, independent scientists, and new tools like LiDAR and ice-core analysis are opening cracks in the orthodox narrative.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should modern science integrate subjective but repeatable psychedelic entity encounters and DMT-realm reports into a testable framework about consciousness and alternate realities?
The conversation also links ancient civilizations to psychedelics, altered states, and non-conventional technologies—ranging from shamanic knowledge and DMT research to claimed modern rediscoveries of resonance-based, Tesla-inspired energy systems—framing this era as a paradigm shift in how we understand history, consciousness, and planetary risk.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If resonance-based or ‘forbidden’ energy technologies truly exist or are rediscovered, what mechanisms could prevent their suppression or monopolization and ensure they benefit humanity broadly?
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Transcript Preview
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)
These are some of my all-time favorite podcasts. I just have to tell you. I'm so excited to have you guys in today. I really was. All weekend, I was giddy.
(laughs)
I was giddy thinking about today. So congratulations on the Netflix series. I am super excited to, first of all, to have that on a mainstream platform-
Yeah.
... is such a huge victory for you. So-
Thank you.
(claps) Congratulations to you.
Thank you.
It's all turning in both of your way. I mean-
Yeah.
... there was so much skepticism, uh, just years ago, but now it seems like with-
Yeah.
And even Michael Shermer. You were showing me, uh, something that he tweeted today.
Yeah. Well, no. He tweeted it a while ago, but-
Oh, okay.
But, uh, you know, he, he walked back on, on some of his crit- criticisms of, of our work, and-
It was in light of new evidence-
Yes.
... of the Younger Dryas impact theory.
Exactly. Exactly. No, it's been a, it's been a, a major challenge getting this show, getting this show done, but, uh, it, it's the first time I think that these radical ideas have got onto a major platform, um, and, um, the whole, the whole focus of the thing is summed up in the title of the show, Ancient Apocalypse, because we had an incredible apocalypse that hit this planet, and it wasn't just one moment. It was 1,200 years of hell on Earth between roughly 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
Wow.
And, and that is not taken into account by mainstream historians and archeologists. Something that really changed the world needs to be taken into account if we're claiming to have a full knowledge of the past of humanity. And so I'm just really glad that, that Netflix have taken this show on and they're gonna blast it out to a worldwide audience, and, and hopefully that will begin to put more pressure on the academics, who, frankly, I'm not a conspiracist, but they do act as gatekeepers as to what may be allowed out in front of the public and what may be not allowed.
Yes.
Like-
And that seems to be because of the books they've written, the lectures they've given, that they've given all these lectures and they've written all these books that have theories that are outdated, and they don't wanna let those theories go in light of the new evidence. They, they wanna push back as much as possible-
Yeah.
... because it, frankly, weakens their credibility as the arbiters of the truth.
Yeah. I think that's, I think that's the issue, but it's, uh, uh, really some quite sinister things have, have happened, uh, be- you know, because of this show. I got banned from Egypt. Uh, they just... That's the very clever way for archeologists to make sure that no criticism can come, can come in of their sites is just to, of their take on things, is just to ban the critic from, from coming there. I got banned from Serpent Mound in Ohio. Can you imagine that? I mean, Serpent Mound is a national landmark. People should not get banned from, from, from going there.
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