One should mention about that particular date, 11,600. Well, it's incredibly important. It's an incredibly important date because the Younger Dryas begins 12,800 years ago with a cataclysm, with a puzzling, mysterious rise in sea level at the same point, 1,000 years of freezing temperatures, mass extinctions of animal species all over the world, and then 11,600 years ago, global temperature shoots up.
The last of the ice caps collapse into the sea. Sea level rises enormously. That is the date that work starts at Gobekli Tepe, and that is a point I've made many times, but it's really worth making because archaeologists roll their eyes every time you say the word Atlantis. But that is precisely the date that Plato, which is the earliest surviving reference to Atlantis, that's precisely the date he gives for the destruction of Atlantis. 11,600 years before our time, he puts it this way, that his ancestor Solon...
visited Egypt and we know about that visit, it's historically recorded. That visit to Egypt was in 600 BC and there Solon claimed to have been told by Egyptian priests about this great advanced civilization that once existed but that angered the gods and was destroyed in an enormous flood. And Solon asked those Egyptian priests, when did this happen? And they said, oh, 9,000 years ago.
Well, do the math. That's in 600 BC. That's 9,000 years before 600 BC.
We call that 9,600 BC. That's 11,600 years ago. That's exactly the date of the end of the Younger Dryas, and it's exactly the date of what is called Meltwater Pulse 1b, one of the biggest single rises overnight in sea level that ever occurred. So if Plato made it up, it's really weird.
that he picked a date that is precisely a date that coincides with the latest geological evidence on cataclysmic sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. Peter Robinson Could be a coincidence, but... Trevor Burrus A pretty good one.
Peter Robinson I will mention, I did a two-parter on all of the deep...what Graham's just talking about and the geological evidence that confirms or refutes Plato's account. And it's available on my website. for download and it's like seven hours seven hours of detailed unpacking. You go deep bro, you go deep. And you see the academics have never bothered to do this because they in their pride and in their arrogance they just say oh we know that play that the play-doh just made it up but it's just a fantasy they don't know that and there's people right like Randall coming from the outside who are actually doing the legwork that makes us think about all this again.
plenty of evidence that there were many sites like this that were thought to be just legend and myth, like Troy, for instance, that has now been proven to be an actual real city that mimics the initial descriptions of it, the historical descriptions of it. We should never dismiss myths. We should always listen to them.
They're the memory bank of our species, and they may be expressed in symbolic language. There may be wonderful stories built around them, but at the core... It's factual information. And what better way to ensure that factual information is passed down to the future than to record it in a fantastic story that people will pass on.
People love telling stories. And they don't even need to understand what the heart of the story is. As long as it's a great story, they're going to keep on passing it down to the future. So I think myth is very important. And that's something that we do in my Netflix series is we look at the myths.
The story of Atlantis is not alone. There are thousands of traditions from all around the world speaking of a global flood that destroyed a former civilization that brought to an end a golden age. With all this physical evidence and with all these myths, are there more and more people that are accepting this or exploring this with curiosity and open-mindedness now? I would say yes.
And one of the things that makes me confident that that's happening is because I am getting... A lot of emails and communications from people, young people going, you know what, I was watching your stuff and Graham's stuff, I've decided I'm going to go into geology. I mean, I've gotten dozens, or I'm going to go into paleontology or archaeoastronomy or archaeology.
So just the fact that I'm getting those kinds of communications from people, every time I get one, that's encouraging to me. Because I think it's the old... But the old axiom that sometimes in order to evolve past an entrenched theory, the gatekeepers have to pass away and a new generation has to come along who's a little more willing to look outside that dogmatic framework. Well, also, if you are a young archaeologist and you're trying to carve your way in the world, what better way than to explore this with tons of evidence that's very...
Very controversial theory that's been dismissed. Takes courage, though. Takes courage on the part of those archaeologists because they can lose any hope of promotion if they touch ideas like this. Archaeology is a very restricted discipline. If you don't copy what your professor says, if you go off on a tangent, they'll cut you off.
There's so many people who've done such great work in archaeology that doesn't fit with the mainstream and they just get isolated by their colleagues. I'm hopeful. I really am. And one of the things that gives me hope is Brian Murorescu's, the reception of his material, that book, The Immortality Key, which is fantastic, which points to real- Which I wrote the foreword to. Yes.
And you did that podcast with us remotely. Yeah. When we did that and he expressed all of this information, we talked about these ancient clay vessels that show clear evidence of- Some sort of psychedelic that was mixed in with wine that was probably the origins of a lot of these, a lot of the, like, even democracy, like the Enlightenment.
A lot of it came from these meetings and people came from all over the world to participate in these rituals. This is now being widely accepted and it's a field of study at Harvard. Yeah, and you know where, let's think about it. If you're... If you're locked, this is one of the reasons why psychedelics are being so successful in healing people with profound depression.
Because what is profound depression otherwise that you're locked in a very narrow frame that you just can't escape from? And what psychedelics seem to do is they break that lock and they allow a kind of openness to come in. and new thoughts to come in. So it's not surprising that psychedelics revolutionized the ancient world. And I'm absolutely convinced that there isn't a religion in the world, and this is going to annoy a lot of people, that there isn't a religion in the world that didn't begin with experiences in altered states of consciousness.
And when we talk about a lost civilization, I believe that that was a civilization that grew out of shamanism and for which altered states of consciousness were fundamental. been taught to despise altered states of consciousness in our society today. We're supposed to just be alert problem solvers and not doing anything else.
But it's out of altered states of consciousness that the real creativity comes and that changes in mindset come and that people can break free from previous restrictions and move in new directions.