How Graham Hancock Feels About Debates, Michael Shermer | Joe Rogan

Do you plan on having any debates with people that oppose these ideas? Well, it was interesting on your very show, Joe, to have the debate that involved Michael Shermer, who's the editor of the Skeptic magazine, and some colleague of his who came in online who I got a bit annoyed with. And myself and my great friend and colleague, the genius Randall Carson. And I felt that that was a very useful debate. I felt that it's possibly the first time that those of us on the alternative side of the argument about history were given an opportunity really to put our evidence forward and to confront so-called skeptics. Well, so-called, that's what he calls himself, Michael Shermer, with this evidence. And obviously, I'm biased, but I don't feel that he fielded the situation particularly well. I don't think mainstream archaeology came out of that looking really good. I think it came out of that looking rather ignorant and uninformed. And a man like Michael Shermer, who is a professional skeptic, cannot begin to match the knowledge of a man like Randall Carson, who has devoted his whole life to walking the walk of the geology of the end of the Ice Age in North America. And that showed on that debate. So I think the debate was worth doing. I think it showed that the alternative side isn't just wishy-washy stuff out there on the fringes of things, that there are those of us working in this field who are using really solid information and who our project is to rewrite history. And we're not going to do that with slight information. It has to be solid information. I think we had the opportunity on your show to say that that solid information is there. I'm not claiming it was a complete victory for the alternative side. Michael Shermer is a smart guy, and he put forward some good arguments too. And there were constructive aspects of that debate, which I appreciated. I'd like to see much more engagement and much more positive approach. I wish the skeptics welcome to their skepticism, but I wish they'd be less hateful, less full of derision, less despising. Well, they're so defensive with their ideas. And so defensive with their ideas when the possibility is there for a constructive debate, you know. Well, what's interesting to me is that as this evidence piles up and it seems to be continuing to pile up, as more like these impact sites and more of this ancient civilization material gets unearthed, it's almost insurmountable. Yeah. And this is how paradigms shift. I mean, everybody's familiar with the concept of a paradigm shift. And there's a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, which outlines what a paradigm shift is, where an established model in some discipline of science that has been in control of people's thinking for a very long time suddenly falls apart. And it doesn't fall apart suddenly. What happens is that there's an accumulation of evidence which that model cannot explain. That paradigm cannot explain it. It seemed like a great paradigm at one point, but then it doesn't explain this. And then it doesn't explain like the paradigm that says that megalithic architecture is only 6,000 years old and that the first megalithic architecture was in Malta. That can't explain the massive megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey 5,500 years before that. It's evidence like that, the slow accumulation of evidence that the existing system cannot explain that at an eventual point, no matter how strongly the advocates of the existing system hold onto it, no matter how determined they are in their defense, no matter what dirty tricks they may choose to deploy to undermine their opponents, sooner or later the evidence overwhelms them and the paradigm goes down and you have a new way of thinking. And that is the story of science. And it is a story that I think we're at a tipping point in our understanding of the past of the human species. I am not saying that I am 100% right. I believe that what I'm doing that's worthwhile is I'm asking questions about the past that haven't been asked enough. I'm putting archaeologists on the spot and demanding that they explain themselves. I don't claim that I'm right. I'm offering an alternative theory and my objective is to get people to think for themselves, to think about this stuff and not to accept the voice of authority as the sole medium of truth. That's what I've tried to do. Have you had any archaeologists review any of this work and change their opinions? No. No. I haven't. But what I have found, and I've found it interestingly during the research trips for America before, is a younger generation of archaeologists who are in the field. And they are quite different from the older generation of archaeologists who were running the whole scene 25 years ago. Of course. A very different younger generation. A younger generation that has been exposed to open-minded thinking, that has been exposed to the internet, that itself as part of the general pattern of the younger generation is suspicious of authority. I'm meeting young archaeologists on sites. For example, I met a couple of really amazing young minds on a site called Blackwater Draw in Arizona, New Mexico, where one of the first Clovis sites, the young archaeologists I met there, were incredibly open-minded and really willing to consider extraordinary possibilities about the past, and privately admitted to me that they'd read my books. Well, that's where I get the hope. I get the hope in this young generation that is growing up with the internet that does understand that there's a lot more out there than just what they're being taught in schools. Yes. Yeah. This is where the hope lies, and it lies in every area. Thank you.