#142 - Graham Hancock, Duncan Trussell

[0] Start recording.

[1] I should be it.

[2] Okay, how do I even begin this one?

[3] The internet has been a very fascinating thing for me in the many years that I've been on it.

[4] But one of the most fascinating things about it is the ability to get in touch with people that if you were younger, you know, like a long time ago, there was no chance I would be able to sit down with you and do a conversation.

[5] You would just be some, you know, author whose books I admired.

[6] but now, because of this crazy thing, this podcast, here we are sitting down.

[7] Graham Hancock has joined us.

[8] And if you don't know who Graham Hancock is, Graham Hancock is probably the one guy who's influenced my view of history more than anybody ever.

[9] It's from this book, Fingerprints of the Gods.

[10] And Fingerprints of the Gods is, what is it, so like five million copies or something crazy like that?

[11] We're not about that, yeah, yeah.

[12] It's an amazing book that basically challenges our view of history.

[13] And you have spent an enormous chunk of your life uncovering all these different structures and all these different monuments and all these different things that you attribute to a lost era of humanity.

[14] And one of my favorite terms that you use is that we're a species with hypnosis or excuse me with amnesia.

[15] With amnesia.

[16] Yeah.

[17] And that please tell me where how did all this get cracking?

[18] How did this get started for you?

[19] Well, everything has happened in my life has happened kind of by a series of accidents.

[20] I never planned out anything, except I kind of knew when I was young that I had one gift, which was some ability to write.

[21] And the other thing about me was, it's when all through my childhood, I always felt I was on the edge of things, not in the middle of things.

[22] Other people were in the middle.

[23] I was on the edge.

[24] I just always felt that way.

[25] And when I got through university, I kind of drifted towards writing, current affairs, journalism.

[26] And it was while following journalistic stories, my last journalistic role was as the East Africa correspondent for the economist, quite a serious newspaper.

[27] And I was based in Nairobi in Kenya, and I was covering wars and famines and politics and all of that stuff.

[28] and on my beat was Ethiopia.

[29] And I used to go to Ethiopia quite regularly.

[30] It was in the news a lot.

[31] And on one journey to Ethiopia, I flew into a city that at the time was in the middle of a war zone in a DC3 that kind of dived down out of the sky to avoid the machine gun nests in the surrounding hills and landed in the airport.

[32] And this was an ancient city called Axum.

[33] And it had incredible history.

[34] it had obelisks, it had a palace supposedly of the Queen of Sheba, had an ancient cathedral, the most ancient Christian cathedral in Africa, dating back to 300 after Christ.

[35] And in the grounds of that cathedral, in a chapel, outside the chapel, I meet a monk, and he tells me, in the conversation we have, that he's got the Ark of the Covenant in that chapel.

[36] This was, I had heard that the Ark of the Covenant was, important to Ethiopia, but now I'm sitting in front of a monk with cataracts in his eyes, and he's telling me behind him in that chapel, but I can't go there, is the Ark of the Covenant.

[37] And I said, you know, can I go?

[38] Can I see it?

[39] And he said, no, no, nobody can see it.

[40] Even the former emperors were never allowed to see the Ark of the Covenant.

[41] You know, the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie had come out only like a couple of years before this.

[42] This was in the early 80s.

[43] And so I left that place impressed by this man, but not really believing it.

[44] And then I started to look into it.

[45] And I discovered that actually Ethiopia is the only country in the world which has a living veneration, almost worship, of the Ark of the Covenant.

[46] Ethiopia has ancient Christianity, but it also has ancient Judaism.

[47] There's the Jewish community in Ethiopia called the Falashas.

[48] They call themselves the Beta Israel.

[49] How did they get there?

[50] They practice a very ancient form of Judaism.

[51] They don't have rabbis.

[52] They have priests.

[53] They perform sacrifice.

[54] Other Judaic peoples do not.

[55] It's like an Old Testament world frozen in the highlands of Ethiopia.

[56] So I started to get interesting.

[57] This is weird and this is exciting and what can I find out about this?

[58] Then I went to the academics and they said, ah, it's all rubbish.

[59] Those Ethiopians, they just made it up to make themselves look big.

[60] Okay, but then why is it the case that in every single church in Ethiopia, more than 20 ,000 churches, there's a replica of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies?

[61] What does it look like?

[62] Well, mostly it's a box, and sometimes actually they reduce the replica to simply two tablets, which are supposed to represent the tablets of stone inside the Ark of the Government.

[63] But the Ark of the Covenant is not a Christian object.

[64] It's a pre -Christian object.

[65] What's it doing in all these churches?

[66] Where is this all come from?

[67] Why do we have the Black Jews of Ethiopia practicing their very ancient form of Judaism?

[68] So I really started to dig, and I kind of, as the first time, I realized that you don't want to listen to academics all the time.

[69] Professor X and Dr. Y may be very, very impressive people with their credentials, but they have prejudices, and they have a fixed view of the past, which they're going to stick to, come what may. And as I started to investigate this, this is what drew me out of current affairs and into ancient mysteries.

[70] I found that here was a real investigation, a story that had never been told, could this remote country in the Horn of Africa really have the Ark of the Covenant?

[71] And if so, how could it have got there?

[72] And I spent several years of my life trying to answer those questions.

[73] And by that time, by the time I got to the end of that investigation, I had left current affairs behind.

[74] You were hooked?

[75] I was hooked on the past.

[76] Did you ever wonder if you were going crazy?

[77] Like, here I am really investigating if some people in Ethiopia actually have some crazy thing from a book?

[78] No. It makes no sense.

[79] You really thought it was real?

[80] It wasn't that I thought it was real.

[81] I neither thought nor didn't think that.

[82] I was impressed by the Ethiopians themselves and I was impressed by the purity of their belief and the passion with which they held it.

[83] And the fact that here, after thousands of years, this object disappeared from the Bible at the time, well, around about 650 years before Christ.

[84] It's not mentioned again in the Bible after that.

[85] It vanishes.

[86] And yet here is its worship in 20th century Ethiopia today.

[87] How do we explain this?

[88] And as I dug deeper, I began to realize that actually there was a real possibility they did have the Ark of the Covenant and that it is connected to the mystery of the Ethiopian Jews.

[89] And that the story they themselves tell about it, which connects it, it's a very romantic and lovely story.

[90] They say, in brief, that the Queen of Sheba, famous Queen of Sheba, was an Ethiopian queen.

[91] And that she, when she traveled to Jerusalem to meet Solomon, which is described in the Bible, big episode in the, big episode in the, Bible.

[92] She didn't only exchange wisdom with him, she also exchanged bodily fluids, and she became pregnant with King Solomon's son, who was to be called Menelik, which actually means the son of the wise man. And pregnant, she left Jerusalem, returned to Ethiopia, gave birth to her son Menelik there.

[93] At the age of 20 or 21, he wanted to visit his famous father in Jerusalem.

[94] He traveled north, went to Jerusalem, spent a year there and at the end of the year contrived to steal the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem and take it off to Ethiopia.

[95] And there it's been ever since.

[96] That's the Ethiopian story.

[97] I believe behind that legend, there's a true history of how it really got there.

[98] And that's in the end what I ended up writing my first book of historical mysteries about, which was the sign of the seal.

[99] And wasn't the speculation about the Ark of the Covenant that it was some sort of a technological device that was actually radioactive.

[100] Yes.

[101] I got into that speculation myself at some length because as I started to investigate this subject, not only was the Ethiopian side of it fascinating and mysterious, but the object itself is quite extraordinary.

[102] I mean, it dominates the Bible at the beginning of the story.

[103] From the time there in Sinai, the Exodus, there's a tremendous role for the Ark of the Covenant and they follow it through the wilderness and it's marched around the city of Jericho.

[104] It knocks down the walls of Jericho.

[105] It's hugely important.

[106] The Temple of Solomon is built with only one function and that's to serve and this is a quote as an house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord that's the only reason that the Temple of Solomon's built it's like at a certain point it's got to be placed out of the public view it's always a dangerous object as they're carrying it it it strikes people dead if somebody touches it by chance bolt of fire comes out of it actually I mean Spielberg and the Indiana Jones movie the way they portrayed the ark was spot on how it's described in the old testament as an absolutely devastating deadly instrument so it's the the Israelites use it in battle it there's accounts of it flying into the air rushing towards the enemies of israel emitting a moaning sound they all fall down dead then there's a later account where the the philistines capture the ark of the covenant they take it off to the city of ashdod then they make the huge mistake of opening it and they treated like a tourist object people walk by and the bible says 50 ,000 died and how did they die cancerous tumors that's what's that's what's actually described in the in the bible so the arc of the covenant is supposed to contain within it the what's left of the 10 commandments correct that's what's supposed to be inside of it and also isn't there written upon by the finger of god himself if you if you take the old testament and that's and that they're the kind of power source of the arc of the covenant now what that power is I did get into some speculation on this.

[107] It seems obvious to me that at one level, the Ark of the Covenant is an out -of -place technology.

[108] It's a strange technology, which has presented itself in a surprising context where you don't expect to find it.

[109] And there it is.

[110] So I started to look into the background of this.

[111] Where did this come from?

[112] And where it comes from is Egypt.

[113] Moses is intimately connected with the Ark of the Covenant.

[114] Moses is raised in the household of the pharaoh in Egypt.

[115] He's groomed to be a future pharaoh.

[116] And then the falling out comes and he leaves with the children of Israel and builds the Ark of the Covenant in the Sinai.

[117] Now, if he was raised and groomed as a future Pharaoh, then he would have been a magician.

[118] He would have been versed in the high magic of ancient Egypt.

[119] And those guys could do virtually anything they set their minds to.

[120] I mean, anybody who can build the Great Pyramid of Egypt if it was built when we're told it was built.

[121] It's an extraordinary...

[122] Even if it was built before then.

[123] And for people who don't understand what you're talking about here, your premise, a big part of it is that there is somewhere around, what is it, 10 ,000 years ago, somewhere around then, towards the end of the last Ice Age, humanity was probably mostly wiped out or wiped out at a big way and we had to rebuild from there.

[124] We had to rebuild, and I believe that we lost a civilization at that time.

[125] An entire civilization.

[126] Which has not been recorded by history and that it went underwater with the rising sea levels.

[127] And what led me to this, the reason I became interested in pursuing that line of inquiry was the Ark of the Covenant, because it seemed to me like a piece of technology that was out of its place in history in the way that it was described.

[128] I'm not wishing to put down the spiritual aspects because they had.

[129] there.

[130] But there were definite technological aspects to this device.

[131] And then I had to ask myself, well, where could that knowledge have come from?

[132] And through Egypt, we then start to find that Egypt itself looks back to an older time.

[133] The ancient Egyptians didn't regard themselves as the beginning of their story.

[134] They regarded themselves as quite a late point in their story.

[135] And they look back to the time of the gods, which they called Zeptepe, the first time when there was a golden age.

[136] And they speak, and there are texts, the Edfu Building texts, which speak of the gods living on an island, a gigantic flood coming.

[137] Most of the gods are killed.

[138] Odd thing to happen to gods.

[139] And then they come and settle in Egypt.

[140] The survivors come and settle in Egypt.

[141] So Egypt is the product of an even far earlier civilization.

[142] But the history of Egypt goes back way, way further than people think it does.

[143] That's my view.

[144] That's my view.

[145] I support that view and I was astonished when you had Robert Schock and John Anthony West when they brought their final.

[146] about the erosion on the Temple of the Sphinx.

[147] They brought these findings to these academics and just the tone of their voice, the way they were approaching the information, the mocking attitude that they had of it.

[148] Well, where is this civilization you speak of?

[149] Because they're talking about a civilization that was possibly, what, 10 ,000 BC or something like that?

[150] Yeah, I would put the figure around about 10 ,500 BC.

[151] What people...

[152] If you don't know the story behind it, there's water erosion on...

[153] on the edge of the temple where the sphinx is done, that could only be attributed to thousands of years of rainfall.

[154] That's right.

[155] The last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was...

[156] This is the breakthrough work that John Anthony West and Robert Schock did.

[157] The initial observation came through John, who is an astonishingly knowledgeable man about ancient Egypt.

[158] He's not an official Egyptologist, but he spent his whole life working in ancient Egypt.

[159] And through his research and his background, he came to realize that the...

[160] erosion patterns on the sphinx are really odd.

[161] And he then went to Shock, Robert Schock at the University of Boston, who is a geologist and an open -minded one.

[162] And he said, would you come to Egypt with me and give me your geological opinion on this monument?

[163] So Shock went there, and it was immediately clear to him that this monument had been subjected to thousands of years of heavy rainfall at some point in its history.

[164] And that's where the mystery begins, because the study of ancient climates is quite well advanced.

[165] And we know that five thousand years ago, four and a half thousand years ago when the sphinx is supposed to have been built.

[166] Egypt was as bone dry as it is today and you have to go back some thousands of years before that at least to about 9 ,000 years ago to get the very heavy rainfall that would have caused the erosion of the sphinx but that only means that the sphinx was standing there 9 ,000 years ago to be rained on.

[167] It may be much older than that shock is cautious and he will not he will not push the date back beyond what the hard evidence suggests he's willing to he's what he does accept that the sphinx may well have stood there before the heavy rains began but how long before is a matter that he cannot be certain on and that's where robert boval and i were able to take the matter on a little further with the astronomy of the geyser plateau and you find there's this just this stunning thing that happens in the sky i mean this is one of one of the great things i have some problems with technology but i have to say one of the great things about computer technology is the way that it can speed up access to information in an incredibly efficient way and there are computer programs now which will show you exactly how the stars were positioned at any time in the last 30 ,000 years over any point on the earth surface.

[168] You can literally wind back the ancient skies and see them.

[169] And the skies do change because the earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars.

[170] There's a wobble on the axis of the earth called procession.

[171] That's right.

[172] And the wobble takes 26 ,000 years to complete a cycle.

[173] So it's a cyclical process.

[174] Eventually the stars will all return to starting point and begin the cycle again.

[175] And because of that, we can say that the sphinx was gazing at his own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo, at dawn on the spring equinox in 10 ,000 BC, while 90 degrees away due south, Orion was lying on the meridian in exactly the pattern of the pyramids on the ground.

[176] And doesn't John Anthony West go even deeper?

[177] He believes it's like 30 ,000 BC or something crazy.

[178] John thinks it might be pushed back another processional cycle.

[179] See, we take it back to 12 ,500 ,000 years ago, but you would have the same.

[180] You would have the same alignments another 26 ,000 years earlier.

[181] So 38 ,000 years ago, you would have the same alignments as you had 12 ,500 years ago.

[182] And doesn't he base it on actual hieroglyphs to depict, you know, the ages of the pharaohs?

[183] You're absolutely right.

[184] And again, this is the area where the Egyptologists, the academic Egyptologists, are incredibly annoying because they will not listen to what the ancient Egyptians themselves had to say.

[185] It's as though they, the academics, know more about ancient Egyptian history than the ancient Egyptians did themselves.

[186] The ancient Egyptians were really very clear.

[187] They pushed their history back well plus 30 ,000 years.

[188] Why are they defensive?

[189] Why won't they budge?

[190] Why are they so against this idea?

[191] I wondered that myself when I first got into this.

[192] I initially couldn't understand it.

[193] But I think it's a problem with science in general.

[194] I think that...

[195] Was it a late discovery?

[196] Did they have an established timeline?

[197] They already established the timeline.

[198] The timeline was set literally in stone.

[199] over the last, sort of last 50, 50 years of the 20th century.

[200] I mean, really, by the beginning of the 20th century, a timeline had been worked out.

[201] And by the 1950s, it was very much set.

[202] So they are just not willing to consider any previous date that would, anything...

[203] It throws the whole timeline out.

[204] And because they've been teaching it for so long, they're reluctant to open up to new ideas.

[205] I would say so.

[206] But also, they themselves, I'm not suggesting any dishonesty on their part.

[207] They themselves absolutely believe their version of the path.

[208] And in all fairness, Robert Schock's depiction of the erosion, there have been dissenters, and I've read some different people's papers, but they seem very illogical.

[209] I looked at it myself.

[210] I know what water erosion looks like.

[211] Obviously, I'm not a geologist, but when I look at it, and you say that that's wind and sand, and then they show extreme examples of wind and sand erosion, it doesn't look the same.

[212] It looks like there's crevices.

[213] It's been created by water.

[214] It's really obvious.

[215] It really does.

[216] Yeah.

[217] And then there's so much else that adds to, that.

[218] I mean, the Sphinx is not alone.

[219] There are other weathered structures out there on the Giza Plateau.

[220] And deeper ones.

[221] And they find ones that are underground that are these old style construction ones that were built much like the Temple of the Sphinx, but not like the later stuff.

[222] It looks like two different eras of construction.

[223] It definitely does.

[224] It looks like two phases of construction, one very ancient, one more recent, and they've got muddled up in the academics' minds.

[225] Watching Dr. Schock try to talk to the Egypt's about that was a fascinating thing because the guy got super defensive and he was like, where is the civilization you're speaking of?

[226] This 10 ,000, boom, that's right.

[227] It was like this weird.

[228] One of the classic remarks was Mark Lehner, who's an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute in Chicago and one of the lead Western archaeologists working in Giza, you know, and his remark, which we quite often was, you know, show me the pot shard.

[229] Where is the pot shard from this, from this last civilization?

[230] Well, the argument was at that time that the Sphinx cannot possibly be of that age because there's nothing else in the world of that age.

[231] How could there just be this one unique thing, which is 12 ,500 years old or maybe older, this amazing monument?

[232] How can that be alone?

[233] So show me the potchards of the rest of that civilization.

[234] Well, some years later, those potchards have started to turn up and they've turned up in Turkey in the form of...

[235] Gobeckley -Tepi.

[236] Beckley -Tepi, a gigantic, megalithic circle, which dates back to precisely 12 ,000 years ago.

[237] And even has carvings of animals that don't exist anywhere near Turkey on this thing.

[238] And they're trying to attribute it to hunter -gatherers, which is hilarious.

[239] It's really hilarious.

[240] These were people who had an organized and systematic civilization.

[241] And it was somehow or another intentionally covered up.

[242] They buried.

[243] They buried it.

[244] They buried these gigantic.

[245] Like 12 -foot -tall, beautiful stone carvings with lizards on them and stuff.

[246] In the way, also, by the way, that the ancient Egyptians themselves decommissioned some of their temples when they knew their system was going down.

[247] They knew it was going down.

[248] The Romans were the end of it for Egypt.

[249] The Egyptians thrived through the Greek period.

[250] When the Greeks arrived in Egypt, what happened was the Egyptians colonized the Greek mind, and the Greeks became Egyptians.

[251] But when the Romans took over, it was a dead.

[252] different story.

[253] That's my people.

[254] They fucked everything up.

[255] And worse still, yeah, when the Romans made this alliance with Christianity and the Christian church pulled on the jackboot of Rome, it was Christians who really wanted to take Egypt apart.

[256] They wanted to destroy everything.

[257] And the Egyptian priests themselves, rather than let their temples fall into their hands in that way, they went around and destroyed certain things in the temples.

[258] And they did so quite quite deliberately to remove that power from the others who were going to come and take it in.

[259] I've only been to a couple places.

[260] I've been to Chichen Itza.

[261] I've never been to Egypt, but I've been to at the, one of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had an Egyptian exhibit.

[262] They had all this amazing old shit.

[263] And it is so hard to wrap your head on even the established timeline of 2 ,500 BC.

[264] When you're looking at these structures, it's so hard to your head around, like when you're looking at a beautiful gold and covered sarcophagus that, you know, had King Tut inside of it, it's like, what, what was that like?

[265] You know, what kind of a weird, alternative way to live did these guys figure out where they, thousands of years ago figured how to build these almost perfect geometric structures of 2 ,300 ,000 stones, where if you fuck up just a little bit here or there, by the time you get to the top, it's done.

[266] And they're like, well, they did screw up.

[267] a few of them.

[268] There's a few of them the lops.

[269] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[270] But they got them right, too.

[271] Who knows who the hell was doing the screw -up ones?

[272] That could have been imitators.

[273] And the screw -up ones were done later by people who lost those skills, basically.

[274] That's the mystery of Egypt, and John West makes this point, that it's perfect at the beginning, and it slowly declines.

[275] This is not what we expect.

[276] We expect to see civilizations slowly rise.

[277] We don't expect to see them perfect, fully formed at the beginning, and then take 3 ,000.

[278] years to end.

[279] Well, even when you push back the established timeline and, you know, we can't even wrap our head around a thousand years.

[280] I mean, a thousand years is very difficult to wrap our head around.

[281] Why do you think it's so difficult for them to embrace the pretty obvious possibility that things get wiped out?

[282] I mean, there's craters all over the moon.

[283] We know there's all sorts of spots all over, you know, you'll go drive by that giant crater in Nevada.

[284] It's a mile wide.

[285] Boom, something hits.

[286] Everybody gets fucked.

[287] You know, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, easily could have happened over and over again throughout history.

[288] That seems to me to be way more likely than we made it all the way from caveman to here without a hiccup.

[289] Without a single hiccup.

[290] That's crazy.

[291] And this leads, you know, this leads to, it certainly led me to conclude that academic history is part of a, this sounds a bit paranoid, but part of an overall system of kind of mind control that operates.

[292] There are certain things that we're allowed to think.

[293] and certain parameters that we are allowed to think within in our society and when it comes to the past, those parameters are set by academics and they get so territorial and so defensive when you try to break out of that and suggest other possibilities.

[294] See, I thought naively, when I got into this at first, that those who were specialists in this field would welcome some new ideas.

[295] They might throw them out in the end, but they would want to see whether there was any merit to the ideas.

[296] And so initially I was really shocked that the attitude is, this idea doesn't agree with us, we are going to destroy this idea in any way we can.

[297] And not only that, we're going to destroy the individuals associated with this idea.

[298] We will attack the man and the idea.

[299] Ad homonym attacks.

[300] Exactly.

[301] Exactly.

[302] In a very dirty tricks kind of way.

[303] It's only later on, actually, that I came to realize that academics all treat each other this way as well.

[304] They're all, they're all very territorial.

[305] They're all ego driven.

[306] They have their power base in a particular view, and they defend that view to the death.

[307] Now, when you say the Dr. Shock is, is very conservative.

[308] You're not joking around about that.

[309] And I always wonder, when I hear some of the things that he says about other ancient structures, I always wonder, wow, I wonder if he took too much heat from the Sphinx, and now he, like, backs off on stuff.

[310] He's very careful.

[311] Like the Bosnian pyramid and even the Japanese structure.

[312] Yeah, I went there with shock.

[313] He's crazy.

[314] And shock would not...

[315] That's crazy.

[316] He shock would not accept that it was a man -made structure.

[317] But I have to say that at that point, Yonaguni is a very difficult dive It's a very difficult dive The seas are wild There's a huge current flows right in front of the monument And you have to be an accomplished diver To do any work Shock was on his second open water dive At this point And on those initial dives that we did on Yonaguni He was largely fighting for his life Jesus Christ You guys have balls I love it it's very, you know, but my wife, Santa, who's a photographer and I, Santa's right here with us, have done more than 200 plus dives on the Yonaguni monument.

[318] We went through the process of learning to dive and really getting the skills to be able to handle that kind of current, which is literally going to rip your mask off your face and take your regulator out of your mouth.

[319] It's like swimming in a river against the current, actually.

[320] So what I would say is that I think shock was a little premature with that conclusion and I think he's I have huge respect for Robert Schock.

[321] I have huge respect for his openness of mind and his geological acumen but not enough time was spent on the monument to reach that decision and it's not just one monument it's a whole complex of monuments and further north settles it for me off Okinawa which is about four or five hundred miles north of Yonaguni there is a majestic stone circle 110 feet beneath the water which again santa and i have dived on extensively which shock has not seen uh which is there is just no way on earth that that monument could have been do you have photos of this online yes we do we have photos on what would i look for um okay you go on to w w w i'm sure if i just google it go to graham hancock dot com okay and then go to gallery and then go to underwater we have underwater on the gallery yes oh man and in the underwater section you're going to see a stone circle somewhere there with somebody above it holding a video camera that's me holding the video camera oh yeah and down under down below you is a stone circle and there's probably some more shots of it i'm going to just come around and see what you're looking at there i was looking at this right here is that okay yeah that's the stone circle this is the central upright and these are the surrounding uprights yeah that's somebody made that get out of this thing and this thing is 12 feet high wow wow and it's 110 feet beneath the sea.

[322] That's so cool.

[323] Wow.

[324] That's incredible.

[325] That's amazing.

[326] It's a most extraordinary thing.

[327] And 110 feet beneath the sea tells us that it was made at least 13 ,000 years ago, because that's the last time that 110 foot level was above sea level.

[328] So, well, that makes sense with Robert Chalk about the Japanese ruins, because there's one of them that really freaked me out.

[329] I watched a documentary on it where they showed these two monolith.

[330] We talked earlier.

[331] I described them as pizza boxes.

[332] They were like giant stone pizza boxes.

[333] They were so perfectly cut and laying right next to each other.

[334] I would just think you would look at that and you'd have to throw everything else away.

[335] You look at that and you're like, that's not a natural phenomenon.

[336] There's right angles everywhere and that sends off.

[337] It does.

[338] I mean, the beauty and the perfection of the thing is part of it.

[339] But part of it which needs to be taken into account, I can understand why some geologists feel that it must be natural.

[340] And And this is the reason, that the stone is a sedimentary stone.

[341] It's laid down in layers, and some of the layers are soft and some of them are hard.

[342] And their argument is that the sea, battering against these layers, selectively removed the soft layers and left the hard layers producing this stepped effect.

[343] The problem with that is that if that happened, then you would expect to see the very large amount of rubble, which was created by removing all these layers.

[344] you'd expect to see it lying in a disorganized mass down at the bottom of the monument, which from top to bottom the monument's about 70 feet high.

[345] So 70 feet down, and all of it's underwater because the bottom is about 110 feet below the sea.

[346] So you would expect to find that rubble lying at the base of the monument.

[347] Actually, what you do find is a beautiful path cut out of solid rock at the base of the monument, and all the rubble cleared to the side, pushed away, forming a bank.

[348] which is no way on earth that could have been done by nature.

[349] It had to be done by man. That's what people do.

[350] They clear away rubble, tidy it up, and leave a nice looking sight.

[351] And that's what is there.

[352] So it's little details like that.

[353] Plus the fact that there isn't just one monument, there's actually about five along a good four miles of the coast, makes it impossible for me to accept that it's a natural phenomenon.

[354] I guess the question comes up, when you talk about ancient monuments or ancient, civilizations from 14 ,000 plus years ago, how much really would be left?

[355] It's a long time.

[356] So long.

[357] To put it in perspective, the house that we're in, and 14 ,000 years will absolutely not be here.

[358] If we leave, it's going to be completely gone.

[359] There'll be almost no evidence.

[360] The earth will devour these computers.

[361] It will devour the leather and the table and the chairs.

[362] The roof will cave in.

[363] It will all go into dirt.

[364] Dirt will fill it over.

[365] Lava will come.

[366] Earthquakes will shift things.

[367] It'll be gone.

[368] We'll be forgotten.

[369] Forgotten.

[370] It would be very, very easy for that to happen.

[371] Then consider the effect of ice.

[372] Consider the fact that during the last ice age, North America and Northern Europe, were covered with these gigantic ice caps.

[373] You're talking ice, which is two to three miles deep.

[374] Your website's getting crushed right now.

[375] You can't even get on your website.

[376] I'm sorry with that.

[377] I can't interrupt you.

[378] I can't get on enough.

[379] It's getting smashed.

[380] That's good news Yeah there's a lot of people on that sucker Glad to hear it You know so sorry I lost my thread there I'm so sorry We're talking about ice the effects Yeah ice caps So the ice forms On the continental landmass of the US And of Europe It builds up to a depth of two miles And it's in motion Consider what's happening to anything Under two miles of ice It's being ground to a powder To a fine powder It's like a it's like just wiping out, literally wiping out the past.

[381] That's why it was such a big deal to find that ice man, because he had fallen into a crevice.

[382] And so the glacier had passed over him and never touched him.

[383] Wait, what ice man?

[384] What's the ice man?

[385] What's the...

[386] They found a guy who was...

[387] He's about five and a half thousand years old, and he fell into a glacier in the Alps, and he came out of it again in the late 20th century.

[388] Wow.

[389] It's an interesting story, actually.

[390] It's fascinating.

[391] It looks like he was murdered.

[392] They found an arrow embedded in his body.

[393] He looked like he'd been ambushed and shot up there.

[394] And he died there and froze and was covered with snow immediately and then he was preserved and then some hikers found his body.

[395] It's amazing story man, but what's incredible is that if Graham's view of history is true then this guy, 5 ,000 years ago was really like some dude who survived, some horrible cataclysmic event.

[396] You know, the civilization moved forward.

[397] People relearned things.

[398] Relearned hunting.

[399] Relearned, you know, making skins and turning them into fabric or turning them into clothes?

[400] What's your, what, what's the, your theory of where it all started?

[401] Where, where did we come from?

[402] Why, where did humans originate?

[403] Okay.

[404] Well, I think that I'm, I'm not against the academic reconstruction of the human family tree.

[405] I think they've done some, I think they've done some quite good work.

[406] So to answer your question, I'll have to go back to, go back quite far, to the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee, which is about six million years ago.

[407] And then from then, you get a gradual emergence of a creature who begins to look more and more human.

[408] And by two and a half million years ago, that creature is making stone tools.

[409] The first sign of real intelligent activity.

[410] I'm going to turn the air conditioning.

[411] But the stone tools are very limited and once the creature has invented them, it doesn't change for the next million years.

[412] The stone tools stay exactly the same.

[413] So we know that they're passing down cultural information and we also know that they're extremely rigid in their thought patterns and they're stuck in that.

[414] Then a new type of stone tool is introduced and that one sticks for another million years as well.

[415] And during this time our ancestors are looking more and more like us.

[416] And finally, the earliest surviving, fully anatomically modern human skeleton, comes from Ethiopia, as a matter of fact, and it's 195 ,000 years old.

[417] That's just short of 200 ,000 years old.

[418] Before that, the creatures were closely related to us, but they didn't look quite like us, and their brains were not quite like ours.

[419] But by 195 ,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans have evolved.

[420] But their behavior has not evolved.

[421] Their behavior is stuck in that archaic period and they're still using the same limited, unimaginative stone tools that were being used a million years before.

[422] And then it's a really extraordinary thing happens and it's within the last 50 ,000 years is that you just get this incredible surge forward in human behavior.

[423] The dawn of spiritual beliefs.

[424] They're very, very clear because they started burying food and water with the dead.

[425] that anybody who does that they definitely believe that some aspect of the individual continues after death and they created the great cave art the amazing amazing painting stunning works of art all of this symbolic behavior seemed to just switch on kind of overnight somewhere after 50 ,000 years ago and I so I would I would start the clock about there where where suddenly you've got these incredibly intelligent artistic creative creatures on the planet who are us and they are doing this stuff and I and I believe that some of them stayed in the hunter -gatherer mode all the way through, all the way through history.

[426] And those were the cave artists of what's called the Upper Paleolithic.

[427] And I think some of them moved in another direction and formed a civilization.

[428] And just as today, in our 21st century world, we have highly advanced technological civilizations coexisting with hunter -gatherers.

[429] You do still have traditional hunter -gatherers in the Amazon, in Botswana, for example.

[430] I believe it was the same in the world then.

[431] And I think that what I think of as the lost civilization was largely a maritime civilization, living along coastlines, living on the best lands during the ice age.

[432] Because inland, it was arid, it was cold.

[433] The ice meant there was no rain.

[434] No rain.

[435] It was totally desert.

[436] Very, very difficult to live.

[437] But on the coasts, things were much better.

[438] and it was precisely the coasts that were inundated when mysteriously and suddenly the ice age ended and all that ice started to melt down and went back into the ocean and the sea levels rose.

[439] And you think that, I mean, I've read all your books, I read Supernatural as well, which is one of my more favorite, what I found more fascinating because you really stepped out on some serious limbs on that one.

[440] Yeah.

[441] I kind of did, yeah.

[442] Yeah, I mean, you come from the jury, from being a journalist who was covering this thing in Ethiopia to supernatural, which insinuates that humanity has probably learned a good deal of what we are and what we become because of psychedelic drugs.

[443] I believe that's absolutely the case.

[444] And I think that with the current demonization of psychedelic drugs in our society, it's a huge mistake.

[445] How much resistance have you felt from that book?

[446] Well, I've had an enormous amount of resistance to it because we, have had a mind programming exercise called the War on Drugs for the last 40 years, which has been designed to create an internal enemy in our societies and convince people that there are these evil, wicked groups who are doing these terrible, sinful things, smoking these drugs and doing this and that.

[447] And this very dark image has been created around it, and people get very upset irrationally about this whole issue.

[448] And actually, what's been forgotten in all of this, and for me has become, I regard it as an extremely important issue, is that when the state sends us to prison for essentially exploring our own consciousness, this is a grotesque abuse of human rights.

[449] It's a fundamental wrong.

[450] If I, as an adult, am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I'm absolutely not sovereign over anything.

[451] I can't claim any kind of freedom at all.

[452] And what has happened over the last 40 or 50 years under the disguise of the war on drugs is that we have been persuaded to hand over the keys of our consciousness to the state the most precious, the most intimate, the most sapient part of ourselves the state now has the keys.

[453] And furthermore, they've persuaded us that that's in our interests.

[454] This is a very dangerous situation.

[455] There was an article that was recently published about people and creativity and that everyone says they love creative ideas, but the truth is amongst non -creative people creative ideas make them confrontational make them upset make them defensive when when you start talking about experiences like psychedelic experiences one of the things that always freaks me out is the people's inability to even consider that there's a difference between a psychedelic experience on drugs and a drug that's going to ruin your life they're not even interested in considering that possibility there's two different it's like the same thing it's like someone resisting definitely and that again that That's the result.

[456] Let's remember that...

[457] Programming.

[458] Funded with our money, our taxpayers' money, there has been 40 years of programming, more than 40 years on this subject to make us all develop a kind of aversion of fear, a hatred, horror of drugs.

[459] And this is...

[460] It's just fundamentally wrong in so many ways.

[461] Look, quite a number of illegal drugs are actually really bad and really dangerous, and they will totally fuck you up in all kinds of ways.

[462] But I believe that the sovereignty of the adult over his or her own body and his or her own mind trumps everything else.

[463] And we must have the right to make our mistakes.

[464] You know, we already have laws in our society for punishing bad behavior.

[465] If somebody on drugs goes out and gets in somebody else's face and causes them trouble, we already have laws to deal that.

[466] We don't need new laws that control our consciousness and rigidly place it in a prison and actually place us in prison.

[467] It's such an important point, what you just said, that we already have laws to keep it from doing bad things.

[468] It's so important.

[469] It seems so logical.

[470] It's like so clear.

[471] If you can drink and not do anything bad, go drink.

[472] Exactly.

[473] If you can smoke pot and not do anything bad to you're a fellow human.

[474] Go smoke pot.

[475] If that's what you want to do, if that's your adult decision, that's your choice.

[476] What does liberty mean if it doesn't mean that?

[477] Well, people will get into this ridiculous, just obey the law, why is it such a hard time?

[478] what are you, a druggy, you need drugs, get through this life.

[479] And I always say, this is such a neurological argument, because imagine if we were on an island, we were the only people on the planet, and there was only four of us.

[480] There was only four of us, and one of us wanted to smoke pot, and we said, we've got to lock this guy out and put in a fucking cage.

[481] It's crazy.

[482] It's nice to reduce it to four, then you really see the dynamics.

[483] You see how silly it is.

[484] Like, what?

[485] You would just lock this guy, but in a cage.

[486] You can't smoke pot.

[487] We made a law against it.

[488] Like, what?

[489] And that four is just as ridiculous as four million or four hundred million or what it's just as ridiculous it's an extraordinary thing and you have to consider what it's led to in our society in all kinds of ways it's led to the creation of huge armed bureaucracies who have the right to break into our homes smash down our doors humiliate us in every possible way ruin our lives with with with criminal records and all because what we're we're smoking some natural herb which which affects our own consciousness in some way so again i say if we get into the faces of others, the state may have a role to play.

[490] And it does.

[491] And it already has elaborate rules for dealing with that.

[492] But for the state to have transgressed the consciousness of free sovereign adults is a grotesque abuse of human rights.

[493] And it doesn't work.

[494] This is the other thing.

[495] If the state could turn around and say, the war on drugs has worked, we have reduced the consumption of this, that.

[496] It's not true.

[497] They haven't reduced the consumption of any drugs.

[498] The consumption of all illegal drugs has gone up, up and up and up and up.

[499] let's take another drug tobacco you never got sent to jail for smoking tobacco you never got your life ruined or your front door broken down but some years ago people cottoned on to the notion that tobacco actually may be making us pretty unwell if we're smoking a lot of tobacco seems to be a connection with lung cancer and this was this information was put forward look what's happened with tobacco in the last 20 years millions millions and millions of adults all over the world presented with that information have taken a personal sovereign decision to stop smoking cigarettes.

[500] I took that decision when I was 38 years old.

[501] I used to, I'm 61 now, I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day.

[502] And I was a journalist, you know, a cigarette hanging out of the mouth typewriter.

[503] I was a heavy smoker, but I took the decision.

[504] I came to the conclusion, this is not good for my body.

[505] You know, Stephen King said that it was a neurotransmitter and enhancer that he suffered when he stopped smoking.

[506] So many writers.

[507] Like when you were a writer, why did you smoke so much as a writer?

[508] It helps.

[509] Yeah, yeah, it does.

[510] It definitely did.

[511] It definitely did help, as does marijuana.

[512] But the fact is that there is, the point that I want to make is that if the state was really interested in helping us, this is how the war on drugs is presented, we're concerned about your health, so we're going to send you to prison.

[513] We're concerned about the harm this drug is doing to you, so we're going to send you to prison.

[514] What's more harmful, the harm the drug is doing or being sent to prison?

[515] It seems to be pretty obvious that being sent to prison is a much more harmful thing that's being done.

[516] If the state was really concerned about harm, then the solution is not to criminalize people for taking drugs.

[517] The solution is to present them with very good information in which they believe.

[518] Part of the problem is that the state has become to be regarded as so corrupt that any message emanating from the state about drugs is not believed anymore.

[519] completely disbelieved.

[520] So, you know, once again, we come to this issue of adult sovereignty over consciousness.

[521] And our right also to make mistakes with our own body, if we do that.

[522] That's what we, I believe we're here on this earth to learn and to grow and to develop.

[523] And we have to have adult responsibility to do that.

[524] Always astonishes me in America where you have the Republican Party, which is strongly in favor of individual freedoms, that it's often Republicans who are the ones who are most anti -drugs.

[525] I feel drugs is a Republican issue.

[526] I think that any true Republican should absolutely champion the right of every adult individual if they choose to do so to explore their own consciousness with any drugs they choose.

[527] Yeah, there's no real parties anymore.

[528] It's just a mix mash.

[529] I mean, Obama is just as much of a Republican as any Republican that's ever been in office.

[530] I've seen this happening.

[531] It's weird assimilation.

[532] Yeah.

[533] It is.

[534] It's just your fuck no matter what.

[535] It's either the same person.

[536] Basically, because really our society is being run by gigantic faceless bureaucracies now.

[537] And those are much more dangerous than anything else because they don't even have a figurehead.

[538] They just continue.

[539] They roll on and they run and they run people's lives.

[540] But the aspect of society where powers that be are trying to control people's mental territory, this is not a new thing.

[541] This has been going on for a very, very long time.

[542] It's just the newest incarnation.

[543] I mean, we had witch burnings where.

[544] Exactly.

[545] It's a very old...

[546] Exactly.

[547] I would say that in our society today, drug users play the same role as witches played in Europe in the 16th century.

[548] Absolutely.

[549] That's fundamentally what's going on.

[550] They're an internal enemy which the society can be mobilized to hate because that's what the state does.

[551] It makes people hate and fear and suspect other people because then they want to rely on the state for their defense and their protection.

[552] It's a game.

[553] It's a mind game.

[554] And it's been going on for a very long time and it happens that the current victims are drug users.

[555] And, you know, the word, it's interesting that language itself has been deployed in this war, so that you very rarely find the word drug separated from the word abuse.

[556] That you never find the notion of a responsible use of drugs.

[557] You find only the notion of abuse of drugs.

[558] And so it's become impossible almost to speak about drugs without incorporating this notion that there's some abuse is taking place.

[559] Yeah, and the idea that you can actually benefit from them is an alien thought.

[560] Completely alien, very, very much hate.

[561] by our society and yet you know the research is coming through we've had the research in the last year with psilocybin easing anxiety of terminal cancer patients MDMA with with post -traumatic stress disorder fantastically successful results and cancer apparently have you seen that where they're saying that super doses of MDMA may may treat cancer makes sense all the joy and love that you'd feel just kills all the bad stuff I know I mean these you know these you know these These, I believe that, well, Aldous Huxley called the psychedelics gratuitous graces.

[562] There's something that nature just gave us for free, a kind of grace, to allow us to experience something else.

[563] Didn't Huxley coin the term psychedelic?

[564] He's the one who came up with it.

[565] Quite possibly, yeah.

[566] It was Huxley and I can't remember the other person.

[567] Oh, shit, man. Yeah, I think that they were, they had different, they were trying to come up with a word.

[568] They had another word that they were going to use for it.

[569] It sounded too unscientific.

[570] Yeah, you're right.

[571] You're right, you're right.

[572] Yeah, definitely.

[573] Psychedelic is the perfect word.

[574] They nailed it.

[575] They nailed it.

[576] They nailed it, yeah.

[577] Do you subscribe to McKenna's ideas about the stoned ape theory?

[578] You know, that theory that human beings may have actually evolved from the lower primates because of the fact that we ate mushrooms?

[579] Yeah, I came to that idea.

[580] I'd like to say, Terence McKenna, one of the great minds.

[581] What a wonderful man. Amazing person.

[582] What a wonderful man. An incredible loss that we lost Terrence.

[583] He was a remarkable individual and I never met him, unfortunately.

[584] But he, I love listening to his voice.

[585] Me too.

[586] I love his voice.

[587] I have a whole section of my iPod is all Terrence McKenna lectures.

[588] It's amazing.

[589] We go down to Brazil sometimes to drink ayahuasca.

[590] And sometimes in the late in an ayahuasca session, as you're beginning to return to this reality.

[591] It's nice to play a bit of music or a little bit of voice.

[592] And sometimes we play Terrence McKenna.

[593] And I just remember one line was about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries.

[594] And he says, you know, they'll dissolve boundaries between you and your cat, even between you and your washing machine.

[595] Now, he had wonderful ideas.

[596] And he very intuitively, very far ahead of his time, grasped the notion that this sudden advancement of humanity had to do with psychedelics.

[597] What it did was it broke our rigid behavior patterns that we were stuck in and unable to change and it opened us up to new possibilities and you see this remarkable event taking place after 50 ,000 years ago, definitely to do with psychedelics.

[598] Now, you know, since that time there's a parallel track which is the academic work on cave art and psychedelics which is Professor David Lewis Williams of the University of Wittwatersrand in South Africa and he has absolutely taken it beyond intuition and totally proved without any doubt whatsoever that all of the cave art was inspired by visionary experiences on psychedelics.

[599] There's just no doubt about it at all.

[600] How do you prove that?

[601] You prove it by the nature of the art itself.

[602] It's rich with what I call entoptic phenomena.

[603] Certain patterns, zigzags, grids, hexagons, honeycomb patterns, internested, curved lines.

[604] The caves are covered in all of these.

[605] Go around to the rock canyons in Utah.

[606] You'll see the same thing.

[607] Rock art all over the world is influenced by visionary experiences.

[608] And then classically, the absolute defining characteristic is the appearance of beings or entities in the art. And those entities are typically half human and half animal.

[609] They are, it's called a therianthrop.

[610] That's from the Greek Therion, which means wild beast and Anthropos, which means man. And this is one of the definitive aspects of deep visionary experience.

[611] experience is encountering entities who communicate with you and who are often encountered in this half man, half human form.

[612] So it's interesting that work done in the 1960s with, for example, mescaline, they found that the volunteers were drawing the stuff they saw and one of the volunteers drew a man in a business suit with the head of a fox.

[613] That was an entity that had come and spoken to him in the trance like stake, no different from the man with the head of a lion and the body of a human being that you find in Hollenstein -Staddle Cave in Germany from 32 ,000 years ago.

[614] So what do you think is going on there?

[615] Do you think that you're dealing with entities that don't really have a form that we can understand so they present themselves in some cartoonish combination of things that we are aware of?

[616] Yeah.

[617] I think that, and I'm going out on a limb here, but I think that we're dealing, I don't believe consciousness is generated.

[618] by the brain.

[619] I believe the brain is more of a receiver of consciousness.

[620] I think that's a really important distinction.

[621] The mainstream model of consciousness that we have in our society today definitely sees it as produced by the brain, the same way a factory makes cars.

[622] So if you smash up the factory, the car stop being made.

[623] Ergo, if the person dies, the brain dies, consciousness is just blinks out, gone, finished.

[624] That's the mainstream view.

[625] But the other view, that the brain is a transceiver or receiver of consciousness, that it is manifesting, it's the junction box that's manifesting consciousness on the physical realm.

[626] That raises whole different possibilities.

[627] Then when you destroy the receiver, the signal is still there.

[628] Just as if you destroy a TV set, the TV signal is still there.

[629] And you get into all kinds of possibilities from that.

[630] So the suggestion that I derive from that is that consciousness is fundamentally non -physical, but that for certain reasons, and they may be very deep and very mysterious, consciousness has created realms in which it is possible to manifest physically, because in a physical realm, you have all kinds of consequences to your actions that you would not have in a non -physical state.

[631] A physical realm may be a very useful place to spend time if you're an ancient soul who wishes to learn and grow and develop further.

[632] And that's how I've come to see it.

[633] I think we, and that's how all ancient spiritual traditions see it, that we, that we incarnate in these bodies in order to have the experience of life on earth.

[634] But we don't die when these bodies die.

[635] These bodies are like a suit of clothes that we're wearing for this incarnation.

[636] I've always subscribed to the idea that creativity, when I'm at my best and most creative, and when I'm performing doing stand -up comedy at my best and most creative, I feel much more like a passenger than I do a driver.

[637] I feel like when I'm writing, when I write my best stuff, I have no idea where it's coming from.

[638] I'm not even really there.

[639] I'm just moving my fingers and it's coming to me and it's not even me doing it.

[640] And it sounds ridiculous.

[641] And you could say that, well, it's because really the ego gets in the way of creativity because you're always worrying about yourself.

[642] And if you could just put the ego aside, then your mind can work better.

[643] And I see that argument, but I don't really, it feels like it comes to me in these great bursts of, you know, of ideas that I never considered before.

[644] And I'm like, where is that?

[645] Maybe that's really something that I'm figuring out of way to tune in.

[646] Yeah, you're tuning into it and you're becoming a channel for the material.

[647] For your own material, your consciousness is running the show.

[648] But your consciousness is not limited to this realm.

[649] And it's drawing down material from elsewhere.

[650] I've had the same experience with my writing.

[651] The more that I intellectualize the process, and that's particularly true since I've turned to fiction, The more that I intellectualize the process, the harder the writing becomes.

[652] And the sooner I let off that intellectual control and just let it flow, the better it gets.

[653] It's so strange how it comes in waves, though.

[654] It's almost like you can't keep tuned in to the spiritual realm for any long period of time.

[655] I shake it off.

[656] I know after like a few hours of writing, my writing just starts to turn to shit.

[657] I'm like, oh, I guess it's off now.

[658] It's back to me. How it's me writing.

[659] And the right thing to do at that point is actually to say...

[660] Close the laptop, by the way.

[661] Yeah, close the laptop, go and have a break.

[662] Yeah, save your work and try again tomorrow.

[663] But it's universal.

[664] You know, there's a Stephen Pressfield book, The War of Art, that deals with the concept of the muse.

[665] And it's a fantastic book.

[666] And I used to buy stacks of them and give them to people.

[667] I gave one, right?

[668] Yeah.

[669] Thank you for recommending that.

[670] I'm a big fan of Pressfield.

[671] I didn't know he'd written that book, so I'm going to read it.

[672] It's a brilliant book.

[673] You know, I think I have a copy of it, I will give you one.

[674] And the brilliant thing about it is it's a brilliant thing about it is, really no nonsense but it's all about it's a no nonsense doing put the work in force yourself to do it don't make excuses put the work in but then it's also about the muse it's also about the idea that you are just sitting there and putting yourself in a position to tune into it you just have to show up you show up you move your fingers you and let the muse come to you and that the muse is real yeah well let me tell you i mean i have been a non -fiction writer all my life um i started out as i mentioned in journalism, I moved into ancient mysteries, but it was always non -fiction.

[675] You look a book like Fingerprints of the Gods or Underworld, the book about our diving adventures.

[676] You'll find that there's 2 ,000 footnotes, you know.

[677] They are, I hope they're readable, but they're also, you know, detailed, researched documents.

[678] And that was the kind of, that was the kind of writer I was until I encountered ayahuasca and when I encountered ayahuasca I had I started working with ayahuasca in 2003 and the reason I started working I had to have one psychedelic experience in 1974 with LSD and after that it was an amazing experience by the way I had an most incredible night at the Windsor Free Festival in England I spent the whole night wandering around I had I kind of traveled back in time it was like being a sort of medieval encampment.

[679] It's just incredible.

[680] But when I came out of that experience, I thought to myself, hmm, I was 20, I guess I was 24 then.

[681] I thought, if that went the other way, that was a really powerful experience.

[682] If that went the other way, I'm not sure how I would handle it.

[683] I thought it might really fuck me up.

[684] And I got a bit scared and I'd heard stories of others who'd had scary experiences and I thought, I'm not going to do that again.

[685] And I didn't.

[686] I didn't take any psychedelics from the age of 24 until Let's see, 2003 when I was 53 years old.

[687] And the reason that I started taking psychedelics again was because initially it was my research project.

[688] I was writing supernatural.

[689] It was clear that the cave art had been influenced by psychedelics.

[690] Here was something I could experience for myself.

[691] I've always felt as a writer.

[692] I shouldn't be writing something if I'm not in it myself.

[693] I have to experience it.

[694] Which is why when you were writing Underworld, you learned how to dive.

[695] Diving.

[696] And ended up doing huge numbers of dive.

[697] all around the world.

[698] It's the way that I work.

[699] And therefore, it was logical for me to investigate psychedelics once I started to write supernatural.

[700] And I wanted to investigate them in a shamanic setting.

[701] And I looked around the research to subject and it became clear that the Amazon was the place to go.

[702] And ayahuasca with thousands of years of indigenous use in the Amazon was a very, very interesting substance indeed to investigate.

[703] So, you know, I went down there and started to drink ayahuasca.

[704] Ayahuasca worked changes on me in quite a number of ways.

[705] It's made me a more thoughtful and reflective person in some ways about my behavior and the impact of my behavior on others.

[706] I'm still got a long way to go on that.

[707] They say in the Amazon that ayahuasca is a school.

[708] Don't expect, you know, instant enlightenment.

[709] Actually, all enlightenment is hard work.

[710] and the hard work with ayahuasca is integrating the revelations that it gives you because it will one of the things that iwaska does is she does show you where you've been cruel and hurtful and unkind to others and she shows it you from the other person's point of view it's a lesson that you learn and but then integrating that into your own behavior in daily life is actually really difficult lifetime of bad habits are very hard to change and work has to be done in order to do that So ayahuasca has helped me to begin on that path.

[711] I do not claim to have reached any form of perfection, very far from it.

[712] I'm a very imperfect, frail human being.

[713] But I have at least been set on the path that I believe is a more positive one.

[714] But then something else Ayahuasca gave me. And it happened because I asked for it.

[715] I'd reached a point where I felt that I didn't want to go on with the investigation of the lost civilization subject anymore.

[716] Not because I'd lost interest in it or because I'd turned to.

[717] against it, but because I felt that I'd taken it as far as I personally could, after Santa and I had done six years of scuba diving all around the world and literally put our lives on the line and had revealed a great deal of stuff underwater that people didn't know about, I felt actually I don't know where I take this next.

[718] There are a lot of young, energetic people out there.

[719] I would like them to take it on now, where I took it from.

[720] And I wanted to look for a change of direction.

[721] And I wanted to challenge myself as a writer.

[722] and I'd always wanted to write a novel so down in Brazil over a series of five ayahuasca sessions I asked ayahuasca can I write a novel and if so what would I be writing about and something amazing happened in those five sessions I was given the entire story of the novel that I ended up writing which is a novel called Entangled the whole story the characters their dilemmas the time travel aspect of the story.

[723] Were you just frantically writing it all down?

[724] Or would you try to remember it?

[725] No, it was very, I wasn't even trying to remember.

[726] It was just very, very clear.

[727] It was very clear that I was to write a story and that it would involve two young women, one in the Stone Age, one in the modern times, and that they would be entangled, that they would be connected through consciousness, and that they would be involved in a battle of good against evil.

[728] And certain scenes came through very, very clear to me and stuck vividly in my mind.

[729] And so as soon as we'd finished in Brazil, I went back to England and started writing.

[730] So when you ask ayahuasca, can you do it and what would it be about?

[731] Do you think that ayahuasca wants you to do this?

[732] Because if you do something like that, I always think of any work that I put out, whether it's even writing a blog or putting something, a funny thing up on Twitter, you send out this signal and then this signal is going to affect who knows how many people in a positive way, especially something that they really enjoy reading like a book and people can say like why would I want you to write a book because some books are fucking awesome that's why and that feeling of getting really hooked into a book and really just loving it I haven't read a good novel in a while the strain was the last one that I really liked for a while but then hated you know I love the beginning of it that's that vampire one the Guermo del Toro book my point is that feeling there's a lot of positive energy associated with something that's really entertaining and gripping.

[733] Definitely.

[734] It's a highly effective way of communicating.

[735] I don't know whether Ayahuasca did this for me, but they often say there's a song that, I forget the song, you know, the Rolling Stones, you don't always get what you want, you get what you need, you know.

[736] Iowaska does that.

[737] She tends to give you what you need, not always what you ask for.

[738] I have to, set intense at the beginning of sessions and I found myself going in a totally different direction but these five sessions were different it was very very clear here is a story go home and write it it was very I felt compelled to do it so if they affected you in that way if they created this huge effect on you think about what would happen if it was legally available if people were so then you see how the war on drugs is actually suppressing human evolution if this is it seems like You're saying that throughout time, the psychedelics have been, why, do you think the Egyptians were taking psychedelics?

[739] Definitely, definitely.

[740] What psychedelics were they taking?

[741] Particularly the Blue Water Lily, Nymphaya Serialia, which is a potent psychedelic.

[742] And William Embedon at the State University of California has published detailed research on the Blue Water Lily and on its psychedelic properties.

[743] And it was certainly used.

[744] They were journeyers.

[745] When the ancient Egyptians explored the mystery of life after death, they were not sitting in some scribal room just making this stuff up.

[746] They were investigating.

[747] They were exploring, they were separating their consciousness from the body, and they were entering other realms, and they were coming back and giving a detailed report about what they encountered there.

[748] The first I had ever heard of any of that was from John Anthony West's work and the work on the Temple of Man, which is really fascinating.

[749] that there's a temple and each area of the temple signifies like a part of a human being and there's a whole area about the pineal gland and the the Egyptians were you know they called it the seat of the soul and that they believed that you know the pineal gland was your connection to to the afterlife and and hey they were right you know this is because this is the this is the mystery that DMT which is the active ingredient of ayahuasca is generated by the pineal gland.

[750] They believe that, though.

[751] But that hasn't really totally been proven, right?

[752] It was Rick Strassman's hunch, but something in our bodies and the pineal gland is the most likely suspect.

[753] That's a big sticking point with critics.

[754] Is generating DMT because the presence of DMT in the human body is not in dispute.

[755] What it's coming from is in dispute.

[756] Right.

[757] But its presence in the body is not in dispute.

[758] It just sounds cool if it really comes from the pineal gland.

[759] It sounds kind of cool.

[760] If it comes from the third eye for real?

[761] Yeah, since the pineal gland is, was originally a sense organ and so the suggestion would be that it's still a sense organ.

[762] It's a kind of sixth sense which the lens that it uses is DMT.

[763] And what people don't realize is that in reptiles, in certain reptiles it actually has a retina and a lens.

[764] Yeah, and it's light sensitive.

[765] It is a fucking eyeball.

[766] Yeah.

[767] It's light.

[768] It's light sensitive, yes, in reptiles.

[769] In humans it's not.

[770] It's deep it's sunk deeper into the brain.

[771] But a very mysterious very mysterious organ and I would still say you're right it's not proved I would still say the most likely candidate for the generation of DMT Well Strassman is working on figuring that out right now they're working on more detailed studies to try to exactly pinpoint the location that's where it's created I'm glad this is I'm glad that's happening I mean the you know the point that you were making just now I think that I think that by cutting these ancient plant allies out of our life and by demonizing them and creating this atmosphere of fear and hatred around them, this is a suicidal path that our society is taking and we only need to look at the past in order to realize that that is true.

[772] There is a danger in human species that we get locked into a particular frame and right now we are locked into the technology frame.

[773] Of course we're advancing technology very, very, very fast, but that doesn't mean we aren't locked.

[774] We're locked into one frame and we are not thinking outside of that frame.

[775] And we can see the consequences of being locked into that frame, which is our world is in chaos.

[776] Our world is in a state of hatred and fear and suspicion right now.

[777] There's all this horrible stuff going on.

[778] And we are literally on the edge of destroying ourselves.

[779] And there's never been a time in the human story when we've more needed to break out of our rigid patterns of behavior and start thinking about things from a different point of view.

[780] And nature has provided us with the means to do so.

[781] And those means are our plant allies.

[782] Right.

[783] Yeah.

[784] It's a fascinating concept and the concept that human beings are working against themselves and they're working to keep things fucked up and make them more and that the only way to sustain a society as complex and large and invasive as the one we currently live in, the only way is to do it the way we're doing it.

[785] And that if all of a sudden psychedelic drugs were introduced and the materialism was, you know, sort of pushed in the back burner and spiritualism was something that people, you know, started really understanding and appreciate their connection more.

[786] Who the fuck's going to go to work?

[787] Who's going to be killing all the chickens we need for chicken -micnuggets?

[788] Yeah.

[789] Things would become very different.

[790] But the fact is that our existing economic model is falling apart at the seams anyway.

[791] And people are living in misery and doubt and chaos and confusion because it's just not working.

[792] It's not working.

[793] is the whole thing is not working.

[794] Any society that can stand back while the Amazon jungle is burnt down at the sort of country -sized rate every year, this is an insane society.

[795] We obviously live in a demented society, completely insane.

[796] A lot of people aren't even aware of how crazy that looks.

[797] If you watch it and you know, you see documentaries online of the mass amounts of forests that they're chopping down, it's bizarre.

[798] That's why it's interesting that this particular agent, ayahuasca, comes from the Amazon.

[799] Yeah.

[800] You know, I can't I can't help feeling.

[801] In the Amazon, they strongly believe that an intelligent entity lies behind the ayahuasca vine.

[802] She, they always speak of her as she, most of the cultures do, is using the vine as an access point to humanity.

[803] And, oh, I've just lost my thread.

[804] How did I get to that?

[805] Well, no, the idea that comes from the Amazon, which is being destroyed.

[806] Yeah, yes, exactly, exactly.

[807] At the very time when our Western technological culture is responsible for mass destruction in the Amazon, which it is.

[808] And by the way, it's a problem that could be easily solved.

[809] We don't need to destroy the Amazon.

[810] We really don't need those soybean farms in the Amazon to feed cattle so that people can eat hamburgers.

[811] We much more need the rainforest.

[812] So at the very time that the Amazon is under threat from the Western way of life, which has infected almost every culture on the planet, at that very time the Amazon is sending out its emissary in the form of the Vine of Souls who is kind of extending her coiled, sinuous self all around the world and reaching into human consciousness everywhere.

[813] Because ayahuasca is being drunk all around the world.

[814] It's everywhere.

[815] I know, I know, I've, I've met someone on Facebook who, who takes it regularly.

[816] That's a cop.

[817] No way.

[818] That's a cop, and you're going to jail.

[819] No, that's no, that's no cop.

[820] He knits, like, what are they called, the Shibobo or so?

[821] There's a name.

[822] The Shepibo, yeah.

[823] Shibbo, he knits these patterns.

[824] Like, he, like, he showed, like, they're, like, they knit them.

[825] The exact things you were saying that are on the cave walls, like the honeycomb patterns and stuff, so they, like, create these beautiful quilts, is it quilts that are just incredible depictions of what apparently the Iowa...

[826] Iowa convictions, yeah, of the geometric aspect of that.

[827] Do you ever think of how much you play a part of that?

[828] Does that ever focus in on your mind?

[829] I mean, your instincts obviously were to produce this book and to talk about it very openly and honestly and to do interviews like this and have discussions like this where you talk about it.

[830] And, you know, this right now is going to reach half a million people.

[831] They're going to consider what you're saying and they're going to look into it and they're going to go, whoa.

[832] Do you really think that there's some fucking vine that you can take from the jungle that allows you to communicate with the spirit world?

[833] I feel some responsibility in this area.

[834] Let's explain to people what it does for noobs, for people who are not aware what ayahuasca is.

[835] The first thing I'd like to say is that ayahuasca, and as a matter of fact, all psychedelics are very serious business.

[836] I personally do not believe that psychedelics are appropriate for recreational activity I think if somebody chooses to do that that's their body that's their choice but I don't think it's the right thing to do we need to treat these amazing substances with respect and it's anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know absolutely that the set and setting in which the psychedelic is consumed is as important as the psychedelic itself absolutely what you've prepared what you are looking for from the experience and the company in which you take it and the reason for which you take it are definitely going to colour and affect the experience.

[837] And I think it's a mistake to use these powerful agents of consciousness work for recreation.

[838] There are other great things for recreation and other great sensual substances.

[839] But the psychedelics are not for that purpose.

[840] And if somebody wants to have a really bad trip and have truly horrific experiences, experiences with psychedelics take it in the wrong set and setting and you can be pretty sure that's going to happen to you sooner or later so i would first thing i would say to people with with all psychedelics is be careful this is this is respect respect respect deep respect for this this is a this is a very serious thing you're engaging on therefore um find a find a find a space that can be protected find um somebody who knows what they're doing who who can sit with you and and who can oversee the see this and bring a ceremony to the to the table let's not just just sit down disrespectfully and consume the substance.

[841] Let's bring a ceremonial aspect to it.

[842] And I would say with ayahuasca, I know that quite a number of people now have started to get the ingredients on the Internet and brew up their ayahuasca.

[843] I honestly think that's a mistake.

[844] There are people who are enormously experienced working with ayahuasca.

[845] They are the shamans from the Amazon.

[846] More and more Westerners are being trained by those shamans.

[847] Those Westerners are returning to Western countries and are creating a new form of shamanism.

[848] relevant to the urban and industrial context of the West.

[849] If you really want to work with ayahuasca, seek out somebody like that.

[850] Better still, if you can get the funds together, go down to Brazil or go down to Peru and work with the Masters.

[851] How do you find the Masters if you want to do that?

[852] Well, it's all word of mouth.

[853] There is a huge network.

[854] I'm often reminded of sort of underground sects at the end of the Roman Empire, like the Gnostics, you know, being persecuted by mainstream Christianity.

[855] everything was done by word of mouth.

[856] It's like that with ayahuasca now.

[857] Generally speaking, if you feel drawn to the vine, do some serious research on the subject, and you will find your way to the right people.

[858] There are some Charleston's working in this field.

[859] There are in all fields.

[860] But there are also some very good people.

[861] And do some serious research first and look into the subject and find the right person, somebody who's deeply experienced, who understands the vine and work with them.

[862] And you can be sure you're going to have a much more worthwhile experience.

[863] Whatever series of events led you to go there and take those substances and have these visionary experiences and then relay them, do you ever feel as if you were compelled that you were brought to it like this is, like you have a purpose?

[864] Do you feel that way?

[865] No. If so, it's like the rest of the course of my life, a series of accidents.

[866] Like I flew into that city in northern Ethiopia in 1983 and found myself in front of a monk who said he had the Ark of the Covenant behind him.

[867] It turned the direction of my life.

[868] Okay, I decided that after I published Underworld, which was my last book on the Lost Civilization Issues, I had always been interested in human origins, and that's why I decided to write supernatural.

[869] But when I got into the subject, I found that the story didn't get interesting until 50 ,000 years ago, and it got interesting because of psychedelics.

[870] And then, so it was an accident that led me to that.

[871] Well, obviously, the next research conclusion was that I had to go take some psychedelics and to do so in a shamanic setting and learn about it.

[872] So a series of accidental decisions kind of led me to that process.

[873] So I guess I don't feel called or chosen, but I found myself in the hot seat.

[874] Do you feel obligated, though, because you know so much about it?

[875] I feel obligated.

[876] And I feel a responsibility, which is to share with others that these agents can be transformational and that they can be incredibly helpful, but that they are also extremely powerful and that they must be treated with respect.

[877] And they're real.

[878] And here's the thing.

[879] Everyone is running around looking for magic.

[880] Everyone is running around looking for a religious experience.

[881] You can have that.

[882] You really can.

[883] It is a real thing.

[884] It doesn't care whether you believe in it or don't believe in it.

[885] It's not dogmatic.

[886] It is a legit thing.

[887] And if you take it, you'll have an experience that you cannot believe is real and available.

[888] You cannot believe that it's so easy that you drink this substance.

[889] and all of a sudden you literally enter into some different dimension.

[890] Yeah, that's right.

[891] It's, it is real.

[892] And that's why it's really not a matter for intellectual speculation.

[893] It's, it's a direct experience that what can have.

[894] And then what you make of the experience is really what matters.

[895] It's all those, it's like you're the people who ridicule it.

[896] You know, when people mock mushrooms, like, I even talk to Michiocaku, who's this amazing physicist and this really brilliant guy.

[897] And I was on the Opie and Anthony show, and I asked.

[898] asked him, have you ever done mushrooms?

[899] And he, you know, said like I was a fool.

[900] He was acting like I was a fool.

[901] Like I was a silly person.

[902] No, I need my mind to be intact and all this stuff so I can work on physics.

[903] And since he's never done mushrooms, how can he know what it does to his mind?

[904] This is prejudice at work.

[905] I'm like, my God, man, what if it was real?

[906] If it was real, would you trust me?

[907] If I told you that there was some real thing and you take it and you're going to be in communication with some insanely wise entity from some.

[908] parallel or constantly surrounding you dimension.

[909] Would you just try it?

[910] You convinced?

[911] That's the problem that we're talking about here is because Michio Kaku, he is a genius, but he's also been conditioned.

[912] And so imagine if a genius came in contact with something.

[913] Because right now, this spirit, whatever you want to call it, it's right now, the majority of, a lot of the people it's contacting are like 16 -year -olds in trailers who are like, paying Xbox.

[914] Yeah.

[915] You know, it's like, I am trying to communicate high -level information.

[916] Why are you sending me these idiot kids?

[917] To be fair, I have to say that I'm not sure that's the case with ayahuasca.

[918] No, I think that's mushrooms.

[919] For quite a whole number of reasons.

[920] Mushrooms for sure, but it's not the case with ayahuasca.

[921] It's too difficult.

[922] Yeah, ayahuasca is really a mission.

[923] I mean, you have to brace yourself.

[924] Ayahuasca is hard work.

[925] Iwasca will make you vomit.

[926] It will give you diarrhea.

[927] They call it the purge.

[928] in the Amazon.

[929] And it is an enormously effective, pergative agent, take my word for it.

[930] We still have to explain to the nobs to people who really have no idea what we're talking about.

[931] What ayahuasca is, is an orally active version of DMT and that these amazing people from, how far does it date back?

[932] How many thousands of years?

[933] There's proved archaeological evidence for the use of ayahuasca going back more than 4 ,000 years in the Amazon.

[934] And so somehow another 4 ,000 years ago, out of hundreds of thousands of different plants, right?

[935] They figured out I combined the vine of one with the leaves of another.

[936] It's a sophisticated piece of chemistry that they're doing.

[937] Explain to people what it is.

[938] So the ayahuasca consists of three ingredients.

[939] One of them is water, the medium in which it's brewed.

[940] And the other two are a leaf.

[941] That leaf is from a plant called psychotria viridis, is the botanical name.

[942] They call it Shakuna in the Amazon.

[943] And that leaf contains pharmacologically pure dimethyl tritamine.

[944] It contains.

[945] It contains.

[946] D .M .T. Which your own body makes.

[947] Which your own body makes.

[948] And with that, with DMT, you have a problem because DMT is not orally active.

[949] And the reason that DMT is not orally active is that we have an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase.

[950] And monoamine oxidase switches off DMT on contact.

[951] What they did in the Amazon jungle was that they found out of, actually there's, you're right, there's 150 ,000 different species.

[952] of plants and trees in the Amazon.

[953] They found the one other that contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

[954] That's what the vine contains.

[955] The vine actually does not contain the psychedelic ingredient.

[956] It contains the ingredient that allows the psychedelic to become orally active.

[957] So do you think they just ate the two of them at the same time once and had some crazy experience and went, whoa, write this down?

[958] When I've asked shamans about this, they all say the same thing.

[959] The spirits taught our ancestors to do this.

[960] When these guys are getting blasted on ayahuasca for decades upon decades though do you think they can really recall exactly how they learned all this well no they didn't learn it in their lifetimes because it was already old knowledge to them they're speaking of their of their ancestors and they literally say that the plants spoke to them right they told them how to do it and reached out to them and said put this together and it had to be during the well it had to be at least as recent as they figured out how to harness fire you know and make buckets you need to cook it yeah you need a so you need a metal correct like you need a pot no no you could what kind of pot do you cook it and you can use ceramic and cook it in that?

[961] So it could predate metal.

[962] Yeah, definitely predates metal.

[963] Definitely predates metal.

[964] No doubt about that.

[965] It's an amazing thing that they've combined.

[966] Do you think that it's not orally active because it's in so many different plants that if it was, that people would just be eating it and getting high on DMT all the time?

[967] Could be so.

[968] Nature is our friend in these matters.

[969] Nature looks after us and that may be the case that it's not so widely distributed.

[970] The mystery is that it is present in quite a lot, actually.

[971] And that mixed with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, you end up with an orally active substance.

[972] And does that, would that work if you wanted to?

[973] And I, of course, 100 % agree with you that you should go to a shaman if you're going to do this experience.

[974] But if you did have that leaf that you were talking about and just a classic M .A .O. Inhibitor, whatever it was, and you took that and ate the leaf, would you then have the experience?

[975] It's very dangerous, though.

[976] Yeah, it's a kind of dodgy thing to do.

[977] you would have, but there are what they call ayahuasca analogs, which, which, and even Famawaska is being spoken of now, which does precisely that, which uses a pharmacological MOAI, you know, with DMT.

[978] I think, I think personally we don't need to go there because nature has provided us with this beautiful and incredible possibility in the, in the ayahuasca brew, in these two different plants.

[979] Interestingly, it's not impossible to drink ayahuasca legally in the United States because the battle is already being fought here.

[980] In Brazil, the ayahuasca shamanism has come out of the jungle and into the cities, and it's taken form of several what you could call syncretic churches, which are mixing elements of Christianity with elements of traditional shamanism.

[981] So the best known are the Santo D 'Ami and the Unia de Vegetal, which both use ayahuasca as their sacrament.

[982] I've sat down with the Uniade Vegetal group in Brazil and drunk ayahuasca.

[983] They were the most charming, thorough, professional, hardworking people I could ever have hoped to meet.

[984] They bring their children to the sessions.

[985] They start their children on ayahuasca at the age of 14.

[986] They have a completely different view of psychedelics.

[987] to the view that we have.

[988] They believe that it's a really helpful and important experience for humanity to have this.

[989] And fortunately, the government of Brazil agrees with them.

[990] And it doesn't persecute them for doing this.

[991] So they have formed established churches.

[992] And those churches have members in the United States.

[993] And I think it started in New Mexico.

[994] The matter was taken up to the Supreme Court.

[995] And the Supreme Court said, yes, if you're a member of the Union Outa Vegetal, you can drink ayahuasca legally.

[996] Now, that actually, for somebody who wants to work with ayahuasca is something that I would recommend.

[997] I personally don't, I'm not drawn to establish churches of any kind.

[998] I believe that spirituality doesn't require a church and a hierarchy.

[999] But the fact is that the Uniavegetal and the Santo Demy both know what they're doing with ayahuasca.

[1000] They absolutely know what they're doing and they are present in the United States and they are drinking ayahuasca legally in the United States.

[1001] Strassman told me, Strassman told me he met with them in New Mexico and he said they were all wearing.

[1002] outfits and they're drinking ayahuasca and singing songs about Jesus and he's like they're on these really really strong ayahuasca trips and they're singing songs about Jesus and he was like what the fuck are you people doing down here it's it's such a strange hybrid of things a trojan horse for ayahuasca hybrid but but i mean interestingly enough if we if we separate christ off from the monstrous bureaucracy called the church, you do find an interesting spiritual teacher at work.

[1003] And I suspect through ayahuasca they're getting closer to the true spiritual teachings.

[1004] And more important, ayahuasca is not mediated by a priesthood.

[1005] Ayahuasca is your own direct experience of the spirit realm.

[1006] That's really important.

[1007] Whereas in most mainstream religions, the priesthood is telling you what to think.

[1008] They are the intermediary between us and the divine.

[1009] In the case of ayahuasca, the brew is the intermediary, and it plugs us straight into the divine.

[1010] It sounds like a badass church to join.

[1011] I used to love taking acid in college and reading the New Testament.

[1012] That was one of my favorite things, is getting really, really high, tripping, and then reading the Gospels, because it is a very, very psychedelic text.

[1013] The book of John, it's almost, when you're, it's hard to, it's hard.

[1014] enough to read when you're sober, but when you're tripping, in the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh or it's just this, what is that?

[1015] Yeah.

[1016] Then you start thinking, someone wrote this.

[1017] Like, this wasn't, you know, someone really meant this when they wrote it.

[1018] Long time ago.

[1019] Yeah, a long time.

[1020] And it's very, very trippy.

[1021] So I can totally understand how being on ayahuasca from what you described the experience as and mixing that with Christ symbols could be pretty amazing.

[1022] Well, along the line with McKenna thought, You're familiar with John Marco Allegro's work and the whole idea of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

[1023] Yeah, the second mushroom and the cross.

[1024] Yeah, yeah.

[1025] Very much so.

[1026] And again, this has been, this is another thing that has been erased from history.

[1027] But the fact of the matter is that if you go into early Christianity, what you find is a mushroom cult.

[1028] No doubt about it whatsoever.

[1029] No doubt about it.

[1030] In fact, there are even, there are even depictions of the tree in the Garden of Eden.

[1031] And those depictions show a mushroom cult.

[1032] They show specifically an Aminita Muscaria mushroom, not a psilocybin.

[1033] And Aminita Muscarii also a hallucinogenic mushroom.

[1034] So, you know, when the entity called, you know, Yahweh or Jehovah or whatever he, it calls himself, you know, drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.

[1035] He was driving them out of the Garden of Eden because they'd done a mushroom trip.

[1036] Wow.

[1037] Totally makes sense.

[1038] And then the apple, the apple, even the word for apple also means red, and that the mushroom, the Amanita Muscaria was a red mushroom.

[1039] And that this is what they ate.

[1040] I mean, it makes sense.

[1041] The food of the gods, you know, and the forbidden fruit.

[1042] It makes total sense.

[1043] And actually, I don't believe that we can understand any spirituality without dealing with altered states of consciousness.

[1044] This is, again, something that's been lost in the modern world.

[1045] You don't find in most of the mainstream religions much altered state of consciousness going on.

[1046] But if you go back to the origins, you find altered states of consciousness are deeply involved.

[1047] Now, I'm not saying that those altered states of consciousness were always caused by psychedelics.

[1048] There's other ways to get into deeply altered states of consciousness, including starving yourself, fasting, austerity, certain kinds of rhythmic dancing, but definitely altered states of consciousness were involved.

[1049] So in the case of Christianity, it's St. Paul on the Damascus Road.

[1050] He has this blinding revelation, which completely turns his life around in a totally different direction.

[1051] Benny Shannon, who's the professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has made a very powerful case that Moses, in front of the burning bush, is really a psychedelic experience that's being described there.

[1052] You're sitting in front of this bush, and it's kind of moving and glowing, and a voice is coming out of it and speaking to you.

[1053] It's a very psychedelic experience, and he even further argues that Moses may have been drinking, an ayahuasca analog, Syrian roux and mimosa hostilis, I think.

[1054] These are two prants which contain the same ingredients as are found in the Amazon, you know, the DMT and the MOAI, which grow in the Middle East.

[1055] So that's, you know, that's possible too.

[1056] I've even heard scholars connect the acacia tree or the acacia bush with a potential source of a psychedelic experience because apparently it's rich in dimethylptomy.

[1057] Some acacias are.

[1058] burning bush, you know, like somehow another, like this was, you know, they had synthesized DMT from this and burned it and then he has this experience.

[1059] So they're calling it a burning bush.

[1060] Well, sort of, you know what I mean?

[1061] If this bush that is common to that area actually has DMT in it, it's amazing.

[1062] Yeah.

[1063] It's an interesting idea.

[1064] It becomes different.

[1065] And so you begin to realize that when you scratch the mainstream religions, you get down to base ground before the money man and the bureaucrats stepped in and took it over, you find visionary experiences are at the heart of it.

[1066] They're at the essence of it.

[1067] And then later on, those visionary experiences become banned and illegal and nobody's ever allowed to have them again.

[1068] No. I want to go back to something you said earlier that you said you have problems with technology.

[1069] And I think sort of a lot of people subscribe to the idea that technology sort of even though it brings people together and it connects people, it's sort of pushing people apart too and it's making people become sort of desensitized to a lot of things.

[1070] And And they alienate themselves and sit at home and play video games.

[1071] And do you ever consider the possibility that technology is a life form in and of itself?

[1072] Do you ever consider the possibility that we are, is somehow under the locked in some symbiotic relationship to we are the worker bees creating this new life form?

[1073] And that technology, artificial intelligence, which we're absolutely working on creating, will eventually be the next stage.

[1074] Something that's not hindered by the monkey flesh that really cannot evolve as quickly as the technology.

[1075] technology can't.

[1076] I see no reason why that should not be the case.

[1077] I think that since I personally believe that consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is an independent entity which chooses to immerse itself in physical form, I don't see why that entity shouldn't choose to immerse itself in mechanical form either.

[1078] In any highly organized system, I don't see why consciousness should not manifest through that system.

[1079] Why are we thinking that it only is going to work in a collection of bacteria and cells?

[1080] You know, this bag of bacteria is the only one that works covered a symbiotic relationship between who knows how many different types of things in your body e coli and all these different things on your skin and you know and viruses that you carry for your entire life yeah did you ever see the um it's on the internet it's a video where they took the two artificial intelligence machines and let them have a conversation yes they start lying to each other they start lying i haven't seen that yeah it's hilarious it's amazing But within a minute, they're talking about God.

[1081] Within a minute, these things are talking about God.

[1082] And that was the first time I realized that, oh, you know, I bet that our idea of this robot that the people make is more like Terminator.

[1083] You know what I mean?

[1084] This kind of like emotionless death machine.

[1085] Yes, exactly.

[1086] But maybe if something's super intelligent, the first thing these machines are going to start considering is their source.

[1087] And I think, oh, the humans made us.

[1088] And they're going to think, who made the humans?

[1089] and where did these ideas come from, but they're going to process the ideas we're kicking around here at a mega speed and that's going to produce the new religion or that's going to produce the next big whatever.

[1090] Jesus is going to be a robot.

[1091] The next thing is going to be a machine.

[1092] See, I just don't have any problem at all with the notion of consciousness incarnating in a machine.

[1093] That seems to me perfectly reasonable.

[1094] And besides, there's many machine -like functions of the human body.

[1095] I mean, we are kind of machines too.

[1096] Yeah, we are machines.

[1097] There's a video we've talked about before about watching traffic go back and forth on a high -speed camera, slow motion, rather, or sped up rather throughout the day, that it looks just like cells and blood cells going down an artery.

[1098] Definitely.

[1099] And, you know, it's very interesting.

[1100] I mean, you get to the issue of the origins of life.

[1101] And, of course, you're touching on deep religious issues.

[1102] So were we created in some way?

[1103] I think that the universe the conclusion I'm coming to is that the universe manifests organization and life wherever it can as a as a medium in which consciousness can immerse itself and that this may take many different forms and shapes that the key that was driving it is consciousness and the need for consciousness to manifest on the physical plane I mean I'll make a trivial example but I think all of us have had this experience, you know, with our computers, where somehow there's some kind of interaction between you and your computer in some ways.

[1104] It seems that I remember once I had, it was a most curious thing.

[1105] I had just got a new computer.

[1106] And my old computer had increasingly annoyed me because when I was saving, when I had finished the document on Microsoft Word, it told me that I'd made new changes which I needed to save, which I hadn't done.

[1107] It kept saying, do you want to save the changes that you've just made and I hadn't done that and finally with other glitches on the machine it got so annoying I decided to get myself another computer and that computer was working fine and I was sitting in front of it one day and I was thinking how awful it would be if it started manifesting that same fault and instantly the same fault came up on my computer it did that so I couldn't help feeling that's a shitty Microsoft coding yeah that's just a piece but it was reacting to nevertheless the way it reacted to my thought was odd and and um You know, animals, most people would argue perhaps humans have a soul, but animals don't have a soul.

[1108] I think we're all soul.

[1109] I think soul consciousness is the essence of everything.

[1110] And I think it manifests in all forms.

[1111] We're just incredibly lucky that we have manifested in human bodies because we've got this body with its equipment is an incredible opportunity for learning and growing and developing.

[1112] And we've got much better opportunity to learn and grow and develop than a fruit fly or a cockroach.

[1113] does.

[1114] Have you ever looked in any of Rupert Sheldrake's work?

[1115] Yes, I know Rupert.

[1116] Remarkable Man. Fascinating work and the idea that everything has some sort of memory to it.

[1117] Yes.

[1118] And perhaps even a consciousness to it.

[1119] Yeah.

[1120] That's the morphineatic feel.

[1121] Yeah.

[1122] That's right.

[1123] That's right.

[1124] And he's doing really good science on really metaphysical subjects right now.

[1125] One of the few people who's doing that.

[1126] So he's looked at phenomena like the sense of being stared at.

[1127] People know when they're being stared at, even when they can't see the person.

[1128] who's staring at them.

[1129] And the phenomenon of animals knowing when their master is going to come home, even when the master himself doesn't quite know yet.

[1130] So he's studying that?

[1131] He's studying that in a very scientific way, and he's producing statistically significant results, which show that these phenomena definitely do exist.

[1132] Boy, do people fight him to the nail.

[1133] I've read some of the critiques of his work.

[1134] It's so angry.

[1135] Yes.

[1136] Oh, people get so frustrated.

[1137] People get very angry, because again, it's kind of throwing the existing paradigm upside down, in the air and saying that we're all connected by these morphogenic fields.

[1138] And it's not showing a perfect connection either.

[1139] It's showing a measurable one.

[1140] It's showing there's something there.

[1141] There's something there.

[1142] And it's probably increasing and evolving.

[1143] Just like our ability to communicate was grunts and noises and then eventually evolved into the written word.

[1144] And now CDs and MP3s.

[1145] I mean, it's all evolving and our ability to sense when people are staring on us is probably something that's evolving.

[1146] There's probably energy that comes off of you when you look at me. And I just I can sense it when I'm looking away.

[1147] It makes sense.

[1148] I mean, it totally makes sense.

[1149] Sure.

[1150] Yeah.

[1151] It's so strange, it's so strange that these are all things that people so struggle to consider.

[1152] And then if you do talk about them, and you're a serious guy, but if you talk about them, you run into Cooksville.

[1153] Now, all of a sudden, you're, I mean, you went so deep into Cooksville that you wrote a book about Mars.

[1154] I did, yeah.

[1155] And this is, this is where you really take a chance.

[1156] Yeah, I lost a lot of my readers there.

[1157] Did you?

[1158] Yes.

[1159] Really?

[1160] Yeah.

[1161] But, you know, it seemed to me, it seemed to me an interesting subject that was where of exploration.

[1162] That book was called the Mars mystery that was written with Robert Bavar and John Grigsby.

[1163] No, this is the one.

[1164] I bought it, but I did not read this one.

[1165] Does this have a lot to do with Cydonia and the face on Mars and all that stuff?

[1166] Actually, much less than you'd think.

[1167] But we try to set those in context.

[1168] I do think Cedonia is extremely interesting.

[1169] What I made, my part of that book was mainly about cosmic cataclysms.

[1170] It's clear that the planet Mars has been subjected to the most horrific disaster.

[1171] And that there is some scientific evidence which suggests this may have been pretty recent, like the last 20 ,000 years.

[1172] I mean, half of the planet is like a mile higher than the other half.

[1173] So if you imagine you take a little ball and you cut a line round its equator and then you peel off the outer layer of the lower half.

[1174] And then you leave the upper half as it was.

[1175] There's a cliff, a mile high, runs all the way around Mars.

[1176] and something dramatic and disastrous happened to that planet there was definitely water on that planet flowing water and something took it away very very horrible cosmic cataclysm occurred struck by a gigantic asteroid or a comet most likely and we have these odd ruins or what look like ruins which NASA behaves very oddly about on the planet Mars and I just think it's an extremely interesting mystery And I decided to try to put my mind to work on this mystery and see if I could add anything to the debate.

[1177] I thought it's interesting until...

[1178] What do you mean behaves oddly?

[1179] NASA behaves oddly.

[1180] Oh, yes.

[1181] Well, because NASA has consistently ridiculed the notion that there might be intelligently created artifacts on Mars.

[1182] And that seems to be a most unscientific proposition.

[1183] All we have are photographs.

[1184] And on the basis of those photographs, it's not good to assume that they are monuments or that they are not monuments.

[1185] We need to keep an open mind.

[1186] We were talking earlier about the Yonaguni underwater monument.

[1187] I mean, you can actually bring two geologists to that monument.

[1188] You can put them in front of it for half an hour, and they'll come away with completely different opinions about what it is.

[1189] So how can we form really useful opinions on the basis of photography alone?

[1190] You know who fucks this up?

[1191] Hoagland.

[1192] That guy goes too deep.

[1193] He gets too crazy.

[1194] Richard Hoagland, he's one of the guys who's invested a huge chunk of his life to proving that Sidonia is an artificially created complex.

[1195] And he makes these giant leaps and these weird connections where he measures like random distances between points and shows that they have a direct correlation between distances that can be measured in Egypt and the Giza Plateau.

[1196] But you measure the, you try to follow where he's going.

[1197] You're like, God, this is just riddled with confirmation bias.

[1198] It's riddled with this idea that, you know, you're trying to find this connection.

[1199] You know, it's like, yeah, there's some stuff there that looks unusual.

[1200] The face, well, the face kind of looks like a mountain to me. But what's odd is the shape of it.

[1201] It is odd that it's kind of symmetrical.

[1202] I beg to differ.

[1203] I think that Richard Hoagland's work's important.

[1204] And I think he's shown great courage in putting his neck on the line.

[1205] Whether he's right or whether he's wrong, this is a subject that's worthy of exploration.

[1206] I certainly agree with that, but I don't agree with how he approaches things.

[1207] Sometimes, but you know, sometimes what happens is you get this polarization.

[1208] When you get, when you get extreme academic positions, no, we will not listen to this.

[1209] We will not believe this.

[1210] We do not accept any of this.

[1211] It's total rubbish.

[1212] It tends to make you more extreme on the other side as well.

[1213] You get crazy from the resistance.

[1214] And you need to, you know, you need to keep on pushing.

[1215] So he needs someone behind him giving him a back rub.

[1216] So it's settled down, Richard.

[1217] let's not get crazy I'd like to say it's a fucking pyramid in my opinion Richard is a good man and a good researcher I think he's I think he's done I think he's done important work on Mars and and those who who put Richard down may be eating their words in 10 or 20 years time that's me I'm ready to eat my words that's not a comedian I'm sorry I'm a professional shit talker I can't help it and there's something to be poked fun at especially a guy who believes you know there's a face on Mars and all that.

[1218] There's some of the things that I think are very compelling, five -sided pyramids or some other structures.

[1219] I'm not saying he's right or he's wrong.

[1220] I'm saying the question needed to be asked and it needed to be asked forcefully because it's up against resistant and it needed to be asked in a way that would engage the public imagination.

[1221] And when you say what you said earlier, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all.

[1222] If you say that half of Mars is like literally destroyed a mile lower, well obviously something kind of clismic happened and then the absolute proof, they've already found that there's water on Mars and there has been flowing rivers.

[1223] There's all sorts of evidence of that.

[1224] Why not structures?

[1225] Shit, if there's structures here, how amazing would it be if just 50, 60 ,000 years ago there was a goddamn civilization right up there on Mars, for real?

[1226] And that we were existing at the same time they were existing, and then we had parallel development.

[1227] Could there be some interaction?

[1228] This is an interesting question.

[1229] It's a question worth asking.

[1230] It's a question, and I'm glad that somebody was prepared to devote half of his life to exploring an investigator, even if he's wrong.

[1231] I'm glad that he was prepared to do that.

[1232] It's not even that he's wrong.

[1233] It's just he goes crazy Art Bell on you, where he absolutely knows, and this has been proven, and you're like, oh.

[1234] Like I say, it's the polarization effect.

[1235] It totally makes sense.

[1236] I mean, I would imagine it's got to be incredibly difficult to be taken seriously with any of this stuff, and you have shown incredible bravery in putting forth all this stuff.

[1237] I've taken a lot of shit for this stuff.

[1238] I'm sure you have, man. lot.

[1239] I mean, the worst was really being set up by the BBC in 1999.

[1240] I saw that.

[1241] I was going to bring that up if it came up.

[1242] I mean, in a way, I suppose it's a kind of oblique honor that BBC Horizon, which is their flagship science program, chose to spend three quarters of a million dollars destroying my reputation.

[1243] But that's what happened.

[1244] Now, six weeks before I heard from them, I got a call from a friend in television.

[1245] And he said, Graham, you're going to get a call from Horizon and they're going to ask you to appear in interview on a show about you.

[1246] And here's my advice.

[1247] Say no. They're going to stitch you up.

[1248] The whole thing is intended from the beginning as an operation to destroy you.

[1249] What's the motivation?

[1250] And you will not get a fair hearing.

[1251] And he said the best thing you could do is just not do that show.

[1252] So when they rang me up, I immediately said yes.

[1253] What was their motivation for destroying you?

[1254] Well, the motivation was clear, and I learned about this afterwards, which was a group of academics from various universities in Britain, had written to the BBC and said, this man, Hancock is leading our students to question our archaeology, and he's totally irresponsible, and he's just writing popular books for the public, but he's having such an impact.

[1255] He needs to be stopped, and we need a program about him which really shows how full of shit he is, basically, about what we're done.

[1256] So that was the agenda of the program from the beginning, beginning.

[1257] It was not to give a fair hearing to the ideas that I'd explored, but to demonstrate that I was full of shit.

[1258] And it was very difficult to get any kind of fairness in that situation, especially when in the cutting room dirty tricks were played.

[1259] And that's why Robert Bavall was also on that program with me, and he and I took the BBC to the Broadcasting Standards Commission.

[1260] and it was the first time in 35 years of broadcasting of Horizon that they were found at fault.

[1261] They were found to have produced an unfair program.

[1262] We listed 10 points of unfairness.

[1263] Only one of them was accepted as unfair by the Broadcasting Commission.

[1264] Nevertheless, it was the first time in the history of that program that they were actually found to have been deliberately unfair.

[1265] Do they have to make a retraction?

[1266] And they were obliged to re -edit the program and produce a second version of it, which was fairer in quite a number of ways.

[1267] I actually think that the other nine points we raised were right as well, but the 10th one was the one that we really caught them out.

[1268] What was that on?

[1269] Well, this was to do with the Orion correlation, and the fact that they had not presented our side of the story.

[1270] They had simply presented the academic side of the story, and they had not allowed us to answer.

[1271] This was unfair.

[1272] So the impression was created that we had no answer to this objection.

[1273] I saw the documentary or whatever you want to call it.

[1274] It was horrible.

[1275] It was a real attack piece.

[1276] But then I also read your response to it, which really kind of covered every single area that they, and then you read your response, you go, oh, wow.

[1277] I mean, it's really amazing that they were able to put together that sort of a biased bullshit piece on you.

[1278] But my response, you know, was read by a tiny fraction of the people who actually saw the show.

[1279] And that show actually did have a devastating effect.

[1280] Still today, to this day, somebody put it on my message board when I said that you were going to be on the show.

[1281] podcast when it was being discussed somebody put it on the message port but luckily someone else had your your response to it and you know then it was badgered and it was literally john west actually pointed out at the time because he wrote a letter to the bbc too the BBC were you know they were trying to say well only one of the 10 points was unfair so that's not that's not too bad and and the point john west made was no that's the only point that you were able to really get caught out on it's like they caught al capone out on tax evasion but it doesn't mean he was innocent of all the other things he was accused of you know Yeah, John Anthony West gets stuck on the outside because he doesn't have a degree, right?

[1282] Is that what's going on with him?

[1283] Yeah, he's not a professionally qualified Egyptologist, but he's the best Egyptologist I know.

[1284] It's brilliant.

[1285] His magical Egypt DVD series is incredible.

[1286] John's a great, man. I watched that DVD series no less than 20 times over and over.

[1287] My wife was getting, she was yelling at me. She's like, I can't believe you're watching magical Egypt again.

[1288] She was like, you're a crazy person.

[1289] I'm like, this is fascinating.

[1290] Do you know what they knew?

[1291] how much they knew.

[1292] This is incredible work.

[1293] What could have done?

[1294] John West has done fantastic work on Egypt.

[1295] And anybody who's traveling to Egypt get hold of John West's traveler's key to ancient Egypt, which is by far, by a planetary distance, the best guidebook that's ever been written on Egypt, because that will plunge you into the mystery of Egypt in a way that no other book does.

[1296] Yeah, his work is incredible.

[1297] Real quick about Mr. Hancock, you go and do ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon and deep sea diving and dangerous ruins.

[1298] He's the real Indiana Jones, man. That's what he's going to say.

[1299] This is Indiana Jones.

[1300] For real.

[1301] Like, you're a prime candidate for someone who's probably going to get sucked into some kind of vortex or something.

[1302] Yeah.

[1303] You might just manage sometimes.

[1304] It might just happen.

[1305] It is an incredible resume when you think about it, the fact that you, the description of those dives, man, about the current.

[1306] But the BBC thing, the reason.

[1307] I bring that up is because it's not as though you're just studying foggy pictures or you're just looking at or reading information and then coming up with some idea, you're down under the water looking at this stuff firsthand.

[1308] I've walked the walk.

[1309] I've put my life on the line and I've made an honest and sincere attempt to provide some balance to the grotesquely imbalanced picture of our history that is presented by mainstream archaeology.

[1310] This is what I fundamentally see my role as being.

[1311] I'm portrayed by the BBC as this person, you know, who's selling these wild theories to the public through, I don't know, some kind of glib magic.

[1312] But actually what I see myself as is somebody who's saying, hang on, there might have been another way.

[1313] Things could have been different.

[1314] The way that we're being told things were there's enough problems with that to raise some questions.

[1315] And I'm going to look at those questions and I'm going to document them and examine them and let's see what they come to.

[1316] I do not insist that there was a lost civilization.

[1317] I think it's highly probable.

[1318] I think it has been missed by the mainstream.

[1319] And so what I tried to do was provide balance to a very biased picture.

[1320] Rather than try to completely overthrow the picture, I'm simply trying to balance it.

[1321] And that's never been seen.

[1322] And I feel in that area I was treated very unfairly.

[1323] But hey, the BBC Horizon experience was a really good learning experience for me. I needed my ego taking down a peg or two.

[1324] That's a psychedelic experience in and of itself, right?

[1325] In and of itself, yeah.

[1326] So I was, I was ready for ayahuasca to kick me up the ass.

[1327] Well, thank you very much for joining us, man. I can't thank you enough.

[1328] This was such a huge treat for me. It's like I said, your book, The Fingerprints of the gods, really just changed the way I looked at everything, changed the way I looked at human history, changed the way I looked at the academic study of human history and what people are willing to believe and not believe and how much they're willing to throw everything that they've learned aside or push it aside or everything that they're teaching.

[1329] It's amazing.

[1330] It's amazing work.

[1331] For people that are skeptical, you need to just look at some of the photographs, look at some of the Balback, is that what it's called?

[1332] Balback, 11 ,000 ton ,000 ton megaliths.

[1333] You just need to see them.

[1334] It doesn't even, how tall are they?

[1335] They're like insanely tall, like 10 feet tall.

[1336] Oh, no, much more than that.

[1337] The huge megalith in Balbex is going to be 100 feet long.

[1338] 100 feet long, one stone.

[1339] One stone.

[1340] And where was it cut from?

[1341] It was more than a thousand tons.

[1342] Not far.

[1343] Not far.

[1344] That was quarried quite locally.

[1345] But a thousand tons, you know, come on.

[1346] And what is the explanation, the academic explanation for that?

[1347] They say that that temple was built by the Romans as a temple of Jupiter and that the Romans moved those big stones.

[1348] I would say that what happened was that a much older culture created that big stone structure and on top of it the Romans built a temple of Jupiter.

[1349] So 10 ,000 plus years ago something happened.

[1350] I believe so.

[1351] I think it was the end of something.

[1352] 12 ,500 years ago was the end, not the beginning.

[1353] That was the time when the meltdown of the Ice Age was at one of its most extreme periods.

[1354] The actual meltdown of the ice age took 10 ,000 years to unfold, but within that 10 ,000 years, there were three or four episodes of gigantic flooding where you had 30 foot rise of sea levels very rapidly, virtually overnight.

[1355] You consider what a 30 foot sea level rise would do to our civilization today.

[1356] It would wipe out every coastal city.

[1357] I mean, look, America is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina.

[1358] Imagine what would happen if every coastal city went under 30 feet of water.

[1359] It is enough to destroy any civilization.

[1360] So it was a climate change thing, you think it was?

[1361] Yeah, well, certainly a climate change.

[1362] But, but, you know, the cataclysmic explanation of ice caps is to do with pole shifts and to do with the mechanism called Earth crust displacement, which was first proposed by Charles Hapgood, and I go into this at some length in fingerprints of the gods, the notion that the outer crust of the earth, rather like the sort of skin of an orange could move around the fruit, the inner core of the earth, that the crust could move.

[1363] And therefore, in Hapgood's theory, ice forms on areas of the crust that are close to one or other pole.

[1364] That makes sense.

[1365] The poles are cold.

[1366] But when the crust shifts, it moves that cold area into a warm area, moves it closer to the equator, makes all the ice melt, and meanwhile new ice starts to form on the new pole.

[1367] So that theory explains the meltdown of the Ice Age, not as a result of climate change, but as a result of cataclysmic earth movements.

[1368] And that explains also ancient maps of Iceland and Greenland.

[1369] It does.

[1370] It does.

[1371] I think the maps are a very important question, which I do not see any academic providing a good answer to.

[1372] There are maps.

[1373] Almost always, these maps turn out to be copies of earlier maps.

[1374] The Piri Rees map is a famous example.

[1375] He was a Turkish admiral, and he tells us actually in his own handwriting on the fragment of the map that has survived, that he based his, it was a world map, we've only got one corner of it, that he based it on more than a hundred source maps, none of which have survived.

[1376] This was the case with the Orontius -Finius map and some of the Mercator maps as well, that they were drawing on ancient maps, which no longer, which didn't come down to us.

[1377] So these maps were drawn within relatively recent history, within the last thousand years, but they were copying much older maps.

[1378] many thousand years older and so it's very interesting when we find anomalies on these maps for example um our culture uh discovered antarctica in 1818 um before that maps that were being drawn around 1800 they showed an empty hole where antarctica is but if you go back to the 1500s the 1400s when they were copying these older maps that haven't come down to us you find Antarctica on every single one of them that's incredible on every single one of them and and it's kind of a bit bigger than it is now and it comes close to and almost touches South America just as it did during the last ice age.

[1379] You find off the coast of Ireland, a little circular island with the legend on it.

[1380] It's called High Brazil.

[1381] That island is about 120 miles west of the West Irish coast.

[1382] If you look at sea level rise, you find that 12 ,000 years ago and earlier, an island of exactly that size and exactly that shape existed in exactly that spot.

[1383] And it was covered by rising sea levels 12 ,000 years ago.

[1384] And it shows up on this map like a ghost.

[1385] And that has to mean that somebody was around 12 ,000 years ago who had at least developed sufficient technology to explore the world and map it accurately.

[1386] And a flood killed all that.

[1387] And a flood destroyed it all.

[1388] You're convinced of the flood?

[1389] Like I say, I'm not.

[1390] here with a belief system.

[1391] I'm here with anomalies and problems in the mainstream, in the mainstream model.

[1392] And what the evidence suggests to me very, very strongly is that those cataclysmic earth changes at the end of the ice age.

[1393] And even regardless whether a pole shift or a crustal displacement was involved, nobody can dispute that the meltdown of the ice age was a cataclysmic event.

[1394] Were you excited?

[1395] I'm sorry.

[1396] It involved huge amounts of volcanic activity and it involved these tremendous releases of water.

[1397] So the ice would actually accumulate.

[1398] in glacial lakes for thousands of years, it would melt, slowly, slowly melt.

[1399] And then suddenly, this is the mainstream model, suddenly the banks of the ice dam that held back that water would burst.

[1400] And the whole mass of 4 ,000 years of meltwater would pour down into the world ocean in one moment.

[1401] And the water descending from the top of the ice cap would reach speeds of 600 miles an hour.

[1402] And it were a wave height of close to 1 ,000 feet.

[1403] It then tears across the landscape that lies below the ice cap and you see this still the scablands of new jersey the the the finger lakes of new york state these are the results of those massive outburst floods that then tear across the land and then pour into the water and whoosh up goes sea level whoa holy shit could you imagine a thousand foot high wave just tearing across the entire continent it happened it definitely happened it definitely happened Mainstream science is not in disagreement.

[1404] How excited were you about the discovery of Atlantis?

[1405] Do you buy into that 100 %?

[1406] Well, Atlantis for me is one of thousands of traditions about a high episode of human civilization in remote antiquity destroyed when that civilization angered the gods.

[1407] That is a universal story.

[1408] It's told everywhere.

[1409] And the Atlantis story is better understood as part of that.

[1410] worldwide tradition rather than viewed in isolation.

[1411] It's very interesting.

[1412] The Atlantis story comes to us from the Greek philosopher Plato.

[1413] He is the earliest source of the Atlantis myth, if it's a myth.

[1414] And he sets out information about Atlantis in two of his dialogues, the Timias and the Critias.

[1415] And what he says is that this information came to him through an elder figure who's called Solon, a Greek lawmaker, who existed about a hundred years before the time, of Plato, but was in Plato's family, and the information had been passed down to Plato.

[1416] Solon had received the information from priests in Egypt.

[1417] They told him about Atlantis.

[1418] This is how Plato tells the story.

[1419] And when Plato tells the story, he actually puts a date on the submergence of Atlantis.

[1420] And that date is 9 ,000 years before the time of Solon.

[1421] That means 9 ,600 BC.

[1422] That means 11 .5 ,000 years ago.

[1423] And we're right there in that window when the Ice Age is melting down and hell is being unleashed on earth.

[1424] And if Plato made it all up, I really need to understand how he got the date right.

[1425] It's amazing.

[1426] What a beautiful way of putting it that we are a species with amnesia.

[1427] And it's really almost, I mean, when you stop and think about it, how does one keep records over 12, 15 ,000 years with giant cataclysmic events where people or for many generations scratching and scrounging just trying to stay alive like animals.

[1428] Very difficult.

[1429] And monumental architecture may be one way of doing it.

[1430] You know, the notion that the pyramids and the sphinx were laid out on the ground to model an ancient sky and thus define a date using four constellations, which were Leo, Aquarius, Draco and Orion, using those four constellations to define a date.

[1431] It seems like a kind of exotic idea, but we have that right here in the United States.

[1432] states in the Hoover Dam.

[1433] There is a star map built into the architecture of the Hoover Dam.

[1434] And that star map freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam.

[1435] At the moment the Hoover Dam was completed.

[1436] And the purpose of putting that star map there by the man who originated it was precisely this.

[1437] He said in 10 ,000 years time, if our civilization is lost and our language is lost and nobody can read our documents, when they come across this structure by looking at the star map, they will be able to know when it was created.

[1438] God damn.

[1439] How crazy is that?

[1440] And it's all based on the procession of the equinox.

[1441] It's based on the procession, which gives you this universal, beautifully mathematical cycle.

[1442] And we've got to think that if people think like that today, they must have thought like that back then.

[1443] If the civilization had in some totally different and alien way than our own, I mean, so alien that their writing was images.

[1444] You know, Egypt is, that's one of the things that I really got out of John Anthony West's DVD series was he really, kind of gets you to understand how different their culture and society was than ours.

[1445] The way they thought, just the way they read things.

[1446] They read things, you know, it was all like Shell, Nike, you know, Reebok.

[1447] I mean, they saw things in images.

[1448] That was their language.

[1449] Their language was images.

[1450] It's such a bizarre and different way to even think about existence.

[1451] Yeah, very different.

[1452] And the important thing for me to remember about the ancient Egyptians is, is this was a culture that devoted its best minds, you know, for 3 ,000 years to considering the mystery of life, what this is about and the mystery of death.

[1453] We lost so much in that burning of the library of Alexandria, right?

[1454] Goodness knows what we lost.

[1455] Who knows what they knew?

[1456] The whole heritage of the human race went down in that.

[1457] It's so incredible.

[1458] We're left with this framework, these stone things to try to deconstruct the past and even people, I mean, they have a certain amount of information, and they say, we're done, we're done, we figured it out, we've figured it out.

[1459] Just the idea that they can put a date to it.

[1460] Haven't they dated the pyramids just sort of based on carbon and things that were left behind?

[1461] That doesn't necessarily mean that people didn't move into the pyramids at 2 ,500 BC.

[1462] Like, do they know the exact date?

[1463] No, there's not much to go on.

[1464] You can't carbon date stone, but you can carbon date organic material.

[1465] And in the mortar between the stones, there's some organic material.

[1466] And the carbon dating on that is really puzzling.

[1467] It doesn't make the pyramid 12 ,000 years old, but it makes it a thousand years older than it's supposed to be at the top and 400 years older than it's supposed to be at the bottom.

[1468] Go figure that out.

[1469] You'd think they build from the bottom up, not the other way down.

[1470] And this says nothing about the core structure of the pyramid.

[1471] It only says about the outer facade.

[1472] How does that make?

[1473] I don't think we can take the pyramid away entirely from the ancient Egyptians.

[1474] The ancient Egyptians were massively involved in the pyramid project.

[1475] But I think the pyramid project is one of those two -phase projects.

[1476] And the view I put forward is that the original site was laid out around 10 ,500 B .C. By the survivors of a lost civilization, the subterranean aspects of the Great Pyramid, specifically the subterranean chamber was created at that time.

[1477] the gigantic megalithic structures, the valley temple, the mortuary temples that stand beside the pyramids, which seem so different in terms of their architecture, which have, in some cases, blocks of stone weighing 200 tons and many blocks of stone weighing 100 tons in them.

[1478] But this was the first phase, and that then I would suggest what happened was that those survivors of a lost civilization established something.

[1479] like a monastery at Giza and they then started to recruit from the local population so that within a generation or two they were all Egyptians anyway but they were trained in a system of knowledge and that they kept that system of knowledge close and tight and passed it down for thousands of years the idea of knowledge being transmitted for 4 ,000 years is actually not too difficult to take it's already happened we've had that we have that with some of our existing religions which go back close to 4 ,000 years.

[1480] There's no reason why it shouldn't have happened.

[1481] And then at a certain point, this monastic institution switched Egyptian civilization on with all the high knowledge that they had preserved.

[1482] And that's why it's so perfect at the beginning.

[1483] And no one else was able to do that at that time anywhere else in the world?

[1484] Not in the way the Egyptians did.

[1485] It was quite unique.

[1486] Just a magical series of events.

[1487] Yeah.

[1488] I mean, the great pyramid is a magical thing.

[1489] It was magical.

[1490] I can't even imagine.

[1491] I've been privileged to climb it five times.

[1492] times.

[1493] I've been into every known chamber and passageway in the great period.

[1494] Tell me about the King's Chamber, because that is the freakiest thing of all.

[1495] And for people that don't know, they've proven that some of the stones in the King's Chamber were from a quarry.

[1496] How many hundred miles away?

[1497] Close to 700 miles south.

[1498] These are like 500 tons, these giant stones.

[1499] They come from Aswan.

[1500] How tall were they?

[1501] How much do they weigh?

[1502] The heaviest stones in the pyramid weigh about 70 tons.

[1503] 70 tons So you're talking about The weight of 35 large family cars Roughly If a large family car weighs two tons That's 35 of them In the equivalent of the heavier blocks In the great ones Yeah it's between like two tons and like that Two tons and 70 tons is that what it is?

[1504] You could There's trucks that can be okay Yeah definitely we can do it We can do it but it's hard And to do it again and again and again and again And to do it with incredible precision and to align the whole structure that you're building within 360ths of a single degree of true north, that's really hard.

[1505] And also note, from that quarry to the pyramids, there wasn't a paved road, there wasn't a highway, there wasn't gas stations.

[1506] So if they've got these 50 -ton blocks of solid granite, what are they doing?

[1507] They put them on boats?

[1508] I mean, how are they getting these things 500?

[1509] Do you say 700 miles?

[1510] They were definitely shipping them down the Nile.

[1511] That's what they were doing.

[1512] It's hard to even wrap your head around.

[1513] the fact that people were communicating from 700 miles away that long ago.

[1514] Right.

[1515] But they were doing it moving giant stones into place for some crazy asshole that wanted a huge pyramid.

[1516] In fact that people working in the quarry, this crazy bitch wants a 50 -ton rock.

[1517] Do you believe we got to chop this thing up?

[1518] I'm not kidding.

[1519] I'd like to see the person who tried to talk them out of it at first.

[1520] You know, there's like a few people like, yeah.

[1521] Like, listen, man, I have a hut.

[1522] It's made out of wood.

[1523] It's awesome.

[1524] You don't need to do this.

[1525] I need this pyramid.

[1526] thing is, you know, that the Egyptians didn't devote that kind of architecture or energy to their daily lives.

[1527] Their houses were quite simple.

[1528] They devoted it to their sacred architecture and they were perfect in everything.

[1529] I come out of all of this just with a sense of the mystery, the majesty and the awe of our lost past and the fact that we do need to know who we are and where we came from.

[1530] We do need to recover our memories.

[1531] Part of Part of the reason we're so fucked up is because we just have got no idea what the fuck we're doing.

[1532] We've woken up in the middle of history.

[1533] Duncan and I were talking about this before.

[1534] If there was a time machine, what time would you like to go back?

[1535] We went back and forth from caveman days.

[1536] I like to see some cavemen to Egypt.

[1537] I think I'd like to see Egypt.

[1538] I would love to see Egypt in its prime to see what the fuck was going on there.

[1539] You know, what was that like when it was in full bloom and the pyramids had just been created?

[1540] and just this strange civilization, a super advanced civilization, had just risen far and beyond anything else on the planet.

[1541] Let's build that time machine right now.

[1542] And with that note, thank you very much, sir.

[1543] This has been an amazing conversation, a huge honor, and please follow Graham on Twitter.

[1544] It's a double underscore after Graham, G -R -A -H -A -M -D -Ur -U -U -U -U -U -N -Score Hancock.

[1545] And you've got to do the double - underscore, because if you go to single understore, some asshole has your name.

[1546] You know, Twitter will give you Graham Hancock, if someone has that.

[1547] There is another Graham Hancock.

[1548] Is he a guy?

[1549] Yeah.

[1550] Oh, you should ask him.

[1551] Hook you up.

[1552] He is.

[1553] He is.

[1554] And the website is Grahamhancock .com.

[1555] I have my YouTube channel.

[1556] Oh, you have a YouTube channel?

[1557] What is that?

[1558] It's linked through the website.

[1559] It's Grahamhancock .com channel or something like that.

[1560] And to get started on Graham, if you've got to get this.

[1561] Fingerprints of the Gods, it's one of my all -time favorite books.

[1562] If I was leaving and going to go on the space station for the rest of my life, I'd bring that one with me. For sure.

[1563] It's amazing.

[1564] Thank you so much for being here.

[1565] I cannot thank you enough.

[1566] This has been an amazing treat that the Internet has brought us together.

[1567] Thank you.

[1568] I've really enjoyed that conversation.

[1569] Thank you, brother.

[1570] Thanks a lot.

[1571] Cheers.