In this conversation, recorded in late 2020 while the two were writing The Epic of Humanity, Billy Carson and Matthew LaCroix argue that the destruction and hiding of ancient sites, texts and artifacts is one of the main ways a society loses control of its own story. Interviewed by Jay Campbell, they move from how the book began to the losses at Bamiyan, Palmyra and Nineveh, then to the Nephilim of the Book of Enoch, the megaliths of Baalbek, and the idea that humanity is an experiment in free will.
Part of the topic is not in dispute. The Bamiyan Buddhas, the temples of Palmyra and the gates of Nineveh were deliberately destroyed within the last twenty-five years. What Carson and LaCroix add is an interpretation of why it keeps happening and what the lost sites might have shown, and separating the documented record from that reading is the useful way to watch the video.
What the video covers
How The Epic of Humanity began (from the start)
Carson explains that he met LaCroix through the late Gerald Clark and came to respect him as a researcher who works from primary sources. In Carson's words, LaCroix "went and read the tablets", along with the scriptures, cylinder scrolls and papyri. After meeting in Maine, the two agreed to co-write a book. LaCroix describes the format: alternating chapters that build on each other, ancient-text excerpts throughout, a timeline reaching back 200,000 years, and tables of gods and their names. He says the first chapter alone quotes around six ancient sources, from the Pyramid Texts to Gnostic texts. The book was still being written at the time and has since been published.
Destroyed and lost heritage (from about 8 min)
Campbell asks what lies behind the destruction of ancient sites. Carson and LaCroix both read it as deliberate: in their view, sites that carry evidence of advanced ancient civilisations are targeted because that evidence does not fit the accepted timeline. LaCroix traces the pattern back to the Roman Empire after Constantine, which he says destroyed temples and texts that contradicted the new state religion.
He gives three examples. Palmyra in Syria, he says, mixes Roman building with much older work, as he believes Baalbek does. The Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan held two colossal Buddhas cut into a cliff at over 8,000 feet; LaCroix links rock-cut monuments of this kind to the Indus Valley, which he identifies with Meluhha in the Sumerian text Enki and the World Order, and argues the statues are older than the culture usually credited with them. That dating is his claim. What is documented is that the Taliban blew up both statues in 2001; the larger stood about 55 metres (roughly 180 feet), the smaller about 38 metres. Nineveh in Iraq, he notes, was home to the Library of Ashurbanipal, the largest cache of cuneiform tablets ever found. ISIS destroyed parts of Palmyra in 2015 and demolished Nineveh's Mashki and Adad gates in 2016. Campbell also raises the National Museum of Iraq, looted in April 2003 during the fall of Baghdad.
Taking away a people's history (from about 28 min)
Carson's answer to why this would be done is the core of his argument: "once you rob somebody of their true history, then you can control them." He applies it directly to African Americans, saying they were robbed of their ancestral history and left to rely on whatever version they were given. He adds that those who benefit from that control think in long spans of time: "they plan for millennia," while most people plan for the next paycheck.
He who controls the past (from about 36 min)
LaCroix builds on this with the line about controlling the past and the future, a version of the party slogan in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, though he does not name the source. He then points to anomalies he says the official story cannot explain: round drill holes at Abusir and elsewhere in Egypt, and long straight cuts on the granite blocks of the Valley Temple at Giza that he reads as the work of a large diamond-tipped saw. The tooling debate is covered in the article on Egyptian stone vases and drill cores.
The Nephilim, Mount Hermon and Baalbek (from about 43 min)
Campbell asks who the Nephilim were. Carson's view, drawn from his reading of the ancient tablets, is that the giants were not one group. Some bones may belong to Anunnaki, who could be killed; others were half-human demigod rulers placed after the flood as liaisons between the gods and humanity; others were malformed, including one-eyed giants. He connects this to the pre-flood kings of the Sumerian King List and the Emerald Tablets' account of civilisation being restarted in the land of Khem.
LaCroix, whose chapter of the book covers the Nephilim and figures such as King Og, turns to the Book of Enoch. He says 300 beings came and 200 of them fell; the text itself, at 1 Enoch 6, gives 200 Watchers descending on Mount Hermon, and the Book of Giants he mentions is a separate Aramaic work found at Qumran. He notes that Hermon lies in the same region as Baalbek, where single blocks weigh around 1,000 tons, far beyond the 50 tons a quarry truck carries; see Baalbek explained. He also cites the report from Magellan's voyage of giants in Patagonia over ten feet tall, nineteenth-century accounts of giant skeletons in burial mounds in Wisconsin and the Mississippi Valley, and the elongated skulls of Paracas, Peru, covered in the Paracas skulls explained.
The reptilian brain and an experiment in free will (from about 63 min)
Asked about the idea of reptilian consciousness, LaCroix reads the term mainly as the primitive part of the brain, the source of urges people keep battling, set against what he calls a divine spark. Drawing on cuneiform accounts of humans made as workers for the gods, he argues that humanity outgrew that purpose and that free will may make it far more important than it assumes, part of what he calls a great experiment in consciousness.
Entropy, the Yuga cycle and resonance (from about 80 min)
Carson closes with a cyclical view of history. "Everything moves from the ordered state to a disordered state," he says, and he places the present near the peak of the chaotic phase of the Yuga cycle, before a return to order. If enough people share the same resonant frequency of thought, he argues, the illusion breaks, like a wine glass shattered by a matched note. His most direct point is about the cycle itself. Having read more than a thousand texts, he says "I've never seen where it said you have to start over again", so the aim should be to sustain a golden age rather than repeat the loop.
Key takeaways
- The Epic of Humanity alternates chapters between Carson and LaCroix and is built around ancient-text excerpts.
- The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas (2001), parts of Palmyra (2015) and the gates of Nineveh (2016) is documented; the claim that these sites are older than their accepted dates is the speakers' interpretation.
- Carson's central argument is that removing a people's history makes them easier to control, and he applies it to African Americans' lost ancestral history.
- The Book of Enoch places 200 Watchers on Mount Hermon, which LaCroix links geographically to the megaliths of Baalbek.
- Carson reads history as cyclical but notes that no text he has read says civilisation must start over.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson treats ancient texts as records of real events rather than myth. The Sumerian King List, the Book of Enoch and the Emerald Tablets, which he has worked through in his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, describe for him a history in which non-human beings and their descendants ruled early civilisations, and the Nephilim belong to that history rather than to moral allegory. The longer case is laid out in who the Nephilim were.
His concern with destroyed sites follows from that. Losing the physical evidence and the texts leaves people dependent on the version of the past they are handed. That is why he frames The Epic of Humanity, now available on the books page, as an act of preservation, and why he insists that a cyclical history is not a sentence to repeat it.
What mainstream scholarship says
The destruction itself is not contested. The Taliban and ISIS carried out the demolitions openly, as iconoclasm and propaganda. Radiocarbon dating places the Bamiyan Buddhas around the sixth century CE, and Meluhha is generally identified with the Indus civilisation of the third and second millennia BCE, long before Buddhism, so scholars see no link between the two. At Baalbek, the Temple of Jupiter is dated to the Roman period; the trilithon blocks in its podium weigh roughly 800 tons each, and the 1,000-ton stones never left the quarry. Egyptologists since Flinders Petrie have attributed drill cores and saw cuts to copper tools used with sand abrasive.
The Book of Enoch is generally dated between the third and first centuries BCE and read as an expansion of the brief Nephilim passage in Genesis 6:1-4. No giant skeleton has been verified; the nineteenth-century newspaper reports were never backed by surviving remains, and some were hoaxes such as the Cardiff Giant. Antonio Pigafetta's account of Patagonian giants has been in print for centuries, and historians read it as exaggeration of the height of the Tehuelche people. The elongated Paracas skulls are explained by cranial binding in infancy. The Yugas belong to Hindu cosmology, and entropy in physics describes closed systems; applying either to modern history is interpretation rather than measurement.
Watch, read and go deeper
The Matthew LaCroix show on 4BK TV collects more of his conversations. The Anunnaki topic hub gathers Carson's work on the Sumerian texts and the gods of Mesopotamia. For the Watchers story in full, read the Book of Enoch explained.
Frequently asked questions
What is The Epic of Humanity?
The Epic of Humanity is a book co-written by Billy Carson and Matthew LaCroix. It tells the story of humanity through alternating chapters, quoting ancient texts throughout and setting events on a long timeline. It was in progress when this conversation was recorded in late 2020 and has since been published.
Who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas and when?
The Taliban destroyed the two Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan with explosives in March 2001. The statues, about 55 and 38 metres tall, had been carved into a cliff face around the sixth century CE.
How many Watchers came down on Mount Hermon in the Book of Enoch?
Chapter 6 of 1 Enoch says 200 Watchers descended on Mount Hermon and bound themselves by an oath before taking human wives. The separate Book of Giants, known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, expands on what happened to them.
Have giant human skeletons ever been found?
No giant skeleton has been verified by physical anthropologists. Accounts such as Pigafetta's Patagonian giants and nineteenth-century mound reports survive only as written descriptions, and some newspaper stories were hoaxes.
Sources mentioned
The speakers cite the Book of Enoch and the Book of Giants; the Sumerian text Enki and the World Order; the Sumerian King List; the Pyramid Texts; Gnostic texts; the Emerald Tablets, the subject of Carson's Compendium of the Emerald Tablets; Antonio Pigafetta's account of Magellan's voyage; Matthew LaCroix's The Stage of Time; and the work of Gerald Clark. Campbell mentions Pierre Sabak's Holographic Culture and The Murder of Reality, and the line about controlling the past comes from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Standard references include Nickelsburg and VanderKam's 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation and W. M. Flinders Petrie's The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh.
