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Encore - How Flint Dibble Prepared for the Joe Rogan Experience - TAS 262
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The Archaeology Podcast Network is taking a break for the holiday season. In the meantime, please enjoy this encore episode. It’s a favorite of ours! Happy holidays!
A few weeks ago, archaeologist Flint Dibble was invited on to the Joe Rogan Experience to have a dialogue with Graham Hancock. Over the course of the 4 hour show, Flint did a fantastic job engaging and attempting to educate Graham and Joe. This week, APN co-founder Tristan Boyle had an opportunity to interview Flint about how he prepared for the show, and what the reaction has been on the interwebs.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Interview: Flint Dibble on The Joe Rogan Experience
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 262. On today's show, APN co-founder Tristan Boyle interviews archaeologist Flint Dibble about his recent experience on The Joe Rogan Show. Let's dig a little deeper. I don't have anything clever to say. It's not my show.
00:00:36
Speaker
All right, everybody, welcome to the recording. So as you heard in the intro, this is not Rachel and I today. It's not our show. No, it's not our show today. We handed it over to Tristan because he had this amazing opportunity to interview Flint Dibble. And you might be wondering who is Flint Dibble and why would we want to interview him?
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, so Flint is, he's an archeologist, he's got a YouTube channel, he's got ah an online presence, and he got an experience recently and an opportunity to be on the Joe Rogan experience, yeah and he was on with Graham Hancock. yeah Now, anybody who listens to this show probably has heard of Graham Hancock, I would assume. I mean, we've talked about him. Yeah, we have yeah a bunch of the other shows I've talked to, him and his shows and his books and that whole thing around him. According to Graham Hancock, all archaeologists hate him. yeah And he's been ostracized by the archaeological community. But he's also not an archaeologist. But we don't accept him, but also he's ostracized anyway, whatever. yeah
00:01:38
Speaker
So, it was a four-hour plus episode without a break. Typical Joe Rogan style. I very i don't know how people listen to that daily. I don't even think they took bathroom breaks. It was just four hours. yeah just like They just kept going. yeah and And Flint and Graham both had basically PowerPoint presentations, so if you can watch the YouTube video, we'll link to it in the show notes here.
00:01:59
Speaker
But, if you can or really don't want to give Joe Rogan any like youtube views, but it's not going to change his millions of dollars. So, go watch it. It's not really going to have an impact. yeah Our little audience.
Importance of Media Engagement for Archaeologists
00:02:08
Speaker
but Anyway, this interview Tristan did with Flint is basically about you know how Flint got on the show, his preparation, you know what his experience was. yeah and it's It's interesting. and you know There's a lot of archaeologists out there that wouldn't have gone on a show like this up against somebody like Graham Hancock with ah on the Joe Rogan show. Joe Rogan is a well-known conspiracy theorist and somebody who's like a friend of Graham Hancock. Yeah, he's buddies with Graham Hancock. He's kind of always going to take Graham Hancock's side. But if you go watch the show, you'll see that there was actually some pushback. yeah Joe Rogan gave some pushback to to Graham and kind of almost seemed to side with Flint a little bit. Anyway, just worth it to go kind of watch it and just see how Flint was able to handle that interview and the points that he brought and what he did that was different, I think, for
00:02:56
Speaker
engaging Graham Hancock in a conversation, which doesn't always go so well for yeah scientists and archaeologists. So i I think he did a really great job. And this interview that Tristan did is really amazing because we get a really great insight into yeah where he was coming from and what he was trying to do. So yeah.
00:03:14
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So the takeaway I have on this is really, if you happen to be an archeologist and you're listening to this and and you're approached by a production company or something like that, because they're always trolling around out there actually, if you've been doing this long enough, yeah if you've got any sort of online presence, if you've done a YouTube video or you've got a blog or You have a you know a social media channel or something that has certain number of followers and hits or whatever. You've probably been found by somebody and asked to be on some show or do something. Say yes to it. you'll probably First off, you'll probably never get called back again yeah because the just statistical likelihood is it won't happen because these shows never get picked up, right? The ones that do, then the likelihood that it goes on even further is even smaller. Yeah, so saying yes to start with, it like it's pretty low risk, really. It's pretty low risk, yeah. But but we need to get our the positive voices for good out there, right? Even if you think you're going to be you're going to be taken the wrong way or out of context or something like that, it doesn't actually matter. yeah Just get your voice out there, be heard. The archaeological community knows who you are. you know the you You're not going to be you know ostracized by by going on some show no unless you throw your hands up and go, because it's aliens. yeah I mean, if we don't try to engage with the public and teach and bring these really fascinating and amazing stories of the past from archaeology to life, then how are we ever going to be you know perceived as people that are approachable and have interesting information?
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I think in the end, this was a ah great thing for Flint Dibble to do, regardless of whether or not anybody in Joe Rogan's audience was swayed or not. He seems to think they were ah based on the comments and stuff. so But yeah, just go on and and listen to Tristan's interview, and you can learn more about how he felt about it, how he felt it went, and what he did to prepare for it. And yeah, it's really interesting, interesting. Listen.
00:05:06
Speaker
All right, with that, here's the interview coming up right after the break. Bye. That's not a good bye. Oh, yeah, sorry. See you next week.
00:05:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Archaeology Show. I'm Tristan Boyle, the co-founder of The Archaeology Podcast Network. And today, I have a very special guest. Now, if you're lucky not to be terminally online, you might have missed our guest's appearance on what has been labeled as the most popular podcast in the world right now. No, you won't find it on the APN yet. But Dr. Flint Dibble appeared on the Joe Rogan experience alongside writer and journalist Graham Hancock. So Flint, thank you very much for taking time to speak to us. I'm sure it's been kind of a bit of a maelstrom of
Flint Dibble's Work in Zoarchaeology and Pseudo-archaeology
00:05:56
Speaker
activity afterwards. I know you were then at the SAAs and everything, but could you kind of introduce yourself for people who aren't familiar with your work?
00:06:03
Speaker
Hi, yeah, so my name is Flint Dibble and I'm an archaeologist. I'm currently a research fellow, I have a Marie Curie fellowship at Cardiff University. And so my research actually focuses on zoarchaeology in ancient Greece. So I study a bunch of animal bones, sort of the trash in the past.
00:06:18
Speaker
But I'm very active online on Twitter or X as it's now called. And on YouTube, I'm trying to move over there. And in that sort of online outreach, I share as much as I can about real archaeology. But I've also been active in sort of fighting against, fighting is the wrong word, but speaking up against pseudo-archaeology in the media and ah online and things like that. And so, yeah, that's that's who I am.
00:06:44
Speaker
So I wanted to start this off by going back in the past, which you know archaeologists aren't very fond of. And I kind of want to go back to, obviously, I don't know whether this was the inciting event, but Graham Hancock's Netflix show, Ancient Apocalypse, released now over a year ago. And it caused a stir when it arrived, basically, because I think a lot of people in archaeology felt like the facts didn't match the interpretation.
00:07:11
Speaker
no that somehow has kind of like tumbled into you appearing on Joe Rogan. Give us a sense of like how that actually progressed and how it was you selected as a volunteer.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, actually, for me, it started before that. In May of 2021, a new show was announced on the Discovery Channel in the US called Hunting Atlantis. And so I'd kind of ignored pseudo-archaeology and Atlantis narratives and aliens narratives until that show dropped. I had a friend, Taylor Hermes, who asked me to review this unpublished paper that that show was based on. And I wrote a Twitter thread, did some research, and it went fairly viral. And then as I looked into that show, I realized that that TV show had taken advantage of a number of colleagues of mine and had told them that the show was on their research, interviewed them on their research, and then clipped them into this hokey hunt for Atlantis. Me and some colleagues actually have an article we're trying to publish in the European Journal of Archaeology on how this documentary did that. And so that's what first got me paying attention to the popularity of Atlantis in today's world. And as as as a scholar who focuses on ancient Greece, i I quickly became interested, why is this suddenly so popular?
00:08:26
Speaker
So I started doing some research and figuring out a little bit more about this because I realized, you know, none of us search for Atlantis. No, no real archaeologists are looking for Atlantis. And I thought, you know, maybe we need to explain to the public who's very interested in Atlantis why this is the case. And so I started reading, you know, older texts like Ignatius Donnelly and Graham Hancock. And then I heard that he had a show coming out.
00:08:49
Speaker
And so I read his books for the first time, at least a few of them, I guess September, October, 2022. And it was in, I forget if it was late October, early November, the show Ancient Apocalypse came out on Netflix and it showed up on my my Netflix feed. Well, everybody used to, yeah. And so the day it came out, I said, all right, I guess I got to watch this, you know, see what it's about. And immediately, it's just an attack on archaeologists. It is just we are arrogant, we are patronizing, we get everything wrong. And so me and my wife, we finished the entire show, all four hours of it in one sitting, finished a bottle and a half of wine or something like that. And the next morning, I sort of woke up and said, all right, I got to write a Twitter thread on this. You know, I've done this research already on Atlantis and I crafted something like a 50 tweet thread and it went very viral like fairly quickly I mean by my standards meaning it has like, you know, six thousand likes
00:09:42
Speaker
know' read a hundred thousand times something like that. And immediately I was contacted by an editor for the Conversation UK about adapting that into an op-ed. So I did that. And that was read a few hundred thousand times. And so in the wake of it, a bunch of other archaeologists were speaking out as well. And Graham Hancock singled out one of them, John Hoops, who I guess they have a long running history. I got to talk with John actually at the SAAs. I got to meet him for the first time there.
00:10:10
Speaker
So they have a long history, in particular, the buildup to the Maya 2012 non-events, let's say. yeah So John is a Mayanist, and so I guess he was very vocal trying to debunk that kind of stuff. I i was not very paying attention to pseudoarchaeology at the time. yeah I was still a grad student. So John refused to debate Graham Hancock.
00:10:31
Speaker
Graham Hancock wanted someone to, and eventually I realized somebody's going to do this. And I realized that I had a strategy in a sense. I didn't want to go in and just debunk him. I wanted to go in strong with a pre-bunk and demonstrate the real evidence that we have in a strong manner. And so I didn't want it to be somebody who was a debunker, if you see what I mean, to go in and talk to him.
00:10:54
Speaker
I thought that would be a mistake. And so that's when I volunteered. And I think Graham jumped at me because I was ah an actual scholarly archaeologist. Another PhD ancient historian, David Miano, who was a YouTuber, had also volunteered. And so I don't really know exactly why Graham chose me, to be honest. but he picked me and then ah he announced it. And then the crazy thing happened where the next day I got the phone call that my cancer had returned to my lymph nodes.
Flint Dibble's Personal Health Journey
00:11:21
Speaker
And so I had to i have i have melanoma. So I had to delay it. I had surgery. I had a year of therapy. I'm now fully cancer free. I mean, I have been to the surgery, but ah so that's why it was all delayed for a year as well. That's why there was that huge lag yeah in how it happened. So that's kind of how it's a weird roundabout story.
00:11:39
Speaker
I mean, yeah, obviously it i mean sounds like you got radicalized, to be absolutely honest. You kind of like know knowledge and then burn through everything. And I mean, you came out the other side, a freedom fighter for archaeology. The thing is, i what I find interesting is I think because you went in with the mentality that you weren't there to debunk him, because I kind of agree that, I know I've written years ago a blog and a podcast episode, episode but I agree with Graham Hancock in terms of, I think we need to get better engagement with people in the past, show them
00:12:21
Speaker
what what's there, show them how we do things. And there are under kind of studied areas in archaeology that actually what he might not really talk about, it and I noticed this throughout the the debate with you,
00:12:37
Speaker
you know He focuses on like the global south, you know the if for want of a better term, and he argues that it's because, well, during the last glacial maximum, northern Europe was frozen wasteland, and that's why we want to find it elsewhere, because you wouldn't want to live in a f frozen and well wasteland.
00:12:57
Speaker
and I think he'd he kind of misunderstands maybe a wider perspective of, well, the reason why and one of the problems with archaeology that I see is that a lot of the times the global north going into the global south and has been for many, many years so and extracting knowledge yeah you know, from those areas.
Influence of Global North on Archaeological Narratives
00:13:20
Speaker
It's only recently where we've had a lot more and a lot more visible and public input from archaeologists in those areas. And I think, I mean, Graham Hancock's done it a long time and obviously he's prepared
00:13:35
Speaker
you know, whether there are battles in the blogs of his web pages or there are things where he he kind of sparse people on Twitter. It's evident that you weren't going up against somebody who this wasn't their first rodeo, you know, but this was maybe your first rodeo in this kind of platform. Do you think that is there some sort of thing that you drew on in terms of like maybe the content you consume or things that are in archaeology that you were like, right, I kind of understand how to deal with this kind of person. What what would you say was your inspiration for that moment of, right, I'm not going to debunk, I'm going to actually show the evidence.
00:14:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so that was I think the biggest key as well because so many people, so many of those spars that he has is about debunking site by site by site he goes with. So it's archaeologists that are familiar with that site, whether it's Giza, whether it's Cholula, whether it's, you know, Gunung Padang.
00:14:32
Speaker
they go and they they debunk. And so my real inspiration was to say, no, we need to show what we actually have in the Ice Age because he just ignores that. He talks about this Ice Age civilization and he ignores Ice Age evidence. He talks about agriculture and he ignores all the environmental archaeology evidence. And so that was kind of my secret weapon in a sense. He's used to people debunking him on these sites here and there. What he's not used to anybody doing is saying, hey, you're missing out on this whole big picture of stuff.
00:15:02
Speaker
And so that was really my secret sauce, and I worked hard to keep that strategy secret as well as I prepared so I didn't want to put anything on social media that was going to tip my hand. And I think he went into it thinking all I wanted to talk about was the topic of racism. That's what he seemed to prepare his defense on.
00:15:20
Speaker
and so I also knew because of the venue that that's not a topic to actually get into there. right you know I think it's important to understand the historiography of Atlantis and how it has this connection to, you know like you said, extracting from the global south, colonialism, and and even overt racism. and so I think that that's important to bring up, but not in that venue. It's the wrong audience to to speak about that too.
00:15:45
Speaker
You know, I actually had a i had this little thought on that. You know, Graham Hancock obviously knew his audience and obviously knew Joe Rogan. And obviously, you know, if you like him or hate him, like you can't understand that Joe Rogan has this kind of like, at least the very least anti-cancel culture mentality. He's very, very kind of like, if anybody get canceled for anything or, you know, criticized super strongly, he's like leaping to the defense no matter what it is.
00:16:13
Speaker
And I think Graham Hancock knew that and was able to deploy that. But what he didn't actually count on is the fact that Joe Rogan went very hard on you in terms of like really picking apart, you know referencing what has been said, saying, but do you actually believe that? you know But what that meant is that Joe Rogan's audience couldn't say that Joe Rogan went soft on you. yeah And, you know, they couldn't, nobody, Graham Hancock's fans couldn't then attribute you doing well to, oh, well, Joe Rogan didn't really call him iron or anything because Joe Rogan did several times and pushed it. I did find that part of the conversation quite difficult because I can't totally understand. I think it's
00:17:01
Speaker
I think that it comes from the fact that we're working from two different like starting points, really, because I think this is the the wider conversation about politics. But to bring it back to the show, I think it's very difficult to to convince people whose idea of white supremacy and racism is, well, if they wear the pointy hats and they say the slurs out loud, that's racism, but anything else is not. yeah it's not you know And when you have that standard of racism, what you see as racism, it's it's very difficult to even contemplate, well, no, that can be racism. They're using racism as a spectrum. but
00:17:42
Speaker
i I think did you how how did you feel during that part of the thing where they were pulling up quotes that obviously have been made? How like I obviously is somewhere we have to get really defensive. ah How did you how did you feel in that moment?
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I knew it was coming, and like I just assumed it was, and obviously he went into Clovis first stuff. I mean, we agreed to stick to the evidence and be respectful. He clearly chose not to, and it
Challenges in Debating Pseudo-archaeology
00:18:07
Speaker
is what it is. I was surprised at how hard he tried to pull quotes out of context, so I wasn't – I went and read through the things that I had written about him and stuff like that to try to think through.
00:18:18
Speaker
what he's going to attack me on. And he did it in different ways because he found these out of context quotes. And so that was tough for me to respond to because it's like, yes, I wrote those words, but I didn't say them about you. And so I kept trying to say that. And that was difficult to get across. I eventually was able to turn the topic towards his sources and get into a more comfortable for me conversation about Quetzalcoatl and the depictions that I'd found that were pre-contact, pre-Spanish colonial, that show him clearly without white skin, despite in Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods he's described as a white-skinned foreigner coming from Spanish sources. And I was very pleased to see Joe respond to that. And he really grilled Graham a bit on that, saying like, you know, of course, Spanish domination and and subjugation and colonialism is going to have an impact on mythology. How could you assume that it wouldn't? And so that actually really made me quite pleased because I think it made it made a click in Joe's head about what I was actually trying to say, rather than some of those quotes that were out of context.
00:19:22
Speaker
I think Graham made a few mistakes there as well, where I've heard that Joe Rogan does not like social media money stuff coming to his show. And Graham kept showing tweets. And then I think also ah where he pulled this quote out of my article and put it there like it was a headline. When it was just buried in there and it took Joe a second. But he's like, Graham, did you put that up there? And Graham's like, yeah. And Joe is just like, oh, come on, man. You're just, you know. Yeah, you're doing it. You're doing it. Yeah. Or what was it? the The scare quotes around big archaeology. That was just the silliest thing. I was like, how is this a gotcha? I'm clearly being sarcastic here. And I just don't even know. it was just so So some of it is he shot himself in the foot by having really piss poor arguments on that. I think I got lucky in that sense that he was grasping at straws because I have never called Graham Hancock a racist.
00:20:12
Speaker
or a white supremacist or a grifter. And I point out the history of these issues and why it's a problem. And I point out some other people on the internet who occasionally are actual racists that that misuse this stuff. So yeah. I mean, this is the big problem is that online discourse is unfortunately, despite being a four hour long podcast, it can be boiled down to several points. Some of which I don't know if you dared to see the YouTube comments, but I find some of them very funny.
00:20:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of them was summed up as basically Flint saying, this is what we know. And Graham Hancock says, yes, but this is what we don't know. and i Totally, totally. It's one of those things. so Actually, to to that extent, I do have a few comments here that I thought were marginally funny. And there was a lot of people saying something about your sleeves. yeah I was just wondering, have you now rectified the sleeve gate issue? Yes, I've rectified the sleeve gate issue. That was the new shirt and normally the shirts have tight cuffs. I you know i have short i' have short arms. I'm willing to admit that. and yeah I had not tested out that damn shirt. That was a mistake. and I have so many comments on that.
00:21:23
Speaker
I don't know why it's such a big deal, but whatever it is. Do you know, what does it say in law? If you can't, if if you have the facts, you pound the facts. If you have the case, you pound the case. if If you don't have the facts and you don't have the case, you pound the table. You know, you pick something to kind of... and be I prefer people making fun of my sleeves over something worse, because you know i've I've had worse comments on social media, and that's that's totally fine and superficial. yeah Easy to ignore. No, exactly. And I think it's it's important, one thing is important, and we'll we'll talk about it in the next segment as we come up for a break.
00:21:59
Speaker
is just basically, I find it funny how Graham kind of focuses on you as the arbiter of big archaeology's vengeance against you, that you're supporting the cause and there's this connect, you know, oh, no, it's not a conspiracy. It's just a lot of archaeologists don't like me. And but at the same time, looks at things that you've not said, but people apparently, you know, who agree with you, you agree with.
00:22:25
Speaker
and uses that as a kind of ah a way kind of tarring you with that brush. But we're going to go to a quick break now. And when we come back, we'll kind of discuss that and some other things as well.
00:22:38
Speaker
And you're listening to The Archaeology Show, a special episode with me, your co-founder, Tristan Boyle. I'm here talking to Dr. Flint Dibble about his appearance on the Joe Rogan experience against Graham Hancock. Now, at one point, there was that kind of discussion about, you know, Flint, you being the harbinger of doom, the the kind of the artificer of the great spear of big archaeology. And I find it really interesting how you know In terms of like you know what was attributed to Graham Hancock, especially you know obviously we were just talking about how a lot of Graham and Hancock's sources are from the 18th and 19th century, where there was at times
00:23:22
Speaker
an explicit racial kind of aspect to Atlantis. And your point was that his lack of critique of that aspect of those sources and not contextualizing those sources is one of the reasons why it perpetuates those aspects of the sources. yeah And he kind of draws upon, well, you tried to counsel him as being a racism misogynist. And I i think I think you very confidently said, no, I've never said that about you. But he's like, well, you've said it about my work. You've said about the things I do. It's like you're obviously just trying to get on board. But at the same time, he's the one pulling up tweets. He's the one pulling up posts. He's the one pulling up other things, including the SAA letter, which will come to you in a minute, as examples of his cancellation by archaeology.
00:24:16
Speaker
If he's so readily cancelled, why has he got a Netflix show? Why is he on a Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which has got, at the time, recording about four point four and a half million views? Only on YouTube, too. Only on YouTube. So if he's being cancelled, I'm sorry, you Flint, you have failed. we're We're going to have to step up the program here.
Free Speech and Critique in Archaeology
00:24:40
Speaker
So once you kind of take on that,
00:24:42
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think it's bullshit. That's what I think it is. Like, as you said, it on Amazon dot.com, in this topic of archaeology, his books are consistently in the top 10 bestseller lists. I mean, talking about legitimizing him, he has major media platforms legitimizing him. And I certainly don't think I or anyone has really tried to cancel him. He is uncancellable as such a huge celebrity, and he's very careful in how he talks to his audience, right? He knows how to do that effectively. And so I think that, of course, though, when it comes to topics of archaeology, we are going to critique archaeology in the media. That is our right as as as people. We have the ability to speak up. our We have free speech to be able to speak up our opinions.
00:25:31
Speaker
on these topics, and we're asked these questions about his shows, about his books, about Atlantis in general, from people in the general public and from journalists. you know About me as some sort of puppet master, man that that came about largely because he announced that I'd be going on Joe Rogan against him, as I think I brought up ah ah there. you know The only reason journalists started coming to me for comments about Graham Hancock is because he made that announcement. And so it's sort of like, you're the one that turned me into someone that journalists came to. And given me being a precarious scholar, I'm going to accept journalist requests for comment. I've seen no reason not to. I mean, if they're asking me about something I know nothing about, that's different. But if they I've been doing some research on Graham, we did announce that we would be talking to each other. So you know it makes sense that they come to me for comment. But it certainly was not me that approached any journalists.
00:26:22
Speaker
They came to me and yeah, I don't know what else to say. I'm going to speak up my mind on this kind of stuff. And I think that the relationship between the history of this, I mean, look, archaeology itself is is unwinding in its own history right now. yeah we're coming to grips with the colonial racist past that our predecessors in the field had. And I think the same needs to be true for pseudo-archaeology as well. You need to acknowledge the history of your ideas and some of the harm that they it has caused and some of the harm that it perpetuates today in sort of online, offline spaces. I mean, you know Graham is very proud. I didn't bring this up, but it was something I wanted to. He's very proud of how he's illegally climbed the Great Pyramid and bribed guards to help him do that.
00:27:07
Speaker
kind of behavior harms monuments. It actually directly harms archaeological sites and it directly harms cultural heritage around the world, especially in more impoverished countries where there is not as you know good yeah ah guards around the site to prevent that from happening and you can drive them. And so you know that's the kind of thing that I think is important. We have to work against this sort of negative side of stuff and You know, he can say whatever he wants. I don't care if he wants to say I'm trying to cancel him. That's fine, but I'm not. I'm trying to speak up about what matters with cultural heritage and with archaeology around the world. I mean, to that point, he went on quite a lot about the Clovis first kind of stuff. And, you know, he brought up several names. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, yeah. Again, I googled those guys and Dillahay is still a professor and has quite a large publishing history. He's got several grants. He's a research fellow.
00:28:09
Speaker
you know if he was academically cancelled, why is he still walking around in academic circles? you know And I think it kind of makes me feel as if, like lets let's be honest, archaeologists can at times be a bit kind of like terse with each other, especially when it comes to like conference presentations and new information. I mean, we all know that one guy who's like, it's a bit more of a comment than a question at the back of the room. It's it's I think it's sometimes, yeah, it's something that I think archaeology has a history of is fighting each other on certain academic things. And, you know, I i don't
00:28:54
Speaker
I think there is space for a better way of resolving key differences in archaeology. I don't think there necessarily needs to be a conflict between scholars, but it just I just find it funny that like if if he's calling cancellation the way that those two were cancelled over Clover's first, and yet they still have careers after the fact, they're still yeah for decades yeah I mean, that's the same way that he's been quote unquote cancelled as well, because I mean, he's making money from his books, he's making money from his appearances, he's like Graham Hancock in some circles is a household name. So, you know, in terms of like, his cancellations not really stuck, you know, and when we think of cancellation, we really think about the people who've actually been cancelled, you know, and you know, there are people who've been cancelled for crimes and stuff and things like that. But probably the most of it is people cancel it for crimes, like sexual assault. you that That's what cancels people, not like critiquing their work. Exactly. And the thing is that this is this is, I think, in the same way that he argues that, oh, you're talking about the the racism, I think misogyny came up with something about
00:30:05
Speaker
you know all this about and you're attributing that to my work and therefore me and people come after me it's like well at the same time you're you're are you're using the spectre of cancellation upon yourself but it's not actually it's not actually hitting it's not doing anything yeah like i'm cancelled i'm cancelled i'm cancelled you know and no you're not that's that's the thing um but i think we we can't like archaeologists can't cancel Graham Hancock. And for I don't even think we need to. But one of the things that he is very precious about, and actually, when I was talking to other archaeologists, I let a few of my inner circle know that I was doing this interview with you just for their any of their insights and thoughts and everything. And one of them, particularly and did publicly on on on the like Instagram stuff, say that they don't agree with the SAA letter. They think that it was the wrong move.
00:31:00
Speaker
In terms of the essay letter, you know, it's still up online. People can read it for themselves. But in your kind of mind, that essay letter, which was released, I think, just after Ancient Apocalypse, was it? Yeah. Yeah, soon after. how How do you feel it fits into all of this? I mean, it was basically ammunition for Graham, really. Yeah, I think, so look, I mean, to be candid, and this is acknowledged in my article with John Hoops, both John and I were approached to help write that letter. And so I actually wrote the very first draft that it was like 20% of the length of that current one that was published. And I think a much shorter, terser, more concise response would have been better rather than making it over the top.
00:31:43
Speaker
And so I think that's part of the issue is it became much longer. It became like a mini essay, but in a fairly diatribe sort of manner. And I think that's what I would call is the issue. I'm not sure the essay often releases letters on various topics of politics in the US and culture and anything to do with cultural heritage. So this is one of thousands of public letters that they've written.
00:32:09
Speaker
And so I think that them writing public letters can be beneficial, but I think that that one was maybe a little too long and too over at the top. I wish if I was more of a senior archaeologist, I might have actually put my foot down and said, hey, all this stuff should be edited down in ah in a much more drastic way because as soon as you start getting over the top, it becomes ammunition, as you said. but It doesn't ever accuse Graham of racism or white supremacism in my reading of it, at least.
00:32:37
Speaker
But it does link his work more closely with that than I think is warranted because he is, as I've said, you know he he's he he he definitely tries to be careful about that and not frame things as if this is some white civilization and da da da da. He is careful about that yeah and he doesn't say that stuff.
00:32:56
Speaker
careful I just mean he doesn't he doesn't write that stuff, you know, and so so so to make it so strong in that way, I think also maybe gives ammunition towards leading people down the wrong path and gives him ammunition for that kind of cancel culture stuff that he's got. At the same time, I also think we can't overthink this. He's going to do that anyway.
Strategic Media Engagement for Archaeologists
00:33:16
Speaker
He's just going to do that anyway because, of course, his show, which is insulting towards archaeologists, is going to lead to archaeologists to defend what we do. And then he's going to have ammunition. And so it's just like we can constantly second guess ourselves. But that's part of that playbook. And there's no way to avoid it. It's a damned if you want doo damned if you don't type playbook. And so you know we should we should just act very strategically and mindfully, is my argument.
00:33:40
Speaker
you know and Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I actually think to that point, you know, there's no one way of dealing with, let's call it, you know, alternate archaeology, pseudo archaeology, because it doesn't like pseudo archaeology. and A lot of them don't like pseudo archaeology. And of course, you know, Graham Hancock says a lot lot of time, I'm not an archaeologist, but we as archaeologists, I think we need to have a plenitude of different ways of interacting. And I think that's exactly really important. And also, I think it's important that we do take on some criticism you know of what we can do better. I think, no, we shouldn't be like getting ourselves, but we we should have a standard by which we say, right, have we done the right thing here? What can we do better? To that end, I know it's it's a bad thing to look at comments online, but I was really intrigued if
00:34:30
Speaker
If there's any criticism that you've received that you've cast your eyes over, you're like, oh, okay, I actually, yeah, that actually makes a good point. Is there anything that stood out to you as like, or did you find it was overwhelmingly, well, your dad called you Flint?
00:34:46
Speaker
I mean, I do think that I could have handled that middle section better. I've seen comments on that. And so that would be the one that like, it it was the one section I wish I handled better. That's just, that was a difficult section. yeah You know, my main goal was to go into this knowing what I wanted to talk about and what I didn't want to talk about. And I didn't want to talk about that topic. So I work, I game plan some ways to get around it. And I did okay, I think I made my point by the end. But like I said, I was kind of called off guard by quotes out of context. I didn't quite I didn't expect it that way and I didn't have a quick, ready response. I don't know if you saw the YouTube video I just released about the edfu text and how yeah Hancock clips these quotes out of context. I was waiting for him to bring up edfu to bring up that thing. and That would have been a perfect place to bring that up to say, hey, this is you clipping quotes out of context again.
00:35:34
Speaker
And so, you know, I think that there are ways in hindsight where I could have handled that more difficult part of the conversation better. So many of the other comments are just things I can't control. There are ways that people see me as a scholar and an intellectual. And so it's just sort of like, what can I do about that? I don't know. And I think a lot of the other critiques I saw were more critiquing, not my job there, but how I presented stuff earlier on where I connected it more overtly to white supremacism and stuff like that, saying that was the wrong approach. Though I didn't do that nearly as strong as other people did. I really buried it and I tried to make it clear as about historiography and stuff like that, but you know whatever, people are going to critique. As soon as people see any sort of connection to like a racialized aspect of previous work, especially throughout history, I mean, like it's even recent history that that's kind of occurred. you know People kind of, not to go too off topic, but there is kind of these culture wars that exist that people have taken sides of course they're they're they're they're for their team or the other team. And they they have a very,
00:36:43
Speaker
succinct set of beliefs. you know like It kind of feels sometimes that I know if somebody believes A, they'll probably believe B, C, D and E because it's all within the same kind of ecosystem. And I think, yeah, there was a lot of comments about the hack and at one point you'd have heard of an Amish DJ at one point. i like Yeah, that's why you wore the hat. Come on, you wore the hat so that people can know. I got that hat for one dollar in a flea market in Santiago, Chile. It is not an Indiana Jones hat at all. And Indiana Jones' hat, because I'm a small dude, looks like crazy on me, because the fedora is so big. It's just a nice hat that I like to wear. you know I wear it out all the time. I wear that almost every day, in fact. you know I go into school wearing it, and it's just it's part of how I dress. I don't know what to say. Well, you dress like an archaeologist, apparently according to the gambling community. So do my colleagues. Yeah, no, that's the thing. it's It's knitted jumpers, I find, are very knitted jumpers and like walking shoes.
00:37:52
Speaker
but not when you're walking. I think that's that's the uniform, the uniform of the army of big archaeology. A lot of pockets. Oh, of course. Well, where are you going to put all your finds? Like, that's the thing, isn't it? but my Yeah, cargo trousers was lots of... po Oh, yeah. no it's And they're always dirty.
00:38:10
Speaker
I think that's one one time when i I started doing some commercial work and I met a guy and he's basically like, yeah, my wife lets me do this because every three years I buy her a new washing machine because the clothes get so dirty. and dirty um I do a lot of archaeology in online spaces and to some degree, I think it's better to just play the part. It's so much easier to just do that, have that kind of brand right there. It's simple. You're not trying to break but break the mold, you know try something different.
00:38:44
Speaker
it's it's It's just so much easier because my main goal is to talk about archaeology, so if I'm instantly recognizable as an archaeologist, that that clicks in people's brains, right?
Public Perception of Archaeologists
00:38:54
Speaker
it's sort of you know I teach this stuff with ancient Greek art, where there's very clear signifiers of people's identities in the the way this what they might be holding in ah in a painted scene on a pot, right? That kind of stuff.
00:39:06
Speaker
deities have these kind of really clear signifiers and it's much easier for us to just accept some of these cultural signifiers because then that immediately plants that context into people's brains, right, as opposed to trying to overcome that context. It's just they see that. They say archaeologists boom, they're ready to listen to archaeology, if you see what I mean. And so it just makes that a lot easier, is what I found when communicating with the public, rather than just trying to fight against it. You don't want to look like something you're not. As soon as you look like something you're not, then people are like, wait, is this really an archaeologist or is he like an entrepreneur or something like that? you know that Yeah, no that would be terrible. Absolutely awful. um Yeah. We're in no way.
00:39:49
Speaker
But I think it's it's also funny I find through the entire episode, I don't know if you realize that you're coming up against a wife guy being obviously a dad guy yourself, you know, was one of the key takeaways apparently from the comments was his wife guy versus dad guy.
00:40:06
Speaker
yeah exactly I also find that very, very interesting how it was like, I don't know if I'm sure you didn't really prep for that, but it's funny how that kind of within this new context, within this like thing that you're preparing for, you know, it kind of these little extra kind of layers come into it. Was there how How did you feel by the end of the conversation? Did you feel like you'd done what you could? How do you feel overall? Did it go better than you expected or as well as it could have gone?
00:40:41
Speaker
I'd say it went better than what I expected. I did not expect to end so strong with both Graham and Joe agreeing that cultural heritage should be funded. they've They made a very strong agreement on that, which I hope resonates with people because there's all these cuts going through cultural heritage in the UK, in the US, in university sectors, and in public sectors.
00:41:00
Speaker
And so and and elsewhere in the world and I hope that that maybe reached a new audience of people because of that and so I felt really strong about that in the end. But just in general, I mean, you know, I felt like it definitely went better than I expected. I did not expect to sort of have Joe agreeing with me on so many different things. He's known Graham forever. And it seemed like he came away from that really agreeing with a lot of the points that I brought to the table. And so that absolutely shocked me. I thought it would be more grilling and that grilling only lasted for like 40 minutes. And then the other, you know, almost four hours was was a chance where I could present real archaeology. And so I thought that was pretty dang cool. And the responses I've seen online, I mean, yeah, you don't want to read the comments, but if you go to places like the Joe Rogan subreddit and all the comments there, or even the Graham Hancock subreddit, there's a lot of people that have come around from being Graham Hancock fans to recognizing the merits of actual archeological archaeological research, interpretation methods, and stuff like that. i've had
00:42:07
Speaker
I don't know how many hundreds of of of DMs on Twitter that were 90% positive. you know When I wrote my Twitter thread about ancient apocalypse, I received almost as many Twitter DMs, but they were all negative.
00:42:20
Speaker
they were basically You you woke archaeologists This was like 90% positive Congratulations. You did a great job and about half of them were people who were Former Graham Hancock fans who now said but ah some of them said now I'm a fan of both you and Graham Hancock doesn't quite make sense to me but fair enough that's better than nothing others about the vast majority of them were Look, I really expected you to come off looking like a fool since I've been reading and following Graham Hancock forever. And in the end, you really showed us what what real archeological archaeologists are doing. And so that really gives me some hope. I didn't expect that. I expected more to plant a flag here.
00:43:00
Speaker
that would hopefully deter people who are not already enamored by Graham Hancock from becoming Graham Hancock fans. So I did not expect to have so many hundreds. Maybe I've seen over a thousand messages in public posts from former Hancock fans saying they've come around. And so that I did not expect. In that sense, I think it went much better because I would never have expected to actually make a dent in his actual fan base.
00:43:26
Speaker
And it does go to show they do claim that they're open-minded, and clearly a lot of them are. They're willing to listen and evaluate based on the merits of the evidence they have in front of them. And for that, they all deserve a lot of credit for for doing so. And I hope that maybe you know I try to advertise you know the Archaeological Podcast Network and a bunch of different YouTube channels and different podcast channels. And so I hope that that will lead to more attention from real archaeology creators to try to, you know, this audience is interested in archaeology. That's one of the reasons I did it. It's a place where there is a genuine interest in what we do, and they don't really get a chance to hear archaeologists unedited, which was another big reason I chose to do it. I would i knew I wouldn't be edited strongly there, as archaeologists often are in the media. And so it was a unique opportunity to kind of reach this audience that's interested
00:44:14
Speaker
and not be clipped out of context and this kind of stuff. And in that sense, I think it really paid off. That was one of my big goals. But I didn't expect to hit so many of his fans. That was a real cherry on top, if you see what I mean. And that was cool. Yeah. I think actually the the thing about it, I think it's curiosity. And I think that actually, funny enough, I think that is one thing that Graham Hancock does engender is the idea of curiosity and not just taking things at face
Curiosity, Evidence, and Historical Claims
00:44:41
Speaker
value. Yeah. You know, where he talks about like,
00:44:44
Speaker
oh, we need to explore beyond the what's accepted as the norm. And I kind of, to an extent, agree with that, because I don't think we should be like locked into anything particular. But as you pointed out with your evidence that you came to the show with, it has to be based on something. I kind of felt that, yeah you know especially with regards to the percentage of coastlines excavated, you know i mean what point would Graham be happy with? Is it like 10%? Is it 40%? Is it like 90%? But when we get to 90%, he's like, yes, but it could be in the last 10%. It could be the last 1%, not 0.1%. You know, the thing is, and then he was talking at one point, I picked up on this, and he mentioned about the seven sages or something like that. And I was like,
00:45:31
Speaker
if I'm trying to think about how archaeology could trace ephemeral like ephemeral traces of seven people in the world 10,000 years ago, I think we're nigh on impossible. we We cannot deal with that, because even like if it you know like we don't talk about dinosaurs here, but if we were to talk about fossilisation, fossilisation alone, we get millions of fossilized pieces from, you know, like very far ah long ago, like, you know, dinosaurs, you know, pre dinosaurs and stuff like that. But that's a tiny fraction of the ones that were in the right place at the right time to be fossilized. The fact that we get things like footprints, I mean, those are a couple of footprints out of the billions of footprints that humans have made over the last 10,000 years. So to try and track down such a small group of people,
00:46:24
Speaker
so many tens of thousands of years ago, it's now impossible. I just i think the standard of evidence necessary is it's it's impossible, you know? I think that's one of his goals, is to create explanations for why there's no evidence. That's what he does and spends a lot of time doing. And so I think that that's something we need to reject immediately. we have to We're not there to look for arguments for why there's no evidence.
00:46:48
Speaker
If we are, we need positive evidence for that. like I study taphonomy, why certain soil conditions might not have bones, so we study the soils to demonstrate that. yeah But let's let's also be explicit. like Because we study taphonomy, we know what doesn't stay there either because you know highly acidic soils will will mean that you know it's things like bone, for example, will not remain, but things like wood and plant remains are retained. So we actually have an explanation that we can prove and test, and we can take that explanation elsewhere. The the problem that I think we all have, well, with archeologists have with Graham's stuff is that
00:47:26
Speaker
There's no analogy or there's no other way of finding this information out. Archaeologists, as you will say, don't just take one piece of evidence and extrapolate from that. We look for other pieces of evidence that can correlate together. you know When we look at pollen, we're not just looking at pollen. We're looking at also the soil structure, the geology, so that we can understand the types of soils that these plants would have lived in so that we can correlate those things together. And I think that's a really important thing that I noticed was you know Graham Hancock had amazing pictures you know taken by himself. And it was like, look at this. And now we're going to do this place. Look at this. And now we're going to this place. Look at this. I'm like, that's great. They're beautiful photos. They're really cool. But the the thing is,
00:48:16
Speaker
you know, like, we, and archaeologists don't just go to a place and say, look at this, and then they go to another place, look at this. Don't they look similar? You know, that's right it's very hard to debunk that, because it's like, does that look like architecture to you? And I'm like, no, it doesn't. But how do you explain that other than the fact that I've seen thousands and thousands of examples of archaeological architecture, or that stone tool from Gunung Padang, stone tool, in quotes, scare quotes,
00:48:41
Speaker
You know, because it doesn't look anything like the thousands and thousands of stone tools that we have, millions really. And so that's because it's unique, right? And so it's just like that's something that that's why we can't rely on debunking, because it's just they're just going to keep pulling out those things.
00:48:58
Speaker
And so it's just we got to keep moving the conversation forward. And you know that was my prep in a sense, was to make sure I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about and exactly what I didn't want to talk about and to just keep getting back to what I wanted to talk about in a very informed, clear manner. right And so yeah that was always my goal to try to get away from those things. Because how do you demonstrate to people that have not seen thousands of examples of architecture that that's not architecture? The only way to do that is for them to see thousands of examples of real architecture, if you see what I mean. and so Yeah. Yeah.
Future Content Creation and Audience Engagement
00:49:30
Speaker
I think you've mentioned quite a few times that you do YouTube channel because you're, you know, obviously that's what you do and you have a YouTube channel. How do you feel that this experience might change or augment the kind of videos or how you do your videos? Do you feel like there's lessons learned here?
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I need to think about that actually more explicitly. Right now we have some content that we recorded beforehand, like an interview with the underwater Stone Age archaeologists, for example, that I didn't want to release because of the fact that I didn't want to tip my hand on on what I was going to go in with. So I don't know. I need to think about that. I'd like to try to produce a few more, say, semi-professional videos. Me and my my partner, my wife, Yoni, have been ah working to transition from X to YouTube over the last year because of Elon Musk taking over X. We wanted to transition towards YouTube anyway with the outreach we were doing. and so she's been
00:50:19
Speaker
learning video editing. She's already very good at graphic design, and so some of that is to deploy some of that knowledge and, you know, watching what other people do with podcasts and YouTube channels. I had not paid enough attention to that before thinking about this shift. You know, I have my own research I'm doing too, so it's just like... All that kind of stuff. But I think it's exciting for me because it seems like, surprisingly, now like i my YouTube subscribers doubled from 4,200 to like 9,000. And so it's like I clearly have some momentum right now to try to share real archeology, to try to advertise other channels at the same time, and to try to build up this ecosystem that all of you all have been helping create for so many years. And so I think that that's important to try to
00:51:02
Speaker
distribute as many of these fans as possible across our ecosystem to make it more popular. And I think that's a good thing. I think me appearing on different podcasts will help with that. I think other people giving shout outs around will help with that. And I think we can try to drag more people to understanding what real archaeology is. I mean, I'm from the US, even though I'm in Wales now.
00:51:21
Speaker
And what you see on TV is just so shit. It's just you know it's it's it's it's such a bad representation of archaeology. And so I think that we need to just get more people to realize what we actually do in the 21st century, the kinds of questions we ask, what actually happens.
00:51:37
Speaker
you know, the difference between CRM and and and and academic archaeology, all these kinds of things that people I think would be interested in, but it's just somehow never make it into the press very often. And so I think that that's important. And that's my hope to try to spin this as in as much of a positive direction as I can for myself, but also for the larger community of people. Yeah. Definitely, definitely. So if people are interested in seeing your videos or even reading your academic output, where can they find your stuff online?
Finding Flint Dibble's Work Online
00:52:06
Speaker
Yeah, so my YouTube channel is Archeology with Flint Dibble. My social media handle is always Flint Dibble. My academic stuff is on ResearchGate or academia dot.edu. At least the stuff that I can put there. Yeah, but if if you shoot me a message on ResearchGate, I'm happy to share the stuff that's not on there. It's easier if you shoot me a message through ResearchGate because it's set up to do that.
00:52:25
Speaker
but but yeah yeah but But yeah, so that that's how you can find my stuff. I have more articles coming out, and I expect to do a good number of YouTube videos over the next few months to try to capitalize on this. I have a scripted video on Atlantis we've been putting together, um which should be really good. We have some voice actors and some animation, and it's kind of about Plato and and how he's a liar, let's say, to try to get that expressed very clearly. And then I have a few other YouTube ideas and interviews that I expect to do in particular. yeah That's great. Thank you very, very much for taking the time out today. And I wish you all the best. advice Thank you so much Tristan. Yeah. Thank you.
00:53:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment in and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:53:32
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.