#flint dibble

There is something SO fucking sobering about a man like Joe Rogan calling an archeologist fighting stage four cancer, "the physical embodiment of what [he doesn't] like about academia," and a, "weak man."

Flint Dibble, the cancer patient archeologist in question, is a very cute man. Like any degree of physical tole the illness has taken on that poor man's body really hasn't robbed him of any physical charms-- outside of giving him a bit of a dad bod. Which I know to many man-likers, if anything, is a bonus. He also showed up looking dapper as hell in a very nice suit to Joe's podcast that day. Lookin' fly af. Again, in the middle of battling cancer. If anyone has an excuse to look like shit all the time it's a cancer patient-- which my guy certainly did not.

And not to be crass here but-- who wouldn't fuck an archeologist? Am I weird or is that not like, one of the only high academia fields that's also like-- inherently sexy? Like being a Rockstar? Maybe I'm just Alan Grant-pilled, but.

I swear. The bitches love 'em bones. Am I fucking wrong?

Where as Joe, on top of being a fucking podcaster and useful idiot literal mouth piece for the establishment-- he looks like a man that is 100% penis. Sorry to body shame, but he started it. Like an actual dick-man.

These fucking manosphere men are that fucking diluted-- they think their goddamn gym gains beat out being a literal scholar and a gentleman-- who got da bones.

You wanna talk weak men Joe? You, the fucker than won't stop pissing and crying now that even Austin Texas is calling you a facist for the Nazi you got elected? And NO dino bones to show for it!?

Shut the fuck up Rogan. Dibble's got more riz in the freckles on his face than you have in your whole body. You got zero bitches and zero fucking bones Joe.

“The recent disagreement on The Joe Rogan Experience—between journalist Douglas Murray on one hand and Rogan and comedian Dave Smith on the other—has exposed a problem with the populist media ecosystem: the casual normalisation and celebration of opinions untethered to knowledge. In what follows, I offer eight brief reflections on this trend and its hazards.

I. Ortega y Gasset and The Revolt of the Masses

Ortega y Gasset’s La Rebelión de las Masas offered one of the most enduring diagnoses of modernity’s afflictions. The Spanish philosopher identified the emergence of the “mass man”—not merely the working class, but any individual who believed that competence was unnecessary for opinion. The señorito, a term he used with stinging irony, is the self-satisfied amateur who regards his ignorance not as a defect to be corrected, but as a virtue to be celebrated.

In the world of populist podcasting, this archetype is frequently given centre stage in the name of heterodoxy. When Dave Smith declares his right to discuss Israeli-Palestinian history without deeply studying it, or when Joe Rogan defends such expressions as authentic and valuable purely for being unfiltered, they manifest the worst tendencies of the señorito.

Rogan’s open-door policy is not problematic in itself, but the framing of every viewpoint as equally valid—regardless of depth or rigour—aligns chillingly with Ortega’s vision of an anti-intellectual cultural slide. “The characteristic of the hour,” Ortega warned, “is that the mediocre soul, recognising itself as mediocre, has the audacity to assert the rights of the mediocre.” He foresaw our dilemma—when the only qualification for being heard is the will to speak.

II. Douglas Murray: Misunderstood Defender of Discernment

Douglas Murray’s position is easily caricatured by populists as “elitist” in our “everything goes” cultural moment. But his intervention on Rogan’s podcast was not a demand for censorship, it was a call for standards. Murray understands the need to distinguish between freedom of speech and the mere pretence of knowledge and understanding. His frustration was not directed at Smith personally, but at a broader phenomenon: the rise of what Atlantic contributor and former international-relations specialist Tom Nichols has called “the death of expertise” in his book of the same name.

Murray’s critics mistake rigour for suppression. But to argue that not everyone is qualified to speak on nuclear war or genocide is not to deny freedom—it is to protect meaning. Murray is not defending his own position, he wants to prevent the intellectual commons from being flooded by unchecked performative ignorance. He was protesting a mode of discourse that rewards spectacle over substance. His critique should be understood as a defence of a fragile ecosystem—where ideas must compete not only for attention, but for coherence and truth.

III. Camus: The Rebel and the Moral Weight of Speech

Populist podcasters and their guests like to present themselves as vital voices of rebellious dissent in a media environment of stultifying and frequently mistaken consensus. But Albert Camus taught us that rebellion must be bound by ethics. In The Rebel, Camus distinguished between rebellion as a noble affirmation of justice, and revolt as mere destruction. Similarly, when we provide someone with a platform to speak with authority about topics they do not fully understand, regardless of context or consequence, we risk tipping from noble dissent into a form of discursive anarchy.

Speech, in this context, is an ethical act. In a world where misinformation fuels division, bad-faith arguments on massive platforms become acts of sabotage. Dave Smith’s uninformed claims about Jewish identity and geopolitics do not constitute an anti-establishment rebellion, they just constitute noise. Douglas Murray’s stance channels Camus’s ethic of measured resistance. It is not a reactionary suppression of free voices, it is a reaffirmation of the idea that speech must bear the moral weight of its consequences.

IV. Wittgenstein: Language, Limits, and Intellectual Honesty

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers a quiet but firm critique of the kind of discourse that now proliferates online. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he concludes: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This is not a call for censorship either, it is a call for intellectual humility—a principle now under siege.

Rogan’s show often mistakes verbal freedom for conceptual clarity. But Wittgenstein would have urged caution: when language is unmoored from understanding, it ceases to communicate and becomes theatre. The words may remain familiar, but the grammar of truth is lost.

By speaking without adequate preparation on matters of life and death—war, genocide, and ideology—guests like Smith cheapen the value of discourse. Wittgenstein would have called this a misuse of language and a betrayal of its seriousness.

V. Zylberberg: The Ethics of Not Knowing

Jacques Zylberberg argued that a speaker acquires moral weight when their words reach an audience. Public speech—particularly on massive platforms—creates ripples that extend beyond the moment. Ignorant speech to large audiences is not just an intellectual failure, it is an ethical failure as well.

Zylberberg was not just troubled by the ease with which falsehoods spread, he wanted to show that their transmission becomes socially sanctified through repetition and popularity. In this framework, Joe Rogan’s defence of “just asking questions” is suspect. It is a rhetorical device cloaking epistemic negligence in the garb of curiosity. Murray’s insistence on accountability is restorative. It demands that public intellectuals be stewards of understanding, not amplifiers of confusion.

VI. The Seduction of the Uninformed Opinion

The allure of uninformed opinion lies in its convenience. It demands no reading, no translation, no challenge to one’s prior assumptions. It is democratic in the most corrosive way: it replaces competence with confidence, and inquiry with assertion.

In the podcasting world, this dynamic is dangerous. Influence is not proportional to insight. Popularity is not merit. A well-framed falsehood reaches more ears than a nuanced truth. Murray’s position is unpopular precisely because it asks us to slow down. To read. To reflect. To think. To acknowledge what we do not know. In an attention economy, virtues like these are seen as liabilities. And yet they are the very foundations of a thinking society.

VII. Toward a Culture of Discernment

To recover a meaningful public sphere, we must not only protect speech, we must also be able to judge it. Discernment does not require suppression. It requires listening with care, with criteria, and with context. The elevation of every opinion to equal stature is not egalitarian—it is nihilistic. Douglas Murray’s protest is a signal of intellectual health. It is a boundary marker—a reminder that not all speech is equal, and that judgment is not exclusionary but essential.

VIII. The Courage to Speak Well or Not at All

So, let this be the call: not for silence, but for courage. The courage to say “I do not know.” The courage to wait before speaking. The courage to study before opining. And above all, the courage to stand, as Douglas Murray has done, against the flattening of discourse and the tyranny of opinionated ignorance.

In honouring Ortega, Camus, Wittgenstein, and Zylberberg, we do not retreat from free speech—we advance it. But we advance it into maturity. Into responsibility. Into the discipline without which thought becomes spectacle and truth becomes fashion. Let us not confuse the freedom to speak with the freedom to mislead. Let us defend not only the right to speak, but the duty to mean something when we do.”

“The split between Murray and Rogan over Israel also reveals a deeper fissure across the American right. Murray believes that the United States has a duty to safeguard freedom and democracy abroad through military action, including support for its allies. Rogan, like Vice President J. D. Vance, is skeptical of this principle in general, and (unlike Vance) unconvinced by its particular application in Gaza.

This crack runs right down the anti-woke sphere, which includes other members of what was once called the “intellectual dark web.” The conservative Substacker Andrew Sullivan has repeatedly criticized The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss, for what he sees as its reluctance to stand up for the free-speech rights of anti-Israel activists. Two of the most influential voices in tech, the investor Paul Graham and the podcaster turned Trump crypto czar David Sacks, have also publicly clashed over the issue.

(…)

This is the crux of the argument between Murray and Rogan: Does the latter’s huge success and influence confer any responsibility or duty on him to patrol the borders of allowable discourse on his show? Rogan says no—he’s just a regular guy who never asked for any of this. His critics retort that his commitment to provocative conversations and dangerous ideas has made him reflexively anti-mainstream, pushing him toward conspiracism.

Instead of making the eminently supportable accusation that the media and the scientific establishment both make mistakes from time to time, Rogan now disparages expertise as a concept. In the episode, Murray admitted that he has struggled to listen to Cooper’s podcasts, because “it’s pretty hard to listen to somebody who says: I don’t know what I’m talking about, but now I’m going to talk.” He then attacked Dave Smith, saying that Smith does the same thing: “Dave’s a comedian, but he’s now mainly talking about Israel.”

(…)

The encounter with Murray, then, exposes the limits of Rogan’s just-asking-questions pose, as well as the problem with delegating foreign-policy discussions to comedians such as Smith, a co-host of Legion of Skanks (tagline: “The most offensive podcast on Earth”). The podcast circuit likes to portray wokeness as decadent—a pursuit of college students, affluent feminists, and activists with no real problems—but this exchange reveals something even darker about its approach. Beyond decadence, this is nihilism: The Roganverse’s “lol, nothing matters” approach to life is possible only for people living comfortable lives in a prosperous democracy, where the worst possible crime is to be a buzzkill.

“I don’t think that the world is a studio in Texas, and we just riff endlessly and things don’t have much meaning,” Murray said afterward, adding: “I think there are things that very much matter, and if they matter, then you put in the work.”

(…)

“How is he in all these wars?” Dillon asked of Murray. “Can I just go to wars?” Yes, Tim Dillon, you can. That’s what all of those people on your television with war reporter written under their name have been doing. In the olden days, we had a tradition where people who wanted to find out stuff spoke directly with people who had firsthand information. You guys laughed at it and said that it was dumb and elitist. Dave Smith, meanwhile, has adopted the fact he’s “neva beeeeeeeeen” as a badge of honor.

The whole episode has revealed a major break between the members of the Roganverse who still have an attachment to journalism—such as Murray, who is an associate editor of The Spectator, a conservative magazine—and those who regard all information sources as basically equal. “The incentive structures and thought patterns we would typically associate with the entertainment business are not the same as those we would expect to see in journalism or academia,” Kisin wrote in his perceptive post on the controversy. In other words, don’t get your opinions on Israel, or anything else, entirely from stand-up comics, Bigfoot forums, and men named Dave.”

“Archaeology is having this moment, let's say culturally, within this climate of anti-science and anti-intellectualism that exists in our 21st century world. It’s really heightened right now. I think some of it is that we are all coming to grips with the future and the present. And so, therefore, we look to the past. The past becomes a touchstone for these kinds of culture wars type topics, let's say. I think that's part and parcel of it.

I also think that for this kind of conspiratorial audience, for many of these individuals you mentioned, the Atlantis lost civilization type narrative is their version of entertainment. And so you can turn on Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix, and it's extremely entertaining. Or you can tune into one of the many times Graham Hancock has been on Joe Rogan. Every time he's on, you can look at the comments and everybody's like, "another old-school Rogan episode," where they can talk about this kind of fantastical stuff that's entertaining. And many of the people listening believe it, and many don't. A lot of studies actually show that 50 percent of Americans, give or take—ranges as low as 40, as high as 60 percent—believe in this kind of lost civilization. So it's a very prevalent belief. Certainly, some of the people listening or reading believe this, and some of the people they know believe this. So it's a very common belief that people have. That becomes an issue in many ways because it's so entertaining, compelling, and mysterious, and it's attractive right now because we're interested in history, and it then ties into this anti-intellectualism, anti-science, anti-expertise culture that exists there.

It acts as a kind of gateway into more subversive beliefs, without a doubt. If you follow some of the larger accounts that promote this on Twitter or X, or on YouTube, within the comments, it's just filled with a wide range of harmful beliefs, like disbelief in climate change, for example, or anti-vaccination, or boilerplate antisemitism or white supremacy. It's not to say that everybody who believes in Atlantis has these beliefs, but among the communities that are there, there's a prevailing acceptance of these other beliefs as well.

And so I think that's a big problem because it does prime people to start distrusting experts and to start believing these kinds of pseudoscientific quacks, which in many ways, Carlson and Hancock are. They adopt the language and mannerisms of archeologists, but they don't understand them in the least.

(…)

Yes, exactly. But I do want to bring it back. He brought up Clovis first as this example of archeologists who were not believed by the larger field and then eventually they proved themselves right. But those archeologists were, first, archeologists, unlike Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson, and second, they never claimed they were better than other archeologists. They continued in their jobs. They continued publishing in peer review papers until they amassed a critical body of evidence that convinced pretty much everybody in the field.

And so, that's the point. They weren't appealing to the public. They weren't saying, hey, you don't know XYZ about archaeology, tell my colleagues that I'm right. It's like, no! The entire point of science is you only convince your colleagues! You have to convince your colleagues you're right. That's how you get something published. That's how you get in textbooks, that's how you get on TV. You are the one who makes a discovery in a way that is convincing enough to convince your colleagues.

We all understand this challenge because, to be honest, every single peer-reviewed paper we publish is something new. We're not just publishing the same old ideas. We're always looking at new evidence or using new methods or we have new questions or we have a new test that we put together. That's what scholarship is. And so this idea of just appealing to the public with this stigmatized language, that should always be a red flag because the public doesn’t have the experience and the knowledge to vet those claims. So if somebody's coming to you to vet a historical narrative, that's a big red flag, because they need to convince their colleagues and the experts who know the evidence.

(…)

Exactly. Science is based off falsifiability. You know that you can falsify a theory, and it might not be that you can right now, but you can do it. What many pseudoscientists, Hancock and Carlson included, try to do is to show why their theory is not falsifiable. So they go to great lengths to show why there might not be evidence from this civilization to say that you can't disprove me—it's not possible to disprove me. And so that, again, should be another big red flag. And therefore, since you can't disprove me, it's also plausible, and we can entertain the idea. This kind of sleight of hand, this rhetoric of trying to get you to look in different places and not to pay attention to the known evidence we do have and how we interpret it, is something they very clearly rely on. And that also then gives people a bad impression of, first, history and how it's done, and second, science, and promotes this kind of anti-science attitude.”

Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble

Graham Hancock, formerly a foreign correspondent for "The Economist," has been an international bestselling author for more than 30 years with a series of books, notably "Fingerprints of the Gods," "Magicians of the Gods" and "America Before," which investigate the controversial possibility of a lost civilization of the Ice Age destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. Graham is the presenter of the hit Netflix documentary series "Ancient Apocalypse."

https://grahamhancock.com

/ grahamhancockdotcom

/ graham__hancock