Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 71: Bullshit Apocalypse w/ Dr. Andrew White!

Transcript

Episode 71: Bullshit Apocalypse w/ Dr. Andrew White! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantis, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we help to combat the spread of disinformation about these very topics.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: My co-host, Dr.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: Ruben Ariano Tlacateca, could not be with us today because apparently he has better things going on.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: No, he's uh he's in the middle of some uh important work, and so I wish him the best and he will be sorely missed.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: But, dear listeners, joining us today, we have special guest, Dr.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Andrew White.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_03: Andrew White is an anthropological archaeologist with interests in hunter-gatherers, lithic technology, human evolution, and complex systems theory.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: He is particularly interested in combining archaeological methods and theory with ethnographic data and computational modeling to develop new ways to push the boundaries of our understanding of the social, cultural, and evolutionary aspects of the human past.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: He has spent some time confronting pseudo-archaeological claims about the human past and feels that other professional archaeologists should do the same.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: And I agree.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: So, welcome, Andrew, to the show.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's nice to have you.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, thank you for having me.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_04: That was easily the most dramatic reading of my bio that I have ever heard, and I would like to invite you to uh introduce me at the next conference where I speak.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: We'll see.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: We'll see you in Denver at the SAAs.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: Are you going to the SAAs?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_04: They're too expensive.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, like I I I can I've been to them a few times when I've had support from wherever I was working or when they've been close geographically, but they are so expensive.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_04: They have them in expensive cities at expensive hotels, and uh so no, probably not unless I get a really, really sweet invitation.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: Because I do CRM archaeology, so we have to maintain a level of um continuing ed credits.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: And if you present at the SAAs, it basically covers like three years of continuing ed credits.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm usually there um being obnoxious.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's good.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_04: And does does your company support you to go do that?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: Uh no, but the podcast does.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess uh yeah, in a way, the company does.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: But not the archaeological company, no.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's that's too bad.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, CRM is such a huge part of the work that gets done uh in in this country now that it really does need to be integrated at a high level into what everybody else is doing, you know, and that that's changed a lot um in the last few decades, the whole CRM business.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what's funny is, you know, we're gonna be talking about these uh pseudo-archaeological purveyors of nonsense.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: And when I listen to them talk, I'm like, I don't think they understand what archaeology really is.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I don't think they actually know what archaeologists do or the how multifaceted the field of archaeology is and the different avenues uh that we take for our research.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: I I really don't think they have any clue.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_04: No, I I agree.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think they do.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_04: Part of that is on them, but part of that is also on us.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_04: We have a really great product um and a good story to tell, and we have not been good as a discipline of telling it, and that has left a lot of holes to be filled by people who don't know what they're talking about.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I agree.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: I think we tend to be very um inward-facing, and um you know, back in the day you you would see these uh new archaeological finds, and they would have these symposia that were open to the public, and like people would get excited because it was in the news, and you know, King Tut's tomb has been discovered, or or this and that.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: And it seemed like we were better at talking to the public at one time, and then now we've become so inward-facing, like you said, we've we've left this massive gap, and now that gap is being actively filled with bullshit and and nonsense.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, I I think we do have have a uh a role to play in that too.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_04: And and so does the media, like those stories about you know, you still see now, like these are the top ten archaeological discoveries of the last 10 years or last year, you know, when so-and-so found this tomb, those are the things that make headlines, and that's that's not anywhere near the vast majority of what archaeology is like.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_04: Those things are great, and it's nice to show like a nice picture of something cool that nobody's ever seen before, and it's exciting.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_04: But you know, most of us are just kind of like grinding it out and trying to figure out a way to answer questions that that are hard questions that we have not been able to answer for a long time, and it's not spectacular work.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_04: You know, going and digging shovel probes for waterline is not spectacular work.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_04: But it adds, you know, there's this cumulative effect, and as we move forward and and grind this out year after year, like we learn more and more, and we can we can test things and falsify things and come up with new ideas, but that's not headline material, you know, that's not gonna get clicks.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, there's there's something about the information ecosystem right now that we are not doing a good job of I think capitalizing on it.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and and it is not set up, I think, to um help people understand what it is that we really do.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_04: And that's a shame.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it it really is.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: And um, I I got turned on to your work.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: You did a video a while back on squaring the circle that I thought was really good, and how um Graham Hancock, who does that the TV show Ancient Apocalypse, and he's written a bunch of nonsensical books.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_04: What's his name?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_04: Who Graham Who?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: I I've I've taken to calling him Bland Hancock because the second I I tried watching the second season of that show, The Ancient Apocalypse, and you know, in addition to just being like bad and nonsensical, it's boring.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_04: I have not watched it yet, and of course I know who Graham Hancock is.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just kidding.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, square.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: Dear listener, if you don't know who he is, consider yourself lucky.
• 6:58
  unknown: Yeah.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_04: Squaring the Circle.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, I only paid a little bit of attention to him until he started writing about North America and South America, because that's kind of my hemisphere.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's the part of the world that I know the best.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_04: I've worked in other places, but North America is my bread and butter, especially the Eastern Woodlands.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_04: So I was interested in what he had to say about Serpent Mound and other things.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_04: And so when he was doing interviews promoting his book, America Before, which I think came out in 2019.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_04: That sounds right.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, he showed one of these geoglyphs, you know, as they are destroying the Amazon rainforest, there are all kinds of spectacular earthworks that are being seen for the first time.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_04: They're using LIDAR to find them, and it's all really cool, and it's changing our interpretations of um, you know, the cultures in that part of the world at that at that time, and there's a lot to be learned.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_04: And and again, that's not an area that I know in great detail, but like I'm impressed by what they're doing, and it's really interesting.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_04: And anyway, so he shows this picture of a geoglyph that has uh a circle, like a circular ditch and embankment inside a square.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_04: And he said, that's an example of squaring the circle, which is an which is an exercise, and I'm I'm just paraphrasing here, I can't quote him exactly.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_04: An exercise that we give to the Greeks, you know, that they figured out this complex mathematical thing.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, well, wait a second, you know, I was a pretty good geometry student.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I think I could I think I could do that without any kind of complex mathematics.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_04: And you can.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's really simple.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_04: Uh all you need is a straight edge, which you could get by two people pulling a rope, you know, you have a straight line, and then you need someplace to mark your spots, like a stake in the ground.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_04: So those things are easy to do, and and the procedure to put a square around a circle so that the edges line is really, really simple.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_04: And I demonstrated how to do it.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_04: The issue for me for him with him was that he was saying it was squaring the circle, either one, because he didn't know what squaring the circle is, which is a crazy thing because he provided a definition of it, or he's you know, he gave some kind of context to the statement, which makes me believe that he did know what squaring the circle was.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_04: Or two, he's not being honest.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_04: And either way, either one is bad, right?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_04: Either one does not reflect well.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_04: But I think the the ultimate reason why it's appealing for him to have like some kind of advanced mathematical knowledge in these geoglyphs is because it's a pillar that supports the idea that there was some underlying basement culture that had all of this sophisticated knowledge that had to be passed on through time in order for these things to appear in different parts of the world.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it wouldn't have been independently invented.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_04: So that pillar has to be there.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_04: You can't just have stuff that any normal people can do because they understand what a circle is and a square is and they can draw lines, which people around the world have been doing that for a very, very, very long time.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_04: There has to be something special about it.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_04: And so whether he didn't know what it was or whether he was being dishonest about it, like either one I think deserved mentioned.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_04: So I did a video about it.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_04: He never straight up acknowledged it.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_04: And I I know that he had watched my videos in the past because he got very angry at one of them.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um but if you look after that, like he now says that it's not quite squaring the circle, but it's kind of similar to squaring the circle.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_04: They were playing around with mathematics and geometry, so it's not quite, but it's almost.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: And again, it's it's not anywhere near Yeah, it's not even close to what uh squaring the circle actually is.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I should have said that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_04: So squaring the circle is creating a square and a circle with the same area using only a uh like a compass and uh a small number of steps or something, something like that.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_04: So it it so the circle and square don't end up being the same size, the edges don't align, but they're the same area.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_04: And for that, I think you need to know pi and you need to be able to calculate all this stuff out, and it's a it's a problem that I don't think was and again, I I would have to go check whether it was actually ever solved, like whether you can do it or whether it's impossible.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it was ever solved.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so you can't do it by hand, you know.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sure you can do it, like I could make a square that has the same area as a circle if I you know could just like say an Adobe Illustrator make me a square with this, whatever.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_04: You could do that.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but you can't solve it in the way that the ancient Greeks proposed it as a problem.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so to say that that's close to drawing a circle inside a square, which you can do with with minimal tools and two people on the landscape, and you can do it with one person if you're not making it big, say that's close to scoring the circle is absolutely absurd, you know, and that's almost like doubling down uh on something that he now knows is wrong.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_04: And to me, that's a red flag.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_04: That's a total red flag.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, his his main thesis, I always laugh because it's not a new thesis, right?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: He's he's basically just repeating stuff that had already been said, and and he's adding very little new to it.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_03: He's basically, you know, making money off of these old, outdated uh ideas from the 1800s.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, starting with people like Brazur de Bourbourg and uh Augustus Leponjan, who were essentially the grandfathers of Mayanism, which is just absolute nonsense.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: And if our listeners have not already done so, I highly suggest going back and listening to the episodes where we talk about these individuals.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: And so these guys lead us into Ignatius Donnelly with his book Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, and then he gets followed by Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophists, and it's just this bizarre mishmash of occultists and pseudo-historians, pseudo-archaeologists, and Freemasons who are obsessed with this idea of Atlantis.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, the issue here being that the Atlanteans are almost always portrayed as white people, or in the case of Bourbourg and Laplanjan, the Atlanteans get tied to the Maya, and you have these guys pushing this hyper-diffusionist model where it was the Maya Atlanteans who brought civilization out to the world, which is of course also racist.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's no less racist than claiming that the Olmec were either black Africans or that they were taught by black African explorers or that the Egyptians or the Chinese brought civilization to the Americas.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's important for people to understand that hyper-diffusionism is absolutely racist because it actively erases and undermines and rewrites the histories and cultural legacies of indigenous peoples, but also of those people who are allegedly being credited with you know bringing them civilization.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: So, of course, this brings us back to Donnelly and his uh antediluvian world, because Donnelly seems to be the one who Hancock really likes to lean on for his pseudo-historical retellings.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: So, what can you tell us about Donnelly and his ideas of Atlantis?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, I think it's uh it's a really interesting time in world history, and I started getting into this more recently.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_04: Uh um, you know, Donnelly's book is big.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_04: It's a big book, it's 450 some pages, and we have the benefit of now it's it's all available online.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_04: You know, the original edition you can you can look at in HTML, you can search through it, you can look for specific things.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_04: All of these guys who were writing the late 1800s, like were writing about race in one way or another, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_04: And like he mentions the word race in there, like I don't know how many times.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_04: He talks about the Arians, the uh there's there's biblical concepts of race with the sons of Noah, um, there's all kinds of other uh kinds of things that he brings in about mythology and you know race in ancient Greece and and this sort of thing.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not you know an entirely consistent, but when I look through and I see what he's talking about when he talks about the Aryans and how he's recognizing Atlanteans because they're white and they are bearded, and this is especially true in the Western Hemisphere and you know what he calls the Mississippian area.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_04: So he's talking about you know Native Americans of the eastern woodlands, and he's also talking about Central America, I think he talks about South America.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um, yeah, he's recognizing Atlanteans because they're white, and he's also, of course, looking at the the spread of quote-unquote Aryan cultures into India, which is where the word Aryan first comes from, you know, and across parts of Asia and up into Europe.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um he looks at ancient Egypt, uh, thinks that was a colony of Atlantis.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_04: He acknowledges that the you know Egyptians were not lily white, but he attributes them to being one of the sons of Noah, who was an Atlantean, who's you know, so it's it's a little bit convoluted, but if you look at like the guys he is citing and what they think about race, like some of them are are just absolute rabid white supremacists.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_04: And those guys are are citing other white supremacists from the earlier 1800s.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_04: So like that was the context of when he was writing.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_04: And he very clearly says, you know, that that civilization is not communicable to all.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_04: There are different kinds of people in the world, some are civilized and some are savage.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_04: And it is the kind of the mission of civilized people to to bring civilization and the benefits of civilization to other parts of the world.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that that's how he sees Atlantis and the colonies of Atlantis and the settlers from Atlantis.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_04: And as far as I can tell, those people are white people, in his view.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, and that articulate that articulates really well with what everybody else, not not everybody else, but what a lot of people were saying about the Aryans and their superiority and their whiteness.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_04: So like that's kind of the context of of where he was um that was there when the when he was producing that material.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, I'm and he and he's he's very explicit.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: Like if you if you go through the antediluvian world, um and it's like you said, it's it's kind of convoluted.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: Like he contradicts himself um from chapter to chapter, it seems like, and the writing is really dense, and it's like you said, it's like a 500-page book.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: But if you go through it, he's he's pretty explicit about the color of the Atlanteans, you know, the color of their skin on um page 394.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: You know he's talking about the Incas.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: He, you know, this is a direct quote um from Donnelly.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: These these roads were ancient in the time of the Incas, they were the work of the white, auburn-haired, bearded men from Atlantis.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, yeah, seems pretty not a lot of ambiguity there, right?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_04: Not a lot of ambiguity.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: Or even um uh this is page 403.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: They were there the very traditions to which we have referred to as existing among the Peruvians that the civilized race were white and bearded, and that they entered or invaded the country would show that civilization did not originate in Peru, but was a transplantation from abroad, and only in the direction of Atlantis can we look for a white and bearded race.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's it's kind of hard to look at that and then be like, no, no, that's not what he meant.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're all you're reading that all wrong.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're taking it out of context.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_04: And I mean, it's it's interesting because it you know, I and again, like I'm not inside Donnelly's head, but a lot of these guys were thinking as we learn more and more about ancient civilizations around the world in the mid to late 1800s, you had to explain them somehow.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_04: Because the whole uh kind of rational reasoning to justify colonialism and imperialism was that we are naturally superior to all of you brown people out there, and therefore um you're lucky to have us bestowing this gift of civilization upon you.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_04: But if there are examples of brown people having their own civilizations, then that starts to wreck that argument.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_04: So you have to attribute those civilizations to some other um source, and that source for him is as a common white ancestry coming from Atlantis.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's those are the germs of civilization.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, the same thing happened with the moun builder myth in North America, where they uh, you know, as as the European settlers are pushing eastward and clearing forests, they're finding all these huge earthworks and these geometrical, very complicated, elaborate uh structures, and they're thinking, you know what, this really looks like the signs of a civilized people.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_04: This is not the work of some kind of band of savages.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_04: And it's like, well, that can't be true.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and if it is, uh it must not be the Native Americans that we're looking at, you know.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_04: So it's it's the mound builders, it's the race that came before them.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_04: And there's, you know, Andrew Jackson talked about you know, these monuments of this race past, uh, and and he used that as a rationale for for the removal of Native Americans from their land because, like, you don't own this land any more than we do, because look, there was somebody else here before you, and they were probably white because they were civilized.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_04: Like, that's the mound builder myth.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_04: So this stuff has consequences, and it was entwined with justifying colonialism and genocide and everything else.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_04: And I I feel like the people today who are using these same lines of evidence and who are going back to the 1800s and cherry-picking these examples and saying, well, what about this?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_04: What about this?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_04: Like, they don't they don't want to talk about like that part of it.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it makes them uncomfortable.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, but that's part of the history, you know.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_04: And it doesn't mean that that archaeology that was done in the 1850s, like that all that stuff is completely wrong, but you gotta understand the context and the history.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_04: If you can't do that, you're never gonna be able to weed out um good ideas from false ideas and interpretations.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_04: And that's a real struggle on the pseudoscience side.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_04: They do not have a mechanism for like going back and being reflective and going, you know what?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's almost like they they lack the intellectual integrity to to look at these things and contextualize them and and and say, like, all right, well, we need to understand the times in which these things were taking place and take into account the broad picture and and really get into the weeds on these things.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: They just look at a they have a very superficial understanding and they they cherry pick, right?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: So they only pick out those things that appear to support their personal pet hypothesis or interpretation and they just discount um anything that runs contrary to that, which is like the exact opposite of science.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I know that these guys they like to say that um archaeologists will never question the status quo or they'll never question the orthodoxy because it will mean the end of their careers.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, man, that's that more than anything tells me that they don't know what archaeology is because everything we do has to build upon it has to be new.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, we're not just regurgitating, you know, if you're going to publish a paper or you know you're doing your dissertation, it has to be new.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: You're asking new questions.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_03: And part of that is the literature review where you're basically going through and looking at all of the old research and critiquing it and analyzing it and saying well this I don't agree with this.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_03: I don't agree with this.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: This is what I'm proposing and this is why.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so on its face they're wrong when it comes to you know saying that we don't question the past.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then they'll always point out you know well Clovis first.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: What about Clovis first?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: That seems to be like their favorite thing point out Clovis first, which is funny because Clovis first wasn't even a thing when I was a freshman um it had already been sort you know sort of discounted.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_03: You people, you know, you learn about it as this era in archaeology.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: But part of that learning about it is, you know, and this is why they were wrong when when when they said that and at this point I think Clovis first has almost it's like it's not been a thing almost as long as it was a thing.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: And but that's their f that's like their favorite smoking gun is to point at Clovis first.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like well if you think about it though is we no longer abide you know we no longer promote that idea it's been disproven with the knowledge has grown.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: So if anything that shows the strength of archaeology as a science the fact that this old orthodoxy had been overturned with new data and and new information.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: And so it it basically flies in the face of the of the argument that they're that they're even trying to make.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah I think you have a very good point about that you know their their idea about archaeologists and scientists not wanting to to to upset the status quo is completely ridiculous.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_04: You know as as I was starting off in this I graduated my BA in 1992 I think and I did CRM for a year and then I went to grad school and like all of these kind of steps along the way like you're trying to master enough about your field that you can say something new or you know find a way to use new information or go get it to test an idea or overturn it or propose something.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's the bread and butter of how science is done and and the history of science is filled with things that we got wrong.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_04: And by we I mean scientists people who want to take a scientific view of the natural world.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_04: And that's the way it's supposed to be you know that's the reason we know more about the past now than we did 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 50 years ago and it's because we keep falsifying things learning new things developing and just like grinding this stuff out.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_04: And the pseudoscience stuff is weird because there's really no appreciation for that.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_04: And again I feel like it goes back to like this age of just like cherry picking from from the Victorian era these little nuggets that seem to fit this story.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_04: And then you know if there's something new that comes along like the uh younger dryest impact hypothesis they're all over that like if it fits they'll take the parts that they want and they'll fit that into the story.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_04: You know no longer do we have to have a pole shift to explain why Atlantis sank or whatever.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_04: Now we can just invoke the comet whatever and you look at things like Clovis first which you know what as a hypothesis at the time made total sense.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_04: Like it was the the clear signature of a people that was spread all over the continent at the earliest time that that we could identify uh the remains of human societies it went along with like the wiping out of the megafauna like all these ideas went together it's like well that's that's pretty good like that explains a lot right and it's also a great scientific hypothesis because it's easily falsifiable how do you falsify Clovis first you find something older than Clovis Don one of my favorite quotes I think it's Bruce Smith from the Smithsonian Institution talked about the theory killing power of uh um contrary facts let's say paraphrasing but all you need is one you know you need one good pre-Clovis site and all of a sudden first is not supportable anymore and like we had that yeah even as an undergrad like we knew about uh Monte Verde and Meadowcroft and people were arguing about it and uh the arguments were pretty I guess rough I should say and those are the guys you know who were sticking at Clovis first like those were my mentors as I was coming up so like I heard a lot of those arguments.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_04: And science often takes like a generational change because people are invested in ideas and they grow up with them and you know after a while they stop paying attention and you know they just kind of need to get out of the way and let younger people come along and like that happens like I'm 53 now so that's going to happen to me too 20 or 30 years I'll be gone and people like what the hell was he talking about?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_04: Why did he stick with that idea so long?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_03: You have kids?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well well then you've already felt you've already experienced that oh yeah no I know nothing.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_04: I I've learned that anyway this this process like one of my favorite professors at the University of Michigan one of his lines that he would say all the time was that science is a human endeavor.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_04: Like there are all kinds of feelings and emotions that come into why we hold on to scientific ideas.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_04: Human relationships and and mistakes that people make all factor into these things.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_04: But as long as you're within a scientific framework eventually the bad ideas go away and the good ideas stay and you build on them.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's the foundation of science.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_04: If you're in a pseudoscience framework there is no mechanism for weeding out the bad ideas so you just keep on doing whatever it is you're doing.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: Keep on trucking.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yep and then you know pseudoscience is a human endeavor too but uh it doesn't it doesn't matter so much.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: So well I'm glad that you uh you brought up the Mound Builder myth because uh Jason Colovito wrote this great book um called the Mound Builder Myth and in it he has this uh this quote um from Andrew Jackson and I want to read it here because it it really plays to the to the point that you're making that you know pseudo archaeology and pseudo history can have very dire consequences real world dire consequences that can affect people's lives because people ask me a lot like well why is why why is it even important like why do you care whether these guys are saying this you know um so but here's this quote from Andrew Jackson and he's talking about the mounds says in the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people spread over the extensive regions of the West we behold the memorials of a once powerful race which were exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes nor is there anything in this which upon a comprehensive view of the general interests of the human race is to be regretted.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: Philanthropy could not wish to see this constant this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute occupied more by more than 12 million of happy people and filled with all the blessings of liberty civilization and religion so basically he's saying you know these these mounds existed they were built by you know and a lot of people were saying that it was the Atlanteans that built them but it was this ancient race probably of white people who built these mounds and then the native people show up and exterminate them.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: So they're exterminated by the savages who take their place and uh so now it it's incumbent upon the United States to wipe these savages out because who wants to go back to that right and I I love this what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and I'm like um me?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_04: Doesn't sound so bad, does it?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah it doesn't sound bad at all.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: But you know this has real world consequences because then you get the Indian Removal Act and you get the Trail of Tears and you get this justification for removing the indigenous people from this land because they weren't from there.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_03: They'd wiped out this other earlier civilization right so you know we're not doing anything wrong.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: In fact we're kind of balancing the scales of history yeah so it's it's it's real pseudo history pseudo archaeology has has a real impact.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: I mean hell that the the Nazis were obsessed with it.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah uh I think of the name of the rage against the machine song that talks about he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past whatever.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_04: Do you know the quote I'm talking about?
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah yeah controls the future.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah and so like controlling the past and what we think about the past is it's important and it's important to try to get it right.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: And you know the the Mound Builder myth and the Nazis and slavery like these are all great examples of if you get the past wrong and if you get it wrong on purpose for a political aim it is connected to great human suffering.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not just funny you know to think about Atlantis and ancient aliens and stuff like that.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_04: Like when you start scratching down and looking at this stuff like it's pretty horrifying really and it's connected to real world consequences for a a lot of people um and it's it's not always about white supremacy but oftentimes it is in the modern era it's been about white supremacy but there's there's nationalist pseudoarchaeology that goes along all over the world you know absolutely the Bosnian pyramid uh there's stuff in India um and again like I I haven't drilled down on a lot of those things but people everywhere I think recognize that people care about the past and like controlling the narrative about what happened and where human variability comes from and what that means um is a way to set the table for um changing the way the world is in negative or positive ways.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_04: And it's been used negatively a lot a lot.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah yeah for sure I mean pseudo history pseudo archaeology definitely um it's all it seems to always be used to uh to promote these uh ultra nationalist myths right um here on the podcast we we we talk a lot about Mesoamerican pseudo archaeology and how the Mexican government specifically uh after the Mexican revolution really turned to these pseudo-archaeological pseudo historical retellings of history in order to you know as as a way of nation building after this massive revolution where all these people died they were trying to figure out what this new country not the new country but the uh the new direction that the country was going to take and what ideas were going to undergird the identity of of of the country and a lot of it relied upon pseudo uh history and pseudo archaeology to the point where uh a good story uh that builds upon a nationalist narrative is great you know like it's for example you have these uh they call them the child heroes of Chapultepec and they're like these kids that died defending Chapultepec Castle they were military cadets and they were fighting against the United States invasion.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_03: So the story enough is like yeah we we have a monument to to these child heroes but at one point they decided you know it'd be better is if we had like a grave site for these child heroes.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_03: But there was no way to find their bodies because at that time the bodies were just being buried in in these mass graves right and so what the Mexican government basically did was they they found a mass grave and there were six of these child heroes.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: They dug up six sets of human remains that were small that were probably children and they're like look we found them we found the six uh the child heroes and then they in they exhumed them they reinterred them at this national monument and now it's part of this nation building uh ultra-nationalist process and and it relied heavily on pseudo history and uh pseudo archaeology to make it happen and yeah it doesn't always have to be white supremacy you know you you brought up uh in India you know the Hindu nationalists um are just going off on like the craziest stuff where they're saying that the uh books their ancient you know sacred books were talking about nuclear weapons and airplanes and flying devices and then they're employing archaeologists to go out and find evidence of these things so that they could show how mighty their nation was and then you had the Nazis like literally trying to find Atlantis so they could find this cradle of uh Aryan super civilization.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: And so when people ask me, you know, well like why do you care so much?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_03: Why do you get so mad?
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: That like this is the stuff that I point to like God damn it.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I was reading an interview with the uh the guy who produced Ancient Apocalypse um his name is Kennedy and it was really telling his attitude because he was kind of being pressed by this reporter like well what about you know the the problematic way that pseudo history is used and pseudoarchaeology is used to to advance white supremacy and he's like well hey you know it's and this is a direct quote from him it's a show about ancient archaeology that speculates on some fun stuff.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't tell people to storm the Capitol the appeal to me is the mystery and the fun of speculating about that mystery.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_03: So laughing it off like well it's it's all in fun.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: We're not really taking it seriously why are you taking it so seriously it's it's just neat that uh we're we're kind of exploring what what what happened to Atlantis.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_04: And when I think when they're doing that is they're kind of like washing their hands of uh any responsibility that they might have for platforming these ideas or repeating these ideas because he he states right there you know it doesn't tell people to storm the Capitol oh so then it must all be fine right so right and uh I mean I guess that's that's where I I see stuff like that and I get really frustrated also because like there's more to this story you know and the other parts of the story should also be told and they're not going to tell them.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_04: So like that's up to us you know the few of us who decide that it is important to try to put information out there so that if people are curious uh they have something to find and something to go to like that's why I I started writing a blog 10 years ago pretty soon it was around the time that Search for the Lost Giants came out.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_04: Do you remember that show on History Channel?
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah and I and I remember because I had experience like finding these old newspaper clippings you know about giant skeletons.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_04: And so like I knew that this was a thing that there was a time in American history where people were reporting finding giant skeletons all the time and it's a really interesting phenomenon like the the newspaper clippings exist.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_04: Like the stories exist.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_04: So like we have to explain that somehow and I watch that show and it's like well there's there's other parts of this story that can be figured out and that's when I started kind of blogging in earnest to try to provide you know information if somebody would search on search for the lost giants or giants with double rows of teeth like they would find something else other than a recapitulation of the same stupid stories over and over and over again.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_04: And that's that's really important even if you know we write stuff that not very many people read or we don't have audiences in the millions.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_04: I don't reach a big audience I don't have a big megaphone I don't have a Netflix special but the people who are curious if if we are to believe those who tell us that people just don't accept this stuff like they go out and they do their own research well then you know I'm gonna put something out there so they have something to find that's going to give them a different perspective on it.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe they'll go like oh well I I didn't know that that doesn't really quite make sense you know maybe the geoglyphs in the Amazon aren't what Graham Hancock is telling me they are or you know maybe Donnelly really was a racist and maybe I should think about that a little bit and because that colors his interpretations um it's good to know some context and some background and and then you know you also have your baskets of claims that are just total nonsense uh and I just kind of hate to see those just be able to proliferate unchecked.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_04: You know I I I get the sense that you've gotten the same reaction that I have which is you're you're wasting your time maybe talking about this stuff.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_04: Like why are you doing that?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_04: And I always point to these polls that say that uh some incredibly large percentage of people in the United States now believe in Atlantis and they believe in ancient aliens and they believe in Bigfoot.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_04: So the idea that we are fueling this by talking to them and we shouldn't do that.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_04: Like the strategy of staying silent has not worked like we have evidence that that has not worked because half the country now thinks that all this stuff is real.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_04: So if more academics would get off their butt and try to engage in a constructive way and have these conversations and kind of normalize like having these conversations rather than saying oh it's all just fun and games we don't need you know you don't need to worry about it it'll just go away on its own guess what it's not going away on its own it's getting worse uh it's getting worse and it has real policy consequences as we saw from the example of Andrew Jackson as we see from the example of the Nazis um when these fantastical ideas can make their way into people who have power it's a problem absolutely and I'm not trying to predict the future here but I mean if if we can learn anything from the past it's like let's try to frame real human history in a way that is accurate and fair and it doesn't put some groups in it's such a vulnerable position.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_04: You know I can do all of my kind of dirt and computer modeling archaeology and that's all fine and that's my paycheck and everything else but like I I do this stuff on the evenings and the weekends because it's important to be a voice uh and be on the right side of this.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_04: And that's not about being politically correct.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_04: It's just about getting the past right.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_04: Like it's that simple.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_04: And we know that a lot of the pseudoarchaeology stuff is wrong.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's very wrong and it has had drastic consequences and like I don't want to see us go there again.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_04: You know and I'm afraid that we're losing.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah well well one thing that that does happen though is I get pushback because I'm the same way.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like I'm constantly trying to get archaeologists to uh to be more vocal about their opposition to pseudoarchaeology and the the criticism or the response I get and they're not wrong unfortunately is that they don't like the idea that it opens them up to nonstop harassment online because a lot of these YouTubers these pseudo archaeological pseudo intellectual youtubers are very very hateful and um they don't they're not really concerned with with you know having a an honest discussion they turn it into like invective right like right away they just start spewing hatred and attacking archaeologists and then you know if they've got a big enough platform whether they're encouraging it or not they they get their followers to start piling onto archaeologists who are pushing back against pseudoarchaeology.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of the archaeologists that I've spoken to are just like they just throw up their hands and they're like all right I've that's you know I tried.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: I know one person who uh started talking about archaeology on TikTok you know I I think they got really disillusioned really fast because they had no experience with pseudoarchaeologists and like the kind of hateful community that's out there online brewing with this this kind of stuff.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: So they're on TikTok and they're like oh great I have this great tool to uh to teach archaeology.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so they make a video about their expertise and then every comment is just like hateful infective just they're being attacked and they're like what is going on?
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_03: Why are these people responding this way?
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: All I did was you know talk about my job and they're acting like I'm public enemy number one.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I think a lot of archaeologists are concerned about that.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah and and you've got people like you know Graham Hancock saying things like I don't know why people won't engage with me.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_04: You know why the archaeologists aren't interested in what I'm saying.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_04: I mean it's a total mystery right like why wouldn't anybody want to be part of this conversation like I love stepping outside my front door and having things thrown at me metaphorically so I get it.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_04: You know and when I when I was teaching classes in this I had the students write blog posts like we assigned sections of Donnelly's book and they had to say like how would you know whether his claim here is true or false like what evidence would you look for and stuff like that.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_04: And I made them use pseudonyms because I didn't want to expose them to any of that kind of roughness because and it's gotten worse.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_04: It's gotten way worse since then.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: For a group that says that they just want to have a discussion as a group as a collective they behave pretty poorly I would say well not only that but but for people who are um you know they they claim to be so concerned about you know these archaeologists in the past who who tried to overturn the status quo and and how they were unjustly attacked and maligned and their careers were destroyed and this and that they don't they really don't seem to mind doing that themselves right they the them them and their followers sure do enjoy attacking and maligning and attempting to destroy the careers you know to to the to the point where they're having they encourage their listeners to like you write to this university and uh complain about this professor And it's like, well, hold on.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_03: I got you, I I thought you guys were um, you know, angry about that, about archaeologists being attacked for their ideas.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: But only when they agree with you, right?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_04: No, it's it's pretty hypocritical.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_04: And that's just one, you know, we can we don't need to stray into politics, but we can find numerous examples in our culture now where that that hypocrisy, that kind of hypocrisy is present.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_04: Super unhelpful.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_04: You know, all all any single one of us can do, I think, is to just try to figure out the way forward to be constructive.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, I I put myself on the bench for a couple years because I was fatigued by it.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_04: I had had enough, and like I, you know, I can swing elbows, uh, I can I can go into professor mode, I can do this in all kinds of ways, but like, yeah, I I just had to like step away because it just wasn't any fun anymore.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_04: But, you know, you take a breather, you come back, you try to make a contribution.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_04: And there are a lot of us, a lot of professionals, and a lot of people have stepped up and become voices, and they've also made themselves targets, and so it has a cost, and uh that's too bad, but ultimately they're doing a good thing by doing that, you know.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_04: And we're all we're all different people.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_04: We have different contributions that we can make.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_04: You know, the way I approach some topics might not be the way that somebody else would approach them.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_04: Some things that I let slide might not be things that somebody else would let slide, you know, and I'm human, I make mistakes, I have made mistakes, I will make more mistakes, both factually and how I interact with people.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_04: But I think it's an important thing to just kind of like keep going as much as you can and maintain your sanity.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, for me, again, it's it's a weekend and evening deal.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_04: I don't get paid to have anything to do with pseudo-archaeology at all, totally separate from my job.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_04: So when I get a minute or an hour on a weekend evening or something and I have a topic, I'll make a video and that's it.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_04: That's that's what I can do within the bounds of my life.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_04: And if if more of us did that and were able to talk to each other and like kind of create some kind of ecosystem where you know we have our own community and we can share information and talk about stuff and bent a little bit, um, that would probably be helpful, I would say.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I agree 100%.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_03: One thing that I found um very telling about uh the uh Graham Hancock stuff, because Hancock really likes to um play innocent or play dumb when people point out the the inherent racism and a lot of ideas, uh a lot of the ideas that he's spreading.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: And he'll be like, Well, what do you mean?
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: That's not racist.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just, you know, I'm just I'm just quoting sources from the 1800s or the 1500s when nobody was racist.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: But one thing that I found that was very telling was there was a um I don't know if you know about this, that that uh neo-Nazi Hardy Lloyd.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: He uh he's in prison right now, I guess.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh hardcore racist, white supremacist.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he was interviewed by someone by a journalist, and turns out this guy is a huge fan of uh Graham Hancock's work.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: I want to quote from this story.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: He says, uh Harvey Lloyd, uh Hardy Lloyd says that listening to Hancock is like listening to Third Reich archaeology without the baggage.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh-huh.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: So I can watch it with somebody else.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's actually a good way of introducing people to white superiority.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's a nice little intro to racialism.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_03: So basically he's he's looking at it and seeing maybe not the overt, uh, you know, it's not overt, so people are more comfortable watching it, but he sees it as like this good gateway drug.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_03: Let's let's watch this show together.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: And uh the people around me feel more comfortable watching this, and it's like a good intro, it's a good way to introduce them to what is essentially third Reich archaeology.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_03: Right, well, and I thought that was very telling.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_04: We can get to the Himmler speeches then after they're a little bit more comfortable with the didn't uh didn't Hancock respond to that.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_04: I feel like I know that story.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_04: Like I thought that he he tried to distance himself.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, to his credit, but he came out and was like, Oh yeah, I I I want nothing to do with that, you know.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_04: None I I That's what I thought.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_04: But I mean it doesn't diminish the point that his way of telling the story has an appeal to white supremacists.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's undeniable.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_04: Whether he intends that or not, that's what happens.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, look, if I was putting out some work and some indigenous people came up to me and said, Hey man, you know, the stuff that you're saying, we find it incredibly offensive and racist and dismissive of our ancestors.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_03: And then if I looked at the sources that I was using and they're very racist, and then if I had a neo-Nazi saying, Hey, you know, I really like your work because I use it to introduce people to uh what's essentially Third Reich archaeology, if if all of these things were happening, I might step back and re-evaluate and reassess the the claims that I'm making, instead of throwing up my hands and saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, you know, instead of just denying everything and deflecting and accusing other people, um, maybe I would take uh a better look at the work that I was putting out and and reconsider it.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_03: But that would require a level of integrity that I don't think uh Graham Hancock has.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think he would make that that step.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_03: He did say, you know, yeah, I I I disassociate myself with this guy, but then he followed it up because he wrote this letter and he says, I do not dismiss or undervalue indigenous cultures.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, motherfucker, I've read fingerprints of the gods.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_03: You can't, you know, maybe somebody who doesn't know what you write would would believe that, but I've read what you've written, and um, it comes across very much as being dismissive and undervaluing indigenous cultures.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there's a a level of lack of self-reflectiveness or denial or something there that um is kind of remarkable.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and I I wonder if I wonder if it's connected to, you know, I think he sees his role as he is an attorney fighting for the lost civilization, and he's not under any obligation to provide evidence that disputes that or whatever.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, talking about that the racial baggage and the history like that's not such a good look for his client, which is the lost civilization, so he's not gonna talk about it.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and if you if you look at things that he has said, he makes statements like, you know, he's actually have one right here.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, I am selective with the evidence I present.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_04: Of course I'm selective.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_04: It isn't my job to show my client in a bad light.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_04: So if his client is a lost civilization, there's no way he's gonna show it in a bad light.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_04: He's only gonna pick the things that he wants to talk about.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_04: And he said that.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's a direct quote.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_04: So um he's a businessman, you know, he has he's very well spoken, he's good at writing his books, he's obviously tapped into something out there that that that people want to buy, and he sees that as an as a mandate for producing more.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_04: That's his job.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's funny you you read that quote.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_03: I've got a couple of quotes here from him.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_03: Because just addressing his his uh idea that he says, I do not dismiss or undervalue indigenous cultures.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I thumbed through my uh my copy of uh Fingerprints of the Gods, and there's a section where he's talking about the Maya calendar system.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_03: And this is this is Graham Hancock referring to the Maya calendar.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_03: He says, Isn't it a bit odd that this otherwise unremarkable Central American tribe should, at such an early date, have stumbled upon an innovation which Otto Neugebauer, the historian of science, has described as one of the most fertile inventions of humanity?
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_03: He goes on, isn't all this a bit avant-garde for a civilization that didn't otherwise distinguish itself in many ways?
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's true that Mayan architecture was good within its limits, but there was precious little else that these jungle dwelling Indians did, which suggested that they might have had the capacity or the need to conceive of really long periods of time.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_03: But then uh his my favorite why did the semi-civilized Maya need this kind of high-tech precision?
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_03: Or did they inherit in good working order a calendar engineered to fit the needs of a much earlier and far more advanced civilization?
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_03: So this is not dismissing or undervaluing indigenous cultures, according to Graham.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_04: No, I don't know where that bar would be then.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, he even used the word capacity.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_04: They didn't have the what did he say about capacity?
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_04: They didn't have the capacity to do it.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, um there was precious little else that these jungle dwelling Indians did, which suggested that they might have had the capacity.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's nuts.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's insulting and it's it's racist.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, I read that and I'm like, God, this is some racist shit.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_03: And before we did this uh this show, I did a little experiment of my own where I took these quotes and uh I put them up in our Discord um where our premium members like get to talk to each other, and I just posted these and I was like, um, read these and tell me what you think.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_03: And to a person, they were like, That's some racist shit, man.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_03: Holy smokes.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, my favorite comment was uh this just seems like a very unsophisticated take.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's wild.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_04: You can't read that and not not picture a white guy with a pith helmet saying it, right?
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's you know, probably with like a little Mr.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_04: Monopoly monocle and a cane or something like that.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like that's it's jungle dwelling.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's nuts.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so like when I see him just plead ignorant, like what?
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_03: What are you talking about?
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_03: How could you ever say that I'm racist?
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, I've read your stuff, that's how I I've come to this conclusion.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't know the guy personally, maybe he's not uh a racist, but he certainly says a lot of racist shit.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't know if there's a difference there to be made um to parse those things out.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, everybody has biases, unconscious or conscious, you know.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we have to take trainings where I work, you know, where we talk about our unconscious biases and things like that to create a good workplace.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe Graham Hancock needs to take a little bit of uh sensitivity, self-reflective training and think a little bit.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't have a specific page number, I can't find it right now, but I do know that those quotes were from chapter 21 of uh of Fingerprints of the Gods.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_04: That is a book that I have on my shelf that I have looked at, but I don't think I have ever read it from cover to cover because it's it's really long.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I did I did read America before, you know, all the way through.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but again, that was kind of where I got into Hancock, so I haven't gone back into the the earlier volumes so much, except in a piecemeal fashion.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_04: But that that stuff was that was pretty bad.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_03: It cracks me up because the um the fallback that they always use is um, well, I'm just asking questions.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_03: This seems to be the uh the shield that they throw up to try to defend themselves from uh any sort of criticism, uh meaningful criticism.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_03: And they really hate it when we ask questions, though.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_03: Don't you think these things are racist?
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_03: And then they they explode, they lose their minds.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_03: But when you critique anything they say, they just you know, well, I'm just asking questions, you know.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Hancock really likes to fall back onto his whole uh, well, I'm not an archaeologist, I'm a I'm a journalist.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_04: So he's he's an attorney fighting for his client and presenting the best case that he can.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_04: And his job is to be selective.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, the guy's the guy's insanely rich, right?
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_03: Super wealthy.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_03: And this is what really kind of uh grinds my gears, as uh as the kids like to say, is uh I have a friend, she just defended her her PhD.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's like 800 pages long, right?
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_03: She spent years, years doing research with uh precision and super, super narrowly focused research, right?
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_03: Just studying households, Dine households and the construction methods used for these houses and figuring out did families uh use the same construction methods?
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_03: Were were the did the construction methods differ between households?
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what did access to resources have to do with this?
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_03: What did social standing have to do with this?
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like how did all of these things play into constructing Danae households and you know, consulting with descendant communities and working with Danay people and just putting in all this work years and years to put out this 800-page document that she then had to defend right in front of her advisors to go through all that just to turn around and have some jackass on YouTube be like, nah, you guys are liars.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's so infuriating.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_03: Like part of it really pisses me off.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_03: Part of it is just it's funny in how pathetic it is.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_03: And there's an argument to be made that, like, well, just ignore it.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_03: But I think the better, the bigger argument, like you said, is no ignoring it is dangerous.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like we we need to actually speak out against these things.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I I make a video say people get mad and say that I should lose my job.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_04: And it's like, dude, this is a freaking hobby.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_04: Like, you know, you're you should want like people to come and have a vigorous discussion and not not want to like cancel someone because they made a video in their basement that you didn't like, but like the level of anger uh at at quote unquote intellectuals and and people who put a lot of effort, like your friend, into an 800-page dissertation.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, they don't understand how that stuff works.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, they don't trust the outcome, they don't think it's valuable, whatever the reasons are.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it's it's frustrating.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_03: And and what's funny is I look at a lot of these guys, these these YouTubers, and they don't seem like they're in the greatest of shape.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I I look at them and I'm like, you know, I don't think you could, I don't think you could do what we do.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think you would last uh a session, you know, hiking at 9,000 feet, camping, getting up in the freezing cold at the crack of dawn, all your water's frozen, you gotta make your coffee, you get your 50-pound pack on, and you take off into the mountains, and you do this for eight days at a time, for weeks on end, you know, and being away from your family and and your kids, and and it's hard, hard work.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_03: And then you collect all this data, and then you bring the data back, and then you write the site reports, and then you put together the entire project report.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like, I don't, I don't think these, I don't think these critics could could hack it.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think they uh they would last very long as archaeologists, and it's it's a lot safer to sit in your mom's basement making a a YouTube video yelling about how how evil archaeologists are than it is to to actually learn about it and and put into work.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's armchair.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_04: They're they're armchair on on several different levels.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_04: You know, they don't understand the material.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_04: They have not demonstrated that they could actually do that and survive at those altitudes, and not not the altitudes, you know, but just like the the intellectual like go to a graduate seminar and you know have have discussions with people.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, you know, I've given I gave brown bag talks at the University of Michigan that were rougher probably than some people's dissertation defenses.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, the the intellectual climate that you have to survive in order to be uh somebody in this field that you know is in a position to talk about things that a lot of people care about, like it's it's not a trip to the grocery store.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it takes a lot of dedication and discipline.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_04: And yeah, to have somebody on YouTube come in and say, well, this guy's an asshole and doesn't know what he's talking about because Graham Hancock says, you know, or Joe Rogan says, like, it's like, dude, it's uh it's it's fast food intellectualism, man.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's just garbage.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's so easy.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's it's it's weak.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_03: So I I want to end this episode by asking you a question.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_03: Let's say tomorrow you find a giant, you find evidence of a giant.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_03: Are you going to cover it up?
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_03: Or are you going to do something else with that data?
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_03: But what what do you do, Andrew White?
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_03: You find a giant tomorrow.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_04: What do you think?
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that that taught you know, you know what the answer is.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_04: And this whole idea that there's this conspiracy to cover up information about the past because we're trying to protect some certain narrative, some woke narrative.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_04: And that um you know as well as I do.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if you were out surveying and you found something that you thought would be really damaging to some kind of existing idea, you'd be excited as fuck about that.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_03: Like, wouldn't you?
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_04: Like, yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_04: Show me show me the human femur that's you know goes to a uh 12-foot person.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_04: I'm all over that.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that would that would be uh an incredible thing to like find and explain, but that would not mean that everybody else who was wrong about it in the past was like somehow right or vindicated because they were they were right for the wrong reasons.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um when you have evidence, when you have evidence, you are right for the right reasons, and like that is fine.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I would love to find, you know, so going back to the the the Clovis thing, like I have friends, even people of my generation, who are still like, yeah, I don't know about this pre-Clovis stuff.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_04: Like, there are still some doubters out there, and like I have never worked on a pre-Clovis site.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_04: Like Clovis is very well established, like we can see it, we know where it is.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_04: It's the first, like really easily spottable culture that we have in North America.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_04: I would love to find a pre-Clovis site that nobody could like bat an eyelash at, you know, and I thought it was gonna be those footprints, um, but immediately you had people saying, like, well, maybe those are maybe the dating is wrong.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe, maybe, maybe.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_04: And like, it's fine as scientists, like you're supposed to always question these things and vet all this stuff and and do it.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_04: But like, you know, I would I would love to be able to find something that would that would make other pieces make sense and would would make things fit together and would overturn these ideas, and you know, things could collapse and there would be dominoes, like that would be so, so exciting.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I think most of us dream of that.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_04: Because we're not wed to any any particular idea of the past, like we just want it to be right.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_04: And if we find evidence that suggests that all these other people are wrong, like we're we're salivating over that evidence, you know.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's this idea that um, and I think this is where they're really wrong, is they think that we turn a blind eye to mystery when actually I think archaeologists are driven by mystery, like we want to unlock these mysteries and and solve stuff.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_03: And if it disproves past, you know, beliefs, then so be it.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's just that's just the way it is.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's the way science works.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_03: Good science goes forward, you know, it's not uh etched in stone, like this immovable position that that will never ever change, you know.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's religion, that's not science.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_03: So science moves forward and our views change as new data becomes available.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_04: I would love to know, you know, if I could unlock some box that had information about all the things we were wrong about, I would unlock that box in a heartbeat.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_04: I would I would build a time machine and go back.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I would love to go back and and look at uh the people and the cultures that I study and see everything that we are wrong about.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_04: That would be absolutely mind-blowing.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_04: There are so many things, you know, archaeology, we are left with this tiny, impoverished material record, and we're supposed to hang all of these things from it and and create all of these stories.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_04: And like, there are things that we can do very well, and there are some things that we are just never gonna be able to do.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_04: And I would, I would love to go, oh, you know, I'm gonna go back 6,000 years and look at some archaic society and go, well, that makes total sense then, why that's what we're seeing.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_04: Um, we are wrong about so many things, and I'm convinced, of course, we're wrong about so many things, but we are doing the the best job that we can with what we have, and we have mechanisms and tools for doing that that have proven that we can come up with better answers that way using a scientific framework rather than taking drugs and guessing.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Dr.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_03: Andrew White, thank you so much for joining us today.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's been a pleasure to have you on the show.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a big fan of your videos.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, for our listeners out there who want to uh connect or look up your work.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_03: Are you on uh social media?
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_04: Not very much.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I'm on X, but it's kind of a cesspool, so I don't use it very often.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_04: I check it maybe once a week and just see all the angry comments and then I move on.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_04: So mostly I'm on YouTube.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_04: I'm presuming you could put a link or something down to my YouTube channel.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I used to write a blog, but that's mothballed.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_04: It's still available, but I don't I don't write actively anymore.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I try to post as frequently as I can.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_04: I would love to have you on sometime.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_04: I don't do interview things very often, but it's my channel.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_04: I'll do whatever the hell I want to when I want to.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_04: So if you ever want to come on and talk about stuff, I might uh maybe get a little bit of cross-polinization going, and that would be good.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for sure.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_04: And until next time, remember the truth is like medicine.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_02: In the heart of Bremen, in northern Germany, stands an extraordinary building.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_02: Completed in 1931, Haus Atlantis was designed as an institute for the study of Atlantis and the Aryan Super Race.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_02: The building's facade was originally adorned by a large wooden sculpture depicting the Nordic god Odin, crucified on the tree of life.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Inside House Atlantis, an astonishing stairwell built of glass and steel.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_02: It may evoke the Aryan exodus from Atlantis.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: At the top, the visitor enters a mysterious room.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Known as the Heaven's Hall, this was to be the teaching forum for the twisted ideologies of Hermann Wirth.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Herman was quite fascinated by the idea of finding Atlantis.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: His idea was that this Atlantis was not somewhere in the Mediterranean or something like that, but in the North Atlantic region.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in his idea in Atlantis 20 to 25,000 years ago, a Nordic race was created that was to control and influence the development of mankind to a strong degree.