@Samuel it's so nice when you find a podcast like that and have to gobble the information up again. I did the same and spent a couple hours googling things about Naval and his projects including on Farnam Street.
I did that with another recent JRE show, #1284 from April of this year with Graham Hancock (post-Hiawatha impact in Greenland found). He's out there at times but he's obviously well-educated on many topics related to archaeology and is really pushing boundaries as a journalist based on new very interesting evidence about human history (Gobekli Tepe, the Amazon and terra preta and Melanesian DNA, Sphinx water erosion, Topper, the San Diego 130,000 year find, Denisovans, Bluefish Caves, etc.). I really like the idea that humans aren't always necessarily progressing as a species (which was something I, and it seems traditional archaeology, assumed). Most of us accept that there have been multiple mass extinction events many millions of years ago so it doesn't seem too much of a stretch that there may have been minor events (but still devastating as it pertains to hominids advancing) that perhaps don't eliminate that many species but do take time to rebuild numbers.
I hope he has Randall Carlson on again soon, what really happened during the Younger Dryas period will be pretty important as continental shelves, the Sahara, and the Amazon are explored more.