Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh - Graham Hancock: Banned From Pyramids, Joe Rogan Debate, and Antarctica’s Hidden Jungle

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Yerrrrr we were honored to have Graham Hancock on Flagrant this week. He sat down and explained who might have ACTUALLY built the Pyramids, why Antarctica has been hiding in plain sight for much longer than we think; where Atlantis might have been actually ended up; his upcoming intellectual debate on Joe Rogan Experience; & how psychedelics have changed his life and how they might be the key to all of this. Llearn about all that and much much more. INDULGE Timecodes to follow soon VV

We're almost at the edge of history when we go to 11,600 years ago. That's the date that Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is built. That, weirdly, is the date that Plato's Timaeus and Critias gives for the submergence of Atlantis. Archaeologists roll their eyes at any mention of Atlantis. Flat earth for archaeologists. Yeah, it's flat earth. I want to talk about Antarctica. I was very interested in Antarctica.

There's undoubtedly a time when Antarctica was lush and green. The question is, was it lush and green during the lifetime of the human species? Yes. He did know that other pyramids had their entrance in the North Face, and that is the entrance through which you will have gone when you entered the Great Pyramid. It's called Mamun's Hole. I'm doing a debate with a leading archaeologist on the Joe Rogan experience. It's a very good thing that this is happening.

The mainstream has normally said, now we don't want to talk to you guys. You're loonies, we're not going to give you a platform. But in this case, it is happening. I have things to say that I'm going to preserve my ammunition for. So on psychedelics, particularly on ayahuasca, I have felt the presence of the entity that I call Mother Ayahuasca.

She took the form of an enormous serpent who wrapped herself around my body. I felt enormously comforted. And again, I got a message that I've had many times is that you won't be good at giving love to others if you don't love yourself. What's up everybody? And welcome to Flagrant.

And today we're incredibly excited because we're sitting down with the Godfather, okay? The Godfather of my YouTube rabbit holes for the last maybe five years, six years? Years beyond that, we have Graham Hancock in the building. Thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. No, thank you.

I actually went to see the pyramids because of you. I'm very glad to hear that. It was a mind-bending experience. And when was that? This is, God, when exactly was this? Four years ago? Pandemic kind of makes things a little murky. Maybe three, but it was pre-pandemic.

The Giza Plateau and those three massive pyramids and the satellite pyramids, an amazing place. And the Great Pyramid itself is totally, utterly unique, extraordinary, and special. I have a long relationship with the Great Pyramid. I saw this unbelievable story of you going to the top. I tried to get to,

I got like a quarter of the way up by myself and I was there with my wife and I was like, I'm not trying to get arrested and have her just be alone in Egypt. And so I pushed it out and I went back down. Probably a wise decision

because you could have spent some year or two in jail. Wow. Really? Oh yeah. Wow. Did you get locked up when you went up top?

No. The illegal climbs that we did, the first illegal climb involved four o'clock in the morning and a lot of bribery. How much was it back in the day to get to the top? This was like 1996. It might even have been earlier. It might've been 1994. And we had a local guy who? Made contact with all the guards around the pyramid. We paid him money. I forget the exact amount He said he'd paid them off But then when we got to the base of the pyramid we had to walk all the way around it Which is a considerable distance 750 feet along each side We had to walk all the way around it and then we had to add more money to each of the guards at the four corners

And then we went up and my advice to anybody who's climbing the Great Pyramid, which is pretty much impossible these days, either legally or illegally is go up the southwest corner because the southwest corner is pretty intact. It's pretty much a straight line. You can follow it all the way to the- What is the entrance on? North side. That's north. Yeah.

So south- The opposite side. And the south- Yeah. Southwest. Yeah. Yeah. So south, west. The opposite side, and the south, south, southwest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the opposite side to the Great Sphinx. And then nobody's looking at you. Well, it's good for that. They're all facing east of Cray,

so you've got the whole southwest. But then after we were a few courses up, another guard turned up with a shotgun. I don't think it would have reached us from that distance, but there were threats.

And we had to promise to pay him more money. So he points the shotgun. Yeah, kind of. He's threatening you. You guys go, we'll pay threats. And we had to promise to pay him more money. So he points the shotgun. Yeah, kind of. He's threatening you. You guys go, we'll pay you. And he's like, okay, well, now you can be on.

Basically, yeah, we did a deal that we'd pay him when we came down. Did you? Yeah, we did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good to keep your promises. And then we climbed. Do you remember how much you paid? I actually don't.

But back in the day, I guess it was probably 1994, it would have seemed a lot to me at that time. But it also seemed worth it. It was a fantastic adventure, starting in the dark or just the beginning of dawn light and climbing up to the top, taking shelter at various points behind bits as other gods appeared, finally getting to the top. And then the light coming up

and just this majestic, majestic view. So sunrise on the top of the pyramid. Yeah, sunrise on top of the Great Pyramid and the second pyramid to your south. It's just an amazing, it's an amazing thing to see and it's an amazing experience. I would regard it as one of the peak experiences of my life I did have one other illegal climb which was just fortunate. It was

Following the the holiday of Ramadan. They have they have a thing called the Eid which is a celebration and there were I would guess there Were 30,000 Kyrene's on the Giza Plateau having picnics. And they just decided they were gonna climb the Great Pyramid, not all 30,000, but several hundred of them. And we just joined them, me and Santha, and we climbed with them. And that actually is one of the moments when I realized how difficult the Great Pyramid must have been to build. Because the biggest danger climbing up there with several hundred people on the pyramid was other people coming up and down.

So imagine managing that with all the blocks. With all the blocks and supposedly a huge workforce and ramps or whatever the Egyptologists imagined was done. And I don't believe anybody knows how it was done. For me, that was the biggest risk was people bumping into you, going around you as you're climbing up. But again, we got to the top.

And then I had three legal climbs in those days when those were allowed, doing various filming projects back in the day. When do you see your last name inscribed in the block? This is an incredible story. Yes, it is. I think it was on the second or third climb. I'm not absolutely sure. I think it may have been one of the legal climbs because it was daylight and we were relaxed as we were not when there were hundreds of other people up there with us. So I think it may have been one of the legal climbs.

There I did see, and it's on the south side of the Great Pyramid, the southeast side, overlooking the Boat Museum, which used to be there. And there was the name, initial P, and Hancock. And at that time, there was a date beside it. And that date, if I recall correctly, was the 5th of April 1916. Oddly enough, 1916. Yeah. Now, my granddad was a chaplain with British forces in Egypt in the First World War. So I had to consider the possibility that it could be him. He was called Philip Hancock. Oh, wow. But I couldn't absolutely guarantee that. And I was able to confirm it by finding my grandfather's diaries,

which were little diaries, about that high, tiny little writing in them. And on that date, there was a single line which said, climb Great Pyramid today. Wow.

And then I found- And it was dated 1916? Yeah, yeah. And then I found his biography, which was passed down to me by my dad. And he also talks about his climb of the Great Pyramid

in that, although in very spare terms, doesn't say that much about it. When, I mean, I know it's not that much that he put in there, but did he say there was any security?

At that time, no. Was this free range? At that time, no. Totally free range. And I think the sand was definitely cleared away at that time. But anybody could climb the Great Pyramid. And there was, in fact, the guy who organized our first illegal climb, and I think I can say this safely because he's passed on to the next world, was a guy known locally as Champion.

And he was called Champion because he was the champion runner of the Great Pyramid. He could run all the way to the top of the Great Pyramid. There were times people did that. And it was totally legal and nobody objected to it at all. And that went on, I think, certainly through the sort of 70s and 80s. But by the time my wife, Santha, and I climbed 1994 for the first time, I'm pretty sure it was 94, it had become illegal. And now it's totally

illegal. It's completely banned. And I doubt even if a film crew would get permission to climb the Great Pyramid now. Even like that? Yeah. They're very

careful about it. And one of the reasons why're very careful about it. And one of the reasons why they're careful about it is that every year at least one person dies trying to climb the Great Pyramid. People still try to climb it illegally. And as you can imagine from the bit of the climb you did, you're looking at a 52 degree slope. So once you get up 100, 150 feet above the ground,

if you lose it and fall, you're gonna go all the way to the bottom and it's over. In the beginning, you have a lot of confidence. The first few tiers of rocks seem pretty easy. They're not too bad. But I can imagine you're halfway up and you start looking down and it is over if you slip. Totally over. And also the course sizes vary.

Some of them are really no more than sort of hip high. Some of the courses are chest high. So you've got to... Courses are the blocks. Yeah. I mean, it's laid out in layers. So, you know, it looks like a step pyramid now. It wasn't before.

In ancient times, it was covered with facing stones. And you can see some of the facing stones still there. Some of the facing stones are still there down at the bottom of the Great Pyramid. They give you a sense of how beautiful they were and how magnificently well it was made. But the theory is, there's no absolute proof of this, that they came off during an earthquake in, I believe, 1301. And at that time, it's likely that that's when the Great Pyramid lost its summit. Great Pyramid stands at the moment about 450, maybe 455 feet tall, but its original height was 481 feet tall. And you can calculate that from just pursuing the slope of

the sides up to the- So 30 feet came off? Yeah. So there's a flat platform, or rather even a stepped platform on top of the Great Pyramid with one level and then one level, another level. But the calculation is very simple. You just pursue those side lengths up to where they would meet. And according to that calculation, the Great Pyramid was originally 481 feet tall. Wow. So it lost about 30 feet. The question is, was it in fact ever completed?

We don't know that for sure. Right. The general view is that that earthquake brought part of the top of the Great Pyramid tumbling down as well and knocked off the facing stones. And then of course it was used as a quarry by local people. That's what I heard, yeah. Because it's very, very, very useful

to have all this nice cut stone lying around. And a lot of those facing stones were taken away. Okay, so after inspiring probably tens of thousands of people to go to the pyramids like myself, you managed to get banned from Egypt? Yes.

Is it a real full-time ban? This is not clear to me. We were... We got to sneak in, Greg. We got to do one more time. There's a champion junior that will do it. We need a Carve G Hancock right next to Pete Hancock. I think this would be good.

It's very difficult to do that with a film crew, however. That's a very good point. And this is when it happened, is that my Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse. We wanted to film an episode in Egypt Which you would have thought the Egyptian authorities would welcome but when when they asked who is presenting the show and We said that Graham Hancock is presenting the show They said they said absolutely no way and they they would not they would not grant filming permission

Let me tell you something the Four Seasons in Cairo wants you to do an episode about the pyramid I promise you it would it would bring a lot of interest and a lot of people but there's a rigid fixed view amongst Egyptologists about the prehistory and the history of ancient Egypt Questioning that gets you bad That's the first that's the first line of defense against a critic or an alternative point of view, yes, is simply to deny them access to the site. And I felt since that happened that I've had my left arm cut off because Egypt has been very central and very important to my work. I hope eventually I will get back in. Could I go as a tourist? Maybe.

Right. Maybe. Announcements, I'm coming to the motherland. Play the bagpipes, Miles. That's right. The Life Tour is coming to Glasgow. Okay? Scotland, we're showing up. We're also coming to Dublin. Ireland, we're showing up.

And you know what? We are not going to leave the north of England out. Manchester, we are pulling up. Is it Man City or Man United? We're gonna see who's in the crowd. And whoever shows up more, that's who I'm rooting for, for the rest of my existence. So make sure you make the right decision, red or blue, because that's who I'm rocking with afterwards, okay? Those tickets are up for pre-sale right now. Code is Andrew.

Get them fast, theandrewschultz.com. Can't wait to see you all. Also, thank you so much to everybody who sold out the Royal Albert Hall show in London. We did that in a few hours. That was unbelievable. Thank you so much. Cannot wait to do the show in that remarkable venue. Theandrewschultz.com for all the tickets. Go get them immediately

before they're gone. Can't wait to see you all. Peace. Did the legal climbs, were they aware you had did the two illegal climbs previously? Yeah. Oh, and they still gave you permission? Yeah. At that time, everything was much less sensitive. Everything was much less sensitive until 2015, when I had the beginnings of a public debate with who is regarded as the leading Egyptian Egyptologist, Zahi Hawass. And unfortunately, in that debate, Zahi, it's actually on YouTube, Bitsvik, because there was a member of the audience present. Zahi, it's actually on YouTube, bits of it, because there was a member of the audience present.

Zahi massively lost his temper and stormed out. And then... So you won. Well, I don't know, but the debate didn't happen. Then I gave a talk, he sat sulking outside. Then he came back, gave his talk. Then the audience asked questions. And again, bits of this were filmed. And one of the audience asked him if he knew about a site

called Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which is probably the most important archeological site in the world at the moment. And Zahi said that he didn't know anything about it at all, and that was on camera. So unfortunately, the man is actually enormously knowledgeable about ancient Egypt, but unfortunately he came across looking not very good.

And ever since then, my relationship with him, which had been okay until 2015, has been extremely negative. And when the Egyptian government are approached for filming permission, which these days is done through the tourism and antiquities permission, when they're approached for filming permission, Zahi's the guy they go to and say, is it okay for these people to come in and film? So I'm speculating slightly, but.

Gotcha, so if you have beef with him, then it's not gonna happen. It's difficult. And I understand the defensiveness because when you wrap your cultural identity around something or creating something as majestic as the pyramids, feeling as if that's like being ripped away from you

can really make you feel as if that's like being ripped away from you can really make you feel as if your identity is being taken. Yeah. And to be clear, I would never wish to divorce the Great Pyramids from the ancient Egyptians. There are a lot of wrong ideas about what I think about this. Yeah. Please clarify because I'm a little lazy on it. The clarification is this.

It's complicated, all right? But inside the Great Pyramid, there are four very narrow shafts which point up at the sky. Two of them point north and south from the so-called King's Chamber. I say so-called because no burial was ever found in it. There was a sarcophagus found in it. It's still there, but they had to build the chamber around it. They couldn't bring it up in a funeral ceremony. It's too big to get through the corridor. So two shafts point north and south, and they do actually exit on the outside of the body of the pyramid. And back in the 19th century, explorers climbed up there. There they go. You're looking at the king's chamber, king's chamber south, king's chamber north. And both of those, you could roll cannonballs down

them from the outside, and they would turn up in the king's chamber. But the shafts of the King's Chamber North, and both of those, you could roll cannonballs down them from the outside, and they would turn up in the King's Chamber. But the shafts of the Queen's Chamber are more complicated. Until, I believe it was 1872, nobody knew they were there. The inner wall of the Queen's Chamber was completely smooth, but there was a, actually he was a Freemason called John Wayman Dixon, who had explored the King's Chamber. And he figured, look, there's shafts in the King's Chamber. Maybe there's shafts in the Queen's Chamber.

And he went around knocking on the walls. And he found two hollow points. And he broke those through. You could do that in 1872. And lo and behold, they opened up into these two shafts which go horizontally at first and then point up at the sky. They do not exit on the outside of the pyramid they're very very mysterious the thing is that the angle of those shafts points to significant stars four significant stars uh in the period in which egyptologists

believe that the great pyramid was built archaeoastronomy which is a universal language one of them is the lowest of the three stars of Orion's belt. And the constellation of Orion was identified with the god Osiris. He was seen as the celestial image of the god Osiris. So having a shaft pointing at the belt of Orion or Osiris makes perfect sense. And others point at two of the, the two northern shafts point at two of the circumpolar stars. I forget exactly which ones now. And again, they point at them in the era when the pyramids were built, because the positions of stars in the sky change very slowly down the ages.

So from an archaeological point of view, it would be absurd to disconnect the Great Pyramid entirely from the ancient Egyptians. But there's a problem. And that problem is the ground pattern of the three great pyramids and their relationship to, it's not an accident that Orion's belt has three stars and that the great pyramids are three and that they are positioned on the ground. Anybody can see it in a pattern that looks very similar to Orion's belt. It's like a painter has got his easel in front of him and his canvas. And he's looking up at the sky

and he's painting on the canvas the three stars of Orion's belt. And then he lowers that canvas down to his feet. And that's what you have on the ground at Giza. It's that perfect. It's that perfect, but it's only perfect 12,500 years ago. Roughly, roughly 12,000, let's say a round figure 12,000 years ago.

These changes in the sky are actually caused by a motion of the Earth itself. It's a very slow motion. It's a cycle. It takes 25,920 years to complete. And the pattern of the stars on the ground and the stars in the sky and the pyramids on the ground and their relationship to the Nile River and the Milky Way locks perfectly. At 12,500. About 12,000 years ago.

Not on a single day, but over an epoch of about 1,000 years. And then it gradually shifts out. Because this is a very, very slow change that takes place. So you have the ground saying 12,500 years ago, and you have the shaft saying 4,500 years ago. So one might assume that those shafts were maybe carved out at a different time, potentially? Well, yes, the way I look at it is I think the site was sacred more than 12,000 years ago.

I think ground platforms were created there. It's important to remember the Great Pyramid is already built around a natural hill. The first 30 feet inside the Great Pyramid is a natural mound, and there are traditions in ancient Egypt of the primeval mound. And if you enter the Great Pyramid, and you may or may not have been able to do that when you went there, did you get down to the subterranean chamber? I think everything was, oh no, we did. The subterranean was much bigger. Was it a very rough-hewn chamber cut out of solid bedrock, or was it a built chamber?

There's the built one that we saw, is it called a sarcophagus? Yes, that's the king's chamber. We went to the king's chamber, but I believe that there was another one. Hmm, I can't remember. Well, you can see that on the screen there, you can see the subterranean chamber. You see the entrance in the north face. No, I don't think. Well, you can see that on the screen there, you can see the subterranean chamber. You see the entrance in the north face. Yeah. No, I don't think we went that far.

We went to... Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's about 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Wow. And it's about 600 feet beneath the apex of the Great Pyramid. Wow. And it's cut out of solid bedrock.

And my view is, and it's only in theory, and I don't claim that I'm correct, it's just put this forward for thought, is that the original sacred site on the Giza Plateau was that natural primeval mound beneath which the ancients hewed out this enormous subterranean chamber, which is a rough, it looks like a rough unfinished chamber, but it has curious acoustic effects, which are in themselves very interesting. This is the humming that people talk about in appearance. Yeah, it's an amazing place to be. And actually, you get a resonance. We tried an experiment with an opera singer up in the King's Chamber. You could hear her down in the subterranean chamber,

which is quite remarkable in itself. But I think that was the original sacred site. I think the ground platforms were put in position, and I think the ancient Egyptians finished off the job in a brilliant way, in a brilliant way, overbuilding and commemorating and memorizing a site of enormous significance and importance to them. Sorry, when you say finished off, I'm dumb, so I'm going to ask dumb questions. When you say finished off, what exactly do you theorize? I think the vast majority of the great pyramids as we see them today were the work of the ancient Egyptians.

Okay, got it. But I think they were building on a prehistoric foundation. Okay. And it had been sacred for thousands of thousands. So your point is not to take away from what ancient, you think they built most of it. You think we are just discounting that there might have been people here 12,500 years ago that also built something. Correct, because that runs against the archaeological mainstream.

And this is where you get into issues of geology and the issue of the Great Sphinx. Because I think, again, it's just my theory. I don't claim I'm 100% right. Nobody's got to listen to me and tell the Egyptologists to go away. Just my view is that on the Giza Plateau were the three massive ground platforms of the three great pyramids, the subterranean chamber beneath what is now the Great Pyramid, the megalithic temples, the so-called Vali Temple and the Sphinx Temple right beside the Sphinx, and the so-called mortuary temples.

These are all megalithic, that stand beside the Great Pyramids. Those are the three little ones that are next to them? No, those are the so-called satellite pyramids. But there are megalithic temples. When I say megalithic, you're looking at structures where the largest single block weighs 200 tons. These are gigantic, gigantic blocks of stone. But by particular

interest, right in front of the Great Sphinx is an almost completely ruined one. And then just to the south of the Great Sphinx is a rather intact one called the Vali Temple. And this temple is, again, bears evidence of being built in two stages. Because when you look at it, you see that its core is made of limestone, enormous limestone blocks in the range of 50 to 100 tons each, maybe more. You can bring this up, Mark. In the one on the left,

you can see the limestone blocks up at the top. That's the original structure. And I and my colleagues, and particularly Professor Robert Shock from Boston University, who is a geologist, are of the view that the ancient Egyptians renovated a far more ancient limestone temple. So you can see the weathering on the limestone temple. And then you can see the granite blocks that were added by the ancient Egyptians.

And the puzzle of those blocks is that they are carefully cut to fit around the weathering in the limestone core blocks. So, A, they were respecting those limestone core blocks. They weren't demolishing them. It would be easy just to cut them flat, you know, if you're gonna do this, but no, they didn't. They carefully cut each granite block so it would fit around the weathering pattern. We'd only do that if you thought

that a place was sacred enough to not touch it. You felt it was special, and you were trying to preserve it. Likewise, the Sphinx. Again, I need to pay tribute to others. I need to pay tribute to John Anthony West, who was an independent Egyptologist, brilliant man, dear friend of mine.

Rest in peace, right? Yes, passed away in 2018. He used to call academics quackademics. He was a master of vitriol. And he was the first to draw attention to the possibility that the great Sphinx may also be a multi-phase monument, not just a monument built in the Fourth Dynasty, 2500 BC or whatever. He pointed out that there seemed to be very strange erosion patterns.

They're harder to see on the body. Those fissures. There might be on the walls. But on the surrounding trench, they're much easier to see. And then he brought Professor Robert Shock from Boston University, who is a geologist, and Schock agreed that what we're looking at here in the fissures around the side of the Great Sphinx, and to some extent on the body of the Sphinx, is what's called precipitation induced weathering. It's not a flood. It's weathering that's caused by exposure to a very

long period of heavy, heavy rainfall. And then you have to get into paleoclimatology. When did it rain on the Giza Plateau enough to cause this level of exposure and weathering? You can see the outer trench. The Great Sphinx is cut out of solid bedrock. They created a trench around its body, and the core body was left in place. I and my colleagues think that core body goes back 12,000 plus years. It was originally in the form entirely of a lion with a massive leonine head. But then by the time that the dynastic period of ancient Egypt came along, the great sphinx was very damaged, particularly its head jutting up above the plateau. And we suggest that at that time, the head of the great sphinx was recarved

into a human head wearing a classic nemes headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Can you bring up quickly the sphinx that is covered up to its neck in sand? So this is what the ancient Egyptians probably were looking at, right? Yeah, they were looking at a monument cover, yeah, like that.

I mean, this is- There's many times during its history when that's all there was, you know? That was the bit that got damaged. And we think back 4,500 years ago, 2,500 BC, it was like that then too, but it was a lion head. And it was very damaged and they felt they're gonna re-carve it into a human head.

And it is out of proportion with the rest of the body. Which again, does give credit to the Egyptians. I'm just trying to close you up to the Egyptian government here. Yeah, we want you back in. Also, the Hebrews are okay with this. I think the ancient Egyptians massively venerated this site from the beginning.

It was the place of the beginning. It was the place of the first time, a time that they called Zebtepe. And I think their project was to honor and memorialize it. And then this is where we get into spooky areas which the Egyptologists don't like, which is I'm suggesting that a body of knowledge was carried down within ancient Egyptian culture. And that a certain moment came when it was decided to turn the Giza Plateau back on again. And that body of knowledge was manifested in the construction of the Great Pyramids. It's very peculiar that the quality of workmanship on the Great Pyramid, and indeed on the other two pyramids at Giza, is extremely high. But go a generation later, two generations later,

to the Fifth Dynasty, go to the Pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, where the so-called pyramid texts are inscribed inside the so-called tomb chamber. And that pyramid, the exterior of it is a mess. It's very poorly built. It's very poorly constructed. You know, you look at it, it just looks like a heap of stones, whereas the Great Pyramid today is still a majestic structure. So it's as though they put everything they had into the- Try to replicate it, but they just couldn't. Try to replicate it. And then a generation or two later, that's the pyramid of ulas.

What if it's just like the Knicks, where the father did a really good job and then the next generation just really fucked the whole thing up? Yeah, I mean, it could be. It could be, but it's- Pointless shots on my team. No, it's a fair point.

I mean, human societies go up and down, and that can happen. But that's my view also with the idea of a lost civilization, that we can have an apex and they can fall into a slump and they can come out again. But is knowledge preserved and passed down through the ages? Yes, I think it is. Now, why wouldn't the people in the Nile Valley at that time, 12,000 years ago, also not be Egyptian? Like, could they still be ethnically Egyptian at that time? Well, I think in a way, I'm actually deeply uninterested in ethnic matters. When I come to relate to and evaluate a fellow human being or a culture, I'm interested in the

ideas that those people have. I'm not interested in their genes. I think actually genes are vastly overrated. They're the least important aspect of a human being. They've been blown up into huge importance in our culture today, but I think skin colour, genes, ethnicity, none of these things really matter. Human beings are the same all over the world.

It's been my privilege to travel the world for the intensely for for the best part of 40 years and whether i go to the remotest village in in the remotest corner of the amazon or whether i find myself in new york city once i get down to talking face to face with fellow human being they're just a fellow human being yeah just like just like me. And they have the same hopes, the same dreams, the same fears as every other human being. So I think we make too many divisions. I love cultural differences.

Cultural differences are great. Differences in ideas are great, but genetic differences are trivial in my view. And the things that divide us as human beings are far less important than the things that unite us as human beings. I think maybe it's high time we recognized that. So whether the modern Egyptians are ethnically connected in any close way to the ancient Egyptians is a matter that I regard as fundamentally unimportant. The modern Egyptians also honor and respect the Great Pyramids and ancient Egyptian culture,

and that's what matters to me. I'm curious, picking back on that, like how do you feel about the criticism that you got some people saying you're racist after the Netflix documentary? Well, that criticism was... Because that's why we brought you on. We're like, we hope you're racist.

We like it. You kind of let me down with this whole everyone's equal talk. Yeah. That was interesting. The subject of race is never mentioned in my Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse. It's never mentioned at all. But when the Society for American Archaeologists wrote an open letter to Netflix demanding that my documentary series be reclassified as science fiction. They accused me of spreading racism, white supremacy, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. None of these issues are ever mentioned in the series.

Wait, what was misogynistic? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. And, you know, for that matter, it was anti-Semitic. And what was racist, since race is never mentioned. But what these labels are very useful for,

if you shout them loudly enough. And if your friends in the media see a nice story here and pick them up and multiply it, what they're very useful for is turning people off the work of an opponent. Yes. And that was

clearly what went on here. If you're radioactive, I don't even have to debate you because you're radioactive. That's right. That's fundamentally what went on. Now what is the reason for, what was the possible, they had no justification for any of the others, but what was the reason for saying that I was spreading racism and white supremacy? It's because in a number of my earlier books, I reported indigenous myths and traditions, particularly from South America and from Mexico, which in some cases referred to a white-skinned, bearded stranger and his companions who came after a time of

darkness, after a great cataclysm, bringing knowledge and teaching knowledge to the inhabitants of the country. Now, that is not me saying that. That is indigenous traditions. The view of archaeologists today is that many of those traditions were simply made up by the Spanish conquistadors. I don't think that's true. There are many other archaeologists who don't agree with that and think that they are true and genuine indigenous traditions and should be rightly reported as such.

Whether we're referring to Quetzalcoatl in Mexico or to Viracocha in the Andes, these traditions, it's a pan-American myth. And they're not only found in the Americas, but all over the world. They don't always refer to a person as white skin. You know, the emphasis that's put on skin color today is really recent in human history. It's a few hundred years old. Did the issue of white skin or black skin carry the same resonance 12,000 years ago that it carries today? I somehow doubt it. I doubt it very much. I don't see why it should, because the abuses of human rights that were carried out in the name of color are recent developments. They're not ancient developments.

Recent in the scale of human history. the last five or 600 years, something like that. They weren't really there. They weren't really there before that. But it's a huge distraction from the major issue. They also refer to these individuals as being bearded. They often refer to there being seven of them. In ancient Mesopotamia, they're called the seven sages. In ancient Egypt at the Temple of Horus at Edfu, they are also referred to as the seven sages. In ancient Egypt at the Temple of Horus at Edfu, they are also referred to as the seven sages. In ancient India, it's Manu and the seven sages who appear after the flood

trying to restore the knowledge that was lost during the time of the flood. These are indigenous traditions. Same story, different parts of the world. Same story, different parts of the world. That's one of the things that interests me about it. What interests me about it least of all is the issue of skin color. What interests me about it most of all is the issue that there seems to be a memory of a cataclysm after which a group of people tried to preserve knowledge from before the cataclysm. Is this the Snow White myth?

I'm not sure. She falls asleep. The seven dwarfs or the seven sages, they come wake her up with the wisdom of a guy should make out with you when you're passed out. I need to reread the Snow White. Okay. There might be something there, this is good. Yeah, well, no, because myths are the memory bank of our species.

This is what I loved about the Netflix special, treating the myths as a way of passing on true information. Yes. And, yeah, and taking them seriously, not looking at them as figments of imagination. If we were to pass on data and fact, it's way more digestible in the form of story. We memorize stories. If you wish to pass information to a distant future, you wish it to be preserved, you wouldn't be smart to just write it down. distant future, you wish it to be preserved, you wouldn't be smart to just write it down.

How can we know that our script is going to be readable by any other culture? Let's say 10,000 years in the future. Will anybody be able to read the English language? Who knows? I have no idea. It's fragile. An example I often give is the Indusvali civilization in Pakistan and India. Indusvali civilization in Pakistan and India. The Indusvali civilization, nobody actually knew that it existed until it was accidentally discovered while a railway was built, being built through a site now called Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan. And then they found that there were these actually very, very sophisticated, very complex mud brick structures on a very large scale. Then they began to look at it.

Then they found that this culture had had a language, a fully developed written script. It's about 5,000 years old, but there isn't a single Rosetta Stone that enables us to translate that script into any more recent language. So we can't read that script. The script exists, but we

can't read it. So there could be all kinds of information in that script, which tells all kinds of things about our past, but it's not readable. And how long ago were they thriving? 5,000 years ago. Wow. One of the interesting things in this valley civilization

is that there is a particular seal that has survived, a seal that would have been used to stamp an imprint onto cloth or something like that. It's called the Pasupati seal, and it shows a figure which is recognizable as the god Shiva, who is, of course, an important deity in Indian culture to this day and in the Vedas. And it shows that individual seated in a, yeah, there you are. That's the Pasupati seal. Well, what you'll see is that underneath, the way his feet are organized,

What you'll see is that underneath, the way his feet are organized, is that his heels are pointed forwards. This is a really difficult yoga position, to sit like that and have your heels pointed forwards. You've got to kind of almost disjoint your legs in order to do that, okay? And the problem with that is that it's an advanced yoga position.

It's found in a seal that's 5,000 years old. We have to ask ourselves how many thousands of years before that was yoga being developed. Holy shit. You know, again, there's a hint of a lost human culture in this. The posture is called Moolabandhasana. And I certainly can't do it.

Unbelievable, because what do we date modern Indian civilization back to? Is it 5,000 years ago? Yeah, since the discovery of the Indus Valley civilization, we have to accept that civilization in India is at least 5,000 years old. The largely and correctly discredited notion of an Aryan invasion of India needs to be abandoned as well. Yes, there were multiple cultures moving back and forwards, but Indian culture is extremely,

extremely ancient. 5,000 years. Yeah, yeah. In this valley, that's like a thing you'll learn about in textbooks. Yeah, yeah, you learn about it now. But what most people don't realize, nobody knew it even existed. It was a lost civilization. And the language is completely independent. There's no connectivity to anything else. Nobody can connect it to anything. We don't know what it was. There's some suggestion

that it may have been Dravidian peoples, the peoples who are now found primarily in southern India, people, the Tamils. Okay, yeah. As a matter of fact, my wife is Tamil. Gotcha. And that's been very helpful to us when we've been researching in Southern India. We did a lot of diving in Southern, my wife is a photographer

and a diver as I am, and we did a lot of diving in Southern India. So it was great to be able to talk, for her to be able to talk in their own language to Tamil fishermen and Tamil divers and see if they'd seen any weird stuff underwater, which they certainly had. And they took us to diving on structures that are a fully formed city off the town of Mahabalipuram. Now, you speak about this in the documentary, but I think this is really important to understand as well, that most of human civilization has been organized around water, right? Close proximity to water. Obviously, you can fish, travel, etc. And as the water levels

change, some of those ancient cities could be completely covered. You've recovered some of these, you've seen other people. This is one of the things that I think is missing from our understanding of the past. It amused me, but also irritated me, that in that open letter to Netflix, the Society for American Archaeologists claimed that they could absolutely for certain be sure that there was no lost civilization during the Ice Age. They knew it was a fact. And if there had been any civilization, they would have found it and they would have published it. Right.

Well, how do they know that there was no lost civilization then? Because it's really important to understand that archaeology is often driven by accidental finds. A lot of archaeology, particularly in the industrialized countries, is the result of somebody building, there's a huge building project going on. Maybe a housing state is going to be built. Maybe a road is going going on. Maybe a housing state is going to be built. Maybe a road is going to be built. Maybe a railway is going to be built. Maybe a dam is going to be built.

And then let's see, let's call in the archaeologists to make sure that we're not going to wreck any ancient archaeology while we're doing this. And that's a lot of archaeological discoveries are made as a result of that, rather than of targeted inquiries. The second issue with ruling out completely the possibility of a lost civilization

is that archaeology sets itself up as the sole arbiter as to what is and what is not evidence. So I and my colleagues argue that we should consider the possibility of a much older Great Sphinx, as we've just been discussing, on the basis of its geology. I'm just going to add a more complicated point. It's not only the geology. The Great Sphinx points perfectly due east.

The sun rises perfectly due east on the spring equinox. If you go to the Giza Plateau or anywhere else in the world on the Northern Hemisphere, on the summer solstice, you're gonna see the sun rising far to the north of east. Go there on the winter solstice, you're gonna see it far to the south of east. But on the spring equinox, it rises perfectly due east, directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is looking at where the sun rises at dawn on the 21st of March in our calendar. Now, because of this

wobble on the Earth's axis- What is that called again, the wobble? It's called precession. Precession, yeah. Imagine a spinning top, which is spinning and is kind of doing this. And that's the viewing platform from which we observe the stars and the sun and the moon and everything else. And obviously the changes in its orientation are going to change their orientation. And that's why we get the astrological ages. Again, mainstream science sneers at these things, but it is a simple astronomical fact that there are 12 constellations that lie along the path of the sun, which is called the ecliptic.

And they are the constellations of the zodiac. And right now we live in the age of Pisces, very near the end of the age of Pisces. It's a simple fact that the ancient Christians go back about 2,000 years. Ah, the fish. The fish was their thing. Before that, it was Ares, the ram. Ancient Egyptian symbolism at that time was very much focused on rams. Go back before that, it's the age of Taurus, roughly the Pyramid Age.

That's why if you were building a huge 270-foot- long rock-hewn monument in the Pyramid Age, you'd be more likely to make it in the form of a bull than in the form of a lion. Yeah. Of a lion. Because there is a time when you go back, guess when, about 12,000 years, that you find it's the constellation of Leo that is rising behind the sun.

That's the age of Leo. Just as we live in the age of Pisces, that was the age of Leo. And there was a time when that monument would have looked directly at the place where the sun rises. First, it would have seen its own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo, sitting on the horizon and then the sun rising beneath it. So to us, and I speak of myself, Robert Boval, Robert Schock, John Anthony West, and a few others. We think it makes more sense, take the geology, take the astronomy, this monument has its origins 12,000 years ago. But Egyptologists say, no, we know the Sphinx was built 4,500 years ago. I'm not going to bore your audience with the details, but the evidence is incredibly flimsy. There isn't a single document

that attributes the great Sphinx to Khafre, who is supposed to be the builder of the Great Sphinx. There's nothing. It's just opinion, pure opinion. And we think that they are not right to dismiss the case for a much older Sphinx. So they select what evidence is evidence and what evidence isn't evidence. That's the second thing. And then the third and final thing is the huge areas of the world that have never been looked at by archaeology at all. Or if looked at by archaeology, looked at only minimally. Of course, the most important are the flooded continental shelves. And that's why Santha and I spent seven years of our lives, frequently risking our lives, scuba diving all around the world.

Sea level rose 400 feet at the end of the last ice age. Let's be clear, it did not rise 400 feet overnight. This was a rise that was extended over a period of 11,000 or 12,000 years, from about 21,000 years ago down to 10,000. It was even still rising about 6,000 years ago. All over the world? All over the world, yeah. All the world's oceans are connected. But in local areas, if you have a very steep coastline, the effect of the sea level rise, the amount of land it eats up, is going to be a lot less than if you have a gradually sloping coastline. And 120 feet sea level rise on a very steep bit of coast

is going to remove relatively less land. Whereas on a very sloping bit of coast, it's going to inundate much more land. And the calculation is that 27 million square kilometers that was above water during the ice age is underwater now. I think that's roughly 10 million square miles. I can't do the math in my head, but something like that. It's an awful lot of land. I think it's Europe and China added together. It's not that there's land. I think it's Europe and China added together. It's not that there's been no archaeology done on the continental shelves.

I think we're looking at something from Alexandria here. Yes. Yeah, we are. I've dived there as well. And that's inundated not because of sea level rise, but because of subsidence of the Nile silts. Alexandria stands on the Nile Delta, and the silts subsided and resulted in flooding. What Nile silts off the Alexandria stands on the Nile Delta and the silts subsided and resulted in flooding. The Nile carries a lot of silt with it, a lot of earth with it as it flows out of Uganda and out of Ethiopia and northwards into Egypt. And you come to the Nile Delta and

all that earth it's carrying, which also provided the fertility of ancient Egypt, all that silt is then dumped in the Nile Delta, and there were constructions were made on top of it. And the submergence of the sites off Alexandria, which is a magical, spooky place to dive, by the way. I've been lucky enough to dive there. The submergence of those sites is largely because of subsidence of land rather than sea level rise,

because it's relatively recent. Those sites are not old. So, if you're saying the silt itself has dropped. Yeah. Right. Because it wasn't solid ground. Yeah. I got you.

Anything built on top of it went down. Guys, I'm in different clothes. Why is that? Because we were able to add another special taping at White Oak Music Hall. I'm fighting to get everybody in. I appreciate the demand so much. So, tickets are being released today, the day this comes out, 10 a.m. Central Standard Time.

That's Texas time. So hurry up and buy the tickets, please. I appreciate the demand so much. I wanna get everybody in that I can. Also, speaking of adding shows, we are adding shows at Zany's in Nashville, July 14th and 15th. The 13th is sold out.

I believe I'm gonna be in Huntsville on the 12th. Also, I got a bunch more shows. Please check the website because tickets are selling out for these shows. And I don't have time. We got to get back to Graham Hancock. But thank you guys so much. AkashSingh.com. Hurry up and cop.

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Make sure you do that right now. Just download the SeatGeek app on your phone. Buy your first tickets. Use the promo code Flagrant. You get $20 off. Now let's get back to the show. Why is it a spooky place to die? Well, because you're coming across statues underwater.

You're coming across columns underwater. The visibility is not perfect. It's a little bit kind of weird. And it's just magical, diving on an underwater city. But I cannot claim, and I do not claim, that that city is 12,000 years old. No, it's not. But I do claim that in connection with a giant stone circle called Akejima in the Kerama Islands in Japan, which is 30 meters under sea level, where there

has been no land subsidence, where you can calculate that it's been underwater for 12,000 years. I do absolutely claim that in terms of the enormous structures that lie off the coast of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu in Southeast India. Poonpahar, a little further south, there's a huge U-shaped structure underwater there that Santha and I dived on with a team from the National Institute of Oceanography in India. You have to be careful when you look at underwater structures. You have to look at all the conditions that have led to their submergence. And in some cases, it's very clear that they've been underwater for a very, very, very long time indeed. Malta, which we featured in Ancient Apocalypse. When you went to Malta, did you go, Malta's the one that's divided. There's like an active civil war going on, right? No, no, no,

not for a long time. No. But there's like a Turkish side and then an Orthodox Christian side, and they're basically like a border that they just kind of built. No, not in Malta. Am I not thinking of Cyprus? Not in Malta. Oh, am I thinking of Cyprus? Yeah, it could be Cyprus.

Malta's a wonderful tax haven and good place to shoot. Malta's a piece. Malta's a piece. It has been for a long time. But Malta used to be joined to Sicily during the Ice Age. Malta wasn't an island. It was part of the mainland. Part of Italy, Sicily, all the way out to Malta

was all above water during the Ice Age and all underwater now. So one of my interests as a diver is what do we find underwater in Malta? And what you find strikingly underwater in Malta is a repetition of the so-called cart ruts that you find above water in Malta as well, which have never been properly. Cart ruts? Yes, they're parallel tracks that are cut into the bedrock on the island of Malta. And they look actually like railway tracks

in a way. I'm not claiming they were a railway, but they look like, they look, that's just a comparison. And there are even junctions in them. And nobody knows what they are. The word cart ruts is what they're called, but the notion that they were gradually cut out by carts being rolled over them doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It looks like they've been cut by hand, but more interesting is the fact that they continue underwater. And we've dived on those cart ruts down to 27 meters, which is 80, 90 feet maybe underwater. They've been underwater for thousands and thousands of years. And?

So then the issue becomes, are we secure on the dating of all the structures above water on Malta? And I suggest strongly that we're not. There's been very little carbon dating done on the Maltese temples. And that carbon dating is itself insecure. I'm doing a debate with a leading archaeologist on the Joe Rogan experience on the 24th of October. Joe will be having a debate, huh? That's his thing.

It's a very good thing that this is happening. It's the first time that somebody representing the alternative point of view has actually been debated by somebody from the mainstream The mainstream has normally said now we don't want to talk to you guys. You're you know, you're loony tunes We're not gonna give you a platform But in this case it is it is happening and I have things to say about Malta that I'm gonna preserve my ammunition for Okay, that's a taste. Hmm. Can you give us a little taste? It's to do with the absolute insecurity of the carbon dating.

Oh, I see. Got it. Do you think there's any submerged pyramids? Just to finish that point, carbon dating, by the way, and again, this is not something that everybody knows, carbon dating can only date organic material. It can't date stone. Stone, yeah. So if you're going to date a megalith according to the organic material found around you,

you want to be pretty sure that the organic material dates from the same time as the megalith and wasn't introduced later. Right. And there's no way in proving that it is or it isn't, right? Well, it's very difficult. You find a shield on it. Yeah. Yeah, it's very difficult to do.

And the fact is there are very few carbon dates from Malta and the new dating way that's been done there hasn't added usefully to that database. And when are you doing this on Joe's pod? So 24th of October. And the archaeologist who's going to debate me is called Flint Dibble. He's American, but he teaches at the University of Cardiff in Wales in Britain. His father was a famous archaeologist called Harold Dibble. And Flint has been very pointed and aggressive in his attacks on me following the Netflix show, which he has every right to be. I had wanted to debate another archaeologist who's called John Hoopes from the University of Kansas,

because he has been by far the most obnoxious in these leveling these ad hominem attacks against me and and straw men attacks like Hancock says this Hancock says that when Hancock doesn't say either this or that you know but if you again if you say it enough it begins to have an effect and I I would have liked to have brought called John Hoops to account and invited him to debate me. But unfortunately, he backed out and he wouldn't do it. Flint Dibble, and this is genuine, Flint Dibble has had some health issues. I won't go into the details. And we've not been certain until very recently whether he will be able to make it.

But kudos to him. It looks like he is going to make it. And what he's doing and what I'm doing on the 24th of October is we're both putting our reputations on the line. This is a high stakes issue for both me and him. Because anything can happen in a debate. And I certainly intend to make sure that I'm properly prepared.

I'm sure he's going to make sure he's properly prepared. I hope we can end up hugging each other and finding some common ground rather than all of this hatred. Okay. Now, sorry, there's one question. I'm sorry to interrupt. But you, as society got more advanced in this time,

it seems we have less and less dependence on astronomy. Astronomy, when I'm thinking 4,000, five years ago to now, it just kind of fills in the blanks of what we couldn't figure out on our own. So 12,000 years ago, if there's a really advanced civilization, why would astronomy play as big of a role in them where everything is pointing to X, Y, and Z star? Well, first of all, let's consider what we mean by advanced. What is an advanced civilization?

Are we really an advanced civilization? Do we look around at much of our culture that we would say that's incredibly advanced? Or are we talking tech? Are we talking tech? We're technologically advanced. And like scientifically, yeah. Yeah, we believe that that is advanced. And that is one of the mistakes in looking for a quote unquote advanced civilization in the past is that we tend to be looking for ourselves in our past whereas it's possible for a civilization to be advanced in other ways we could not measure longitude very important issue if you're a navigator and a sailor we could not measure longitude until 1760s 1750s sometime in the second half of the 18th century. It took the creation of a very

precise marine chronometer in order to be able to calculate what your longitude is. Otherwise, in the middle of a stormy night, you could find yourself 300 miles west of where you thought you were and crashing into a coastline. It's a really good thing to know longitude. I mean, a million pounds in the 18th century was a lot of money. There was a million British pounds prize for cracking the longitude problem. And it wasn't until the second half of the 18th century that it was solved. So it's weird that on ancient maps copied from even more ancient source maps, there are precise longitudes, precise relative longitudes. This is one of the things that suggests to me that a civilized, the second thing is those maps show the world as it looked during the last ice age.

Thirdly, and most important, they show Antarctica. Our civilization didn't discover Antarctica until 1820. showing Antarctica where the mapmaker informs us that he based his map on much older source maps that were falling to pieces and that will fall completely apart. He's preserved the information in those maps on his map. He's copying from older sources, and there is Antarctica. So did they just make it up?

Why did we still call it Antarctica? That was another thing I was like... Well, opposite of the Arctic yeah but I just if we it's like it's like bro

he called it Antarctica why don't you just look at the map you're gonna call it the same you know what I mean yeah we call it Antarctica they used to call it Terra Australis

the southern land if you go for the Orontius Phineas map for example you'll find a much better a much better yeah I thought that map said Antarctica.

That's very good. Yeah. Tripped up. I actually am really excited that we're talking about Antarctica. Yeah. Antarctica is an interesting place. This is my newest rabbit hole. It's one of those great...

You see, there's Antarctica. That's the Orontes Finis. Is that right? There's South Africa, and there's Antarctica, and there's the tip of South America, almost touching Antarctica. It's a bit bigger than it is today, but it would have been like that during the last Ice Age.

That's a map from 1531. And what they're saying in the legend is that here in this map, I expose regions that neither Eudoxus nor, I forget the names of all the ancient maps, none of them knew about it. They were hidden in darkness, but here they are. Hidden in darkness, I suggest they're hidden in darkness on ancient maps that Orontes Phineas copied from. It's an anomaly that it's sitting there.

And it's not good enough to say that those mapmakers just wanted to balance the world so they put a fantasy continent there, which later turned out to actually be there. That's roughly what they're saying now. So that suggests to me a culture that was capable of exploring and mapping the Earth during the last Ice Age. The second issue is precisely astronomy. It's ancient knowledge of precession, which, again, our culture attributes to the Greeks, roughly between 300 BC and 100 BC. They're supposed to have been the discoverers of precession. Precession is very hard to observe.

In a single lifetime, it's a fraction of an inch on the horizon, the change. So you have to keep records over long periods of time. You have to have a system that preserves those records and passes them down. So it's the knowledge of precession that is manifested in ancient mythology and in ancient traditions, often traditions that speak of a global flood. The Vedas themselves contain numbers that are related to precession. Again, I don't want to get too boring, but procession proceeds at a rate of one degree every 72 years.

And this is the key number that is found in ancient mythology around the world and variations of that number. So 72 plus 36 is 108. 108 is another processional number. 108 divided by 2 is 54. That's another processional number. That's why on the bridge at angkor thom in angkor in cambodia you have 54 figures on either side of the bridge and what are they doing they're hauling on the body of the serpent vazuki who is wrapped around

mount mandera and they are churning the milky ocean the argument is that this is a symbol for precession procession thatcession that is taking place there. And the numbers are multiplied. Another example I often give is the Great Pyramid itself. And it's very important. I made this point at the beginning. It's very important that when people want to check this calculation, that they use the true original height of the Great Pyramid. The 481 feet that it would have risen to rather than its rather stunted 450 plus feet today.

When you use the true original height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth. And when you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth. Now, why does 43,200 matter? It's 600 times 72. It's another precessional number. It's a number generated by the precessional motion of the earth itself. And there we enter a very clever piece of work. Great Pyramid is almost perfectly aligned to true north. It's within 360ths of a single degree of true north. It's an error, but it's really good. When you look at a monument on that scale,

six million tons, 481 feet tall, and you get it within 3 60ths of a degree of true north, you are doing very accurate work. And you're saying something else as well. You think they figured that out back in the day? Oh yeah, definitely. They used astronomy. They used astronomy to figure it out.

But no, they messed up a little. I think they did the best they could. I think they did the best they could. We also have to take account of movements of the Earth itself. So it might have been right at the time. There might have been a slight shift in the tectonic plates underneath. I'm not sure. But the fact is it's 360, it's off now.

What it does tell us, apart from the level of accuracy, is that when they made that monument, they wanted to lock it in to the key cardinal directions. It's perfectly true north, perfectly true south, perfectly true east, perfectly true west, within 360th of a single degree. The cardinal directions of this planet mattered to them. They were speaking to the Earth with that monument. Secondly, it's located on latitude 30 degrees north, give or take a few seconds of arc. And latitude 30 degrees north is one third of the way between the equator and the North Pole. So that's not an insignificant latitude.

It's a significant latitude. It seems like the monument is speaking to the Earth. And then we find that it encodes the dimensions of the Earth on a scale provided by a key motion of the Earth itself, namely the Earth's precession, operating at the rate of one degree every 72 years. Multiply that by 600, you get 43,200. That's the scale the pyramid is built on, 1 to 43,200.

So it's a monument that speaks to the Earth, that is aligned to the cardinal directions of the earth and that Encodes the dimensions of the earth on a scale defined by the earth itself Hey, nobody would object to this at all Nobody nobody that I know of once they get the measurements right and realize that they're not dealing with a 450 foot tall monument But a 481 foot tall monument nobody nobody disputes 481-foot tall monument. Nobody disputes that. The pie, which is used to calculate the diameter and circumference of a circle, is built into the Great Pyramid.

This is broadly accepted by Egyptologists. It's just that they regard it as a coincidence. And your theory is also that the ancient Egyptians did this, right? Because you said they did most of the work. Yeah, yeah. I think they did. I think it was finished off. You define the very moment you start building that 52-degree slope into of the work. Yeah, I think they did. I think it was finished off. You define, the very moment you start building

that 52 degree slope into all the sides, you're defining what the apex is going to be. Right. That's there from the beginning. And what was their daily ritual use for the pyramids of Giza that you theorize? Well, actually nobody has any idea. The Great Pyramid was sealed.

It was a sealed monument. So in roughly 900 AD, forgive me if I don't give you the exact date, give or take 50 years, the Caliph al-Mamun, who was running Egypt at the time, wanted to get inside the Great Pyramid. This is 400 years before the earthquake. The facing stones are still in place.

He could not find the true entrance to the Great Pyramid. It turned out that it could have been found. According to accounts, there was some sort of, almost like a button that you pressed, and the doorway would slide, the facing stones would slide away, and you could find the true entrance. But he couldn't find that.

But he did know that other pyramids had their entrance in the north face, other older pyramids, like the Pyramid of Unas. He knew they had their entrance in the north face. So he started hacking away at the north face of the Great Pyramid. And that is the entrance through which you will have gone when you entered the Great Pyramid.

It's called Mamun's Hole. He and his team hacked it out with sledgehammers and chisels and they broke their way in to the north face. And then as they were doing so, they heard a block falling in a hollow space. And then they knew they were onto something. That block that fell, caused by the vibrations

that they had caused must have been in some kind of passageway or chamber. So they headed towards that sound and that's where they found the original passageway system of the Great Pyramid, which after you've gone through Mamun's Hall, gone around a little corner where it's all cut out of the rock

and then you find yourself going up into the, first of all, the ascending corridor and then the Grand Gallery, which is the most majestic structure. They found the original entrance system in that way. And now the true original entrance is open, but it's not used by tourists who enter the Great Pyramid. Okay. I want to talk about Antarctica because I think this is going to be the new obsession. I feel like it's trending super

high. Who knows if there's any truth to it, but a friend of ours who will remain nameless went there. Yeah. Got to go on a cool experience trip, etc. And he said a couple interesting things. He said the mountains looked eerily pointy and four-sided. He said way more mountainous than he thought it would be. I think the illusion made from looking at maps and watching penguins is just this flat. You can see mountains on the Orontius Phineas map. Oh, is that what the little etchings are?

Around the edges there. Interesting. Those are mountains. Now, he also said this. He said a couple things. He said there is a pact with every country that has a slice of it that they will not

dig or remove any minerals from Antarctica. And he even said that a scientist was there, said to them, World War III will not start until one of these countries breaks that pact. They are clearly protecting or preserving something that may or may not be under, I believe it's three miles, Mark was saying earlier, at its thickest of ice. Now, Mark, maybe you should describe the thing that you were saying before about there was a time where Antarctica- Yeah, I was reading an article that perhaps 90 million years ago, there was a lush rainforest

that is now covered in miles of ice on the Antarctic continent. Yeah, that's probably true. If you go back that far, you would find that the Earth's climate was very different from how it is today. And there's undoubtedly a time they found fossils on Antarctica. There's undoubtedly a time when Antarctica was lush and green. The question is, was it lush and green during the lifetime of the human species? Yes, this is where it gets tricky. And this is where it gets tricky.

The Homo sapiens line descends from a line that goes back about six million years, not much further than that, if we accept conventional evolutionary theory. So six million years ago, Antarctica is supposed to have been as cold and as frozen as it is today. Now, when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, which is my first book tracing the possibility of a lost civilization, I was very interested in Antarctica. And I was interested in it because of the work of a previous researcher called Charles Hapgood. Charles Hapgood wrote a number of very important books.

One of them is called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, which precisely goes into this issue of ancient maps that don't fit our understanding of how the world was supposed to be known at that time. And another is called The Path of the Pole. and he proposed a phenomenon that he called earth crust displacement whereby from time to time the entire outer crust of the earth like the skin of an orange might shift leaving the core of the earth in place that it could shit like so if you imagine a very loose orange skin the fruit is inside it's staying in place but you're shifting the skin around it well obviously then if that happens I'm talking it could have been in warmer latitudes and could have been shifted into colder latitude and how often does this happen well does it happen at all is the first question I mean of all the theories I've looked at and supported this is this is the one that I've come

in for the for the most criticism for and I've been much more interested recently in the younger dryas impact hypothesis and the notion that the the cataclysm occurred around twelve thousand eight hundred years ago caused by impacts of comet fragments and we can go into that but when I wrote fingerprints of the gods although I was interested in comets I was more interested in Earth crust displacement and and the the standard academic response to that is, look, Antarctica's been frozen for millions of years, and that rules out the whole earth crust displacement argument.

I think that even those who are still researching this field would prefer it to be the mantle rather than the crust of the earth that moves. Again, it's very technical, that moves in one piece. There's an Italian admiral called Flavio Barbiero who wrote an article for my website suggesting that Earth crust displacement could be kicked off by a comet impact where it hits the Earth a glancing blow

and causes a shift of this kind taking place. But by and large, I don't argue these days that Antarctica and Earth crust displacement are the mechanism we should be looking at. I'm much more interested in the very solidly scientifically grounded Younger Dryas impact. Back in 1995 when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I was searching around for many possibilities that could have caused a global cataclysm in the range of 12 to 13,000 years ago because that's what all the astronomy pointed out 12 to 13,000 years ago and hapgood's theory seemed to me a very valuable and useful one i still won't write it off i won't dismiss it entirely but i've shifted in the direction of the younger dryas impact hypothesis

simply because i'm in a constant argument with mainstream academia. And the issue to me, the most important issue to me, is the issue of a global cataclysm at the end of the Ice Age. What caused that cataclysm is a secondary issue. The cataclysm itself is the primary issue. And I found the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

a better, much more scientifically grounded explanation for that cataclysm than the notion of Earth crust displacement. But do any archaeologists or any of these prehistorians dispute the Younger Dryas? There's still a lot of argument around it. There's about 60 major scientists who are involved in the comet research group. They're all credentialed scientists. They've all published dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, including Scientific Reports, and many, many others on the hypothesis. But there's also a group of academics who are opposed to it

and dispute that any impact ever took place. And then even in those who do accept that the Younger Dryas was a cataclysm, some think that it may have been caused by solar activity rather than by comet impact. How would that work? Well, it would certainly, it could work at the end of the Younger Dryas. There are two moments in the Younger Dryas. The beginning is 12,800 years ago.

It's a very strange moment in Earth history. This is when the world's climate, which has been warming up for a few thousand years, the ice age is still very much present, have big ice caps on North America, big ice caps on Northern Europe, but it's been warming up gradually. And then 12,800 years ago, two things happened at once. First, a sudden cataclysmic drop in climate. The cold, it gets incredibly cold. As cold as it was at the peak of the ice age more than 20,000 years ago.

It gets incredibly cold. But then puzzlingly, there's a release of water into the world ocean. I say puzzlingly because when the earth is freezing, you would not expect melt water to be going into the world ocean. I say puzzlingly because when the earth is freezing, you would not expect melt water to be going into the world ocean. It should be staying on the ice caps. And I cite the work of Cesare Miliani and his work on the submergence of Bahamian corals.

This is how do you know that sea level rose? There are certain corals that can only exist within a certain number of feet of the sea surface. Because they need the sunlight. Yeah, when they drown, that tells you the sea level has risen. And they point to a significant sea level rise 12,800 years ago at exactly the moment of this deep freeze. The comet impact hypothesis explains that

because it says that the shock at the heat of the impact of large fragments of a comet on the North American and European ice caps would have been sufficient to release that freezing water into the world ocean, to cut the Gulf Stream. That's the central heating system of our planet. It's called the global meridional overturning circulation. It's these currents of warm and cold water that flow around the planet. And the Gulf Stream was cut and the Earth got extremely cold. So I think the comet impact hypothesis does best explain that. So just real quick, so comet hits, cuts the Gulf Stream, cutting the Gulf Stream-

It cuts the Gulf Stream because it releases a huge quantity of melt water from the North American ice cap almost instantaneously. So the comet hits the ice that is in North America. And Europe. And Europe. That water cuts the Gulf Stream because it releases all this, which was frozen water. It's freezing water.

Gotcha, gotcha. Goes into the world ocean. Temperature plummets. Temperature plummets. But at the same time, there's much more potential water in the oceans so that when the temperature does rise, now you have that

meltwater. Well, no, so now we need to go on. 12,800 years ago, in the thousand or 1,200 years after that, that's a window when all the great Ice Age megafauna go extinct. Megafauna are? Sabertooth tigers, woolly mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, the whole collection of famous Ice Age megafauna, they all go extinct in that window and clearly

they didn't go extinct for no reason it's the cataclysm of the Younger Dryas that made them extinct. Have you seen the oh god, what is the gentleman's name he's a guy who I believe excavates up in Alaska for gold I'm forgetting what it is right now.

But there are images of woolly mammoths who have had their legs completely shattered, but they're intact. Yeah. Is this a boneyard that's been... Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's very, very, very interesting.

I've not been there. I've not looked into it yet, so I can't speak authoritatively about it. But it might speak to your opinion right there. What I can say is that at Serrania del Indosa in Colombia, there is an eight-kilometer-long rock art panel dated to 12,800 years ago, which shows these megafauna. It shows many of the extinct megafauna from that period.

To get back to the point, so we have this window of about 1,200 years where the Earth is very cold, the megafauna go extinct. But then 11,600 years ago, just as fast and dramatically as the Earth went cold, the Earth goes warm. You're looking at a 10 degree rise in global temperatures in a couple of hundred years. It goes very, very, in geological terms, very rapid and very fast. And sea level rises very quickly. And what is the cause of that? 11,600 years ago, it's called melt water pulse 1B. There's another collapse of the ice sheets and huge amounts of water go into the world

ocean. Now that, that could realistically be caused by a sudden burst of solar activity, which melted down those ice sheets. But that's not what I go with. I still prefer the notion that we're dealing with multiple bombardments from comet fragments. And in this case, you're looking at a comet fragment that goes into a world ocean, that sends up a huge amount of water vapor into the upper atmosphere, creates a greenhouse effect,

and accounts for the warming that takes place at that time. So two comets. One that cooled things down and one that heated things up? Yeah, yeah. Any idea why one would cool down and one would heat up? Depends where the impact is. If the impact's on an ice cap and it's releasing enormous amounts of melt water into the world ocean,

you're going to make the world very cold. If the impact's in a world ocean and it's putting a huge amount of water vapor into the upper atmosphere, it's a greenhouse effect and the world is going to get warmer. It's all theory. It's not fact. What is fact is the sudden warming at the end of the Younger Dryas and the sudden freezing at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. So we're searching for explanations for that. We're searching for explanations. I've picked the one I back, but I'm not claiming that I have to be right. It's that what I do think is really important is recognizing this was a global cataclysm.

It was sustained. It wasn't just a minute. It went on for a thousand years plus. And it's in our backyard. It's in very relatively recent human history. We're almost at the edge of history when we go to 11,600 years ago. That's weirdly the date that Gobekli Tepe in Turkey is built, 11,600 years ago. That, weirdly, is the date that Plato's Timaeus and Critias gives for the submergence of Atlantis, 11,600 years ago, before our time. So what's happening to humanity in this 1,200-year window? I need to be clear about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay?

Because archaeologists roll their eyes at any mention of Atlantis. Even say the word Atlantis, you're automatically regarded as a member of the lunatic fringe. Okay. And if you've even said that word, all your work, all the 30 years of work you've done,

the thousand dives that you've done on continental shelves all around the world, all of those can be written off simply because you said the word Atlantis. it's flat earth for archaeologists. Yeah They hit they detest the you tell us why the earth is flat That's one theory I definitely don't buy no no give us the Atlanta steering So so the the story of Atlantis comes down to us from Plato It's expressed in two dialogues the Tim Timaeus and the Critias.

Okay. Plato was writing at around 300 BC. Does it come from his uncle? Yeah, well, it's arguably from a member of his family line who was the Greek lawmaker Solon. Solon, yeah, yeah. Who did make a famous and documented visit to Egypt around the year 600 BC.

And he was told in Egypt... And he was at the Temple of Neith at Sice in the Delta, and there are these inscriptions on the walls. That temple no longer exists. It's a ruin in the Delta now. There are these writings on the walls, and he asks a priest, what do the writings say? And the priest spoke Greek and ancient Egyptian,

and he told Solon what the writings say, that there was this great civilization, that it was destroyed in an enormous flood. Plato or Solon refers to it as Atlantis. Atlantis is not an ancient Egyptian word. It looks like some attempt to translate into a meaningful Greek phrase what was originally an ancient Egyptian phrase. And that ancient Egyptian phrase, I can tell you pretty much for sure, was the homeland of the primeval ones. And I'll tell you why in a minute. But the point is that then Solon asks, when did this happen? And the priests say, they're very relaxed about it. They say, oh, 9,000 years ago. So immediately we have a date that we can put to our calendar. 600 BC, he makes the visit. 9,000 years before that, that's 9,600 BC. Give or take 23 years, that is 11,600 years ago. That's when Gobekli Tepe is built. That's when Meltwater Pulse 1B begins to flood the world's oceans. And again, my critics will niggle away at the edges of this and say, well,

meltwater pulse 1B unfolded over 300 or 400 years. If you average it out, it wasn't that much in any one year. But who says it happened at average rates? Who says there wasn't a big rise and then a smaller rise? These things are very annoying. But the bottom line is 9,000 years before Solon is 9,600 BC. That's the Atlantis date. That's Gobekli Tepe's date. And then secondly, the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Upper Egypt is very important. There's been, I worked with a partial translation. Edfu is?

Edfu is in Upper Egypt. It's sort of halfway to Aswan in Southern Egypt. It's kind of middle. Aswan is the quarry, I believe, where they got a lot of... Aswan is the quarry where they got a lot of the granite that they brought. It's about 500 kilometers south. But Edfu is a bit further north than that. But it's also on the Nile.

Now, the Temple of Horus at Edfu is a relatively recent temple, probably built around 270 BC by the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt. These were Greeks who had overtaken ancient Egypt. But although they colonized ancient Egypt, ancient Egypt colonized their minds. And they became ancient Egyptians. More ancient Egyptian than the ancient Egyptians themselves in many ways. It's like when white people go to Hawaii.

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temple. And it stood on the foundations of an even older temple. The archives were preserved. That's what's inscribed on the walls. It's inscribed in Middle Egyptian. It's about 2000 BC. And it speaks of, it tells the whole Atlantis story. It just doesn't call it Atlantis. It speaks of a sacred island. It calls it the homeland of the primeval ones. It speaks of a great serpent that comes from the sky and splits the island in two. It speaks of a huge flood that arises and kills off almost all the divine inhabitants, apart from a few survivors, who then travel around the world. One of the places they go to is Egypt, and they make their first business to build primeval mounds in ancient Egypt that will be the places, the locations of all future temples and pyramids. The Edfu texts are very clear.

Now, I just need to make this clear, because I relied on Eve Elizabeth Raymond, who was an early translator of the Edfu texts are very clear. Now, I just need to make this clear, because I relied on Eve Elizabeth Raymond, who was an early translator of the Edfu texts. But recently, the Edfu texts have been completely translated, every single word, into German by a gentleman called Dieter Kurth. And they've translated it all into German. It would be nice if it were all into English because that's much more widely spoken.

What does it say in German? The Jews did not build the pyramid. No, it supports everything in the original translation. There's not a single part of the original translation that's debunked by this. It supports it and it adds information that wasn't there because their reference in those Edfu texts to the destruction of the homeland of the primeval ones

is 7,000 years ago. But that's in Middle Egyptian, which dates back to 2,000 BC. So it goes back to 9,000 BC again. And 9,000 BC is 11,000. Yeah, it brings us to the same date. So I think that Egyptologists have been too hasty to dismiss Plato's story. Real quick, so we can just understand what was said.

The snake that comes down, like you said in the Netflix special, we can look at comets as potentially snakes. Cosmic surface. So this comet that comes and hits the island of Atlantis, that's like a direct shot, right? Yes, yeah. So maybe it doesn't hit exactly the island, but it's hitting close enough where the effects of that hit are going to dramatically affect the island. And remember, they didn't call it Atlantis. They called it the homeland of the primeval. And what does that mean, the primeval ones?

The ancient ones lived there. That was their homeland. They created the mounds. Who then, their survivors, who included seven sages, traveled around the world seeking to rebuild their lost civilization. And we've heard this. And Egypt was one of the places they went to. Okay, now, some people say that Azor's plateau might be Atlantis.

Have you ever been there? And maybe we can describe really quickly where that is. Well, it's in the Mid-Atlantic and on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is interesting because there's a phenomenon called isostasy. Isostasy is the Earth's surface is a little bit fluid. If you put a heavy weight on one bit of it,

it's like the end of a seesaw. It's going to force the other bit up. So in Britain, we had an ice cap on northern Scotland. But right now, the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, far to the south, is sinking beneath the ocean. Why is that? Because the ice cap on Northern Scotland pushed Northern Scotland down and lifted up the Isle of Wight.

Since the ice cap's gone, the Isle of Wight is going back underwater. You see this in the islands off of Italy, like Capri is starting to shift and rotate a little bit. It's isostasy that causes that. And isostatic rebound in this case. And there is some indication that the ice cap on North America may have had an effect on the mid-Atlantic ridge and may have raised it to a higher level than it was today.

Oh, so... Wait a minute. But I need to be clear. I'm not looking for Atlantis there or anywhere. I don't think there was one location. Every story and reference, and I don't think we should be looking for a genetic location for it either. Right.

Just as it would be really hard to look for a genetic location of America today, the US culture is a multicultural society. There's a multi-ethnicity society. I suspect, quote unquote, Atlantis was like that. I suspect that it was all over the world, that it occupied the best real estate on Earth. The lands that are now under a few hundred feet of water caused by- But if we knew where it was, we could at least look for some sort of remains.

If there was a definite heartland for it, I think we should be looking for those remains on the flooded continental shelves all around the world. And that's what I spent seven years of my life doing, was diving on the continental shelves and finding again and again ruins and structures that weren't supposed to be there. I think there's the whole story of humanity that's missing underwater.

And while I'm saying that, I would like to give credit to archaeologists. There is some work now being done, marine archaeology, which isn't any longer just looking for shipwrecks from the medieval period or even from the 20th century, 19th century, but are looking at the flooded continental shelves. And it's just starting. This work should have been happening for decades. It's just beginning. I think that's going to reveal a great deal. And I know it's going to reveal a great deal because I found a great deal. But I want to add that the Amazon rainforest and the Sahara Desert are also underserved by archaeology. And we can't claim that there

was no lost civilization of the Ice Age while there's so much of the world we never looked at at all. Especially the Sahara Desert, right? Because there could be thousands of pyramids just covered in mountains of sand right now. There really could.

We are finding a lot in the Amazon. Yes. The Lidar in the Amazon. The Lidar work in the Amazon is fascinating. Okay. I hope to be back in the Amazon

within the next few months. Okay. I want to, while we're talking about Amazon, Ayahuasca. Yes. Psychedelics within the next few months. Okay, I want to, while we're talking about Amazon, ayahuasca. Yes. Psychedelics. I mean, yes.

Let's do psychedelics. Yes, and how they tie into these myths in ancient civilization and potentially using the knowledge or experience gained from these psychedelic drugs to maybe build these huge megalithic structures. Yeah. How big a role do you think psychedelics

have played in prehistory? Well, it's one of the reasons why we should never look for ourselves in the past because we've had the horrific, vicious, evil thing called the war on drugs for the past 50 plus years, which is gradually going away, thank God, you know, but we're a culture that's hated psychedelics since the time of Richard Nixon. And we kind of just assume that every culture in antiquity also hated psychedelics.

No, they didn't. They were deeply involved with psychedelics, whether you're talking about the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece. What's that? whether you're talking about the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece. What's that? It was a temple, the Temple of Eleusis. It stands just outside of Athens in Greece, what's left of it. They served up a potion to all the initiates,

and the initiates included Sophocles, Pindar, Plato himself. All the great minds of ancient world went to Eleusis. They were given this brew, which was called the kikion. Then they went down into these deep chambers underneath the temple of Eleusis. And then they had extraordinary experiences, which gave them revelations about the nature of reality. They ceased to fear death. They knew that death was not the end. They had no fear of death anymore after they'd had this experience. It sounds a lot like a psychedelic experience. And then we have the work that's been done on that brew. And that brew was made, we're told it was made from barley, mint, and water. But what grows on barley is

Klavyshev's paspali, which is an LSD-like fungus. I love it. I love it. Which is soluble in water. There are ergotts that are very dangerous. Ergotts? Ergotts. Ergotts is the class of fungus to which this belongs. Okay. And some of them are extremely dangerous. But this one is soluble in water, is not dangerous, and is basically LSD.

They were drinking LSD in the Temple of Eleusis, and they were having revelations about the meaning of life, and they were creating great philosophy and brilliant ideas at the time. It's, of course, massively connected to this surge of intellectual activity in ancient Greece. But ayahuasca— Or even before we get to ayahuasca, what were we discussing earlier? Is the pineal gland that you see represented as the pine cone? The pine cone, yeah. There's one at the Vatican.

They're pictured in many of the Mesopotamian reliefs that show the seven sages. They're holding a pine cone to somebody's head, you know? Yeah. There's a suggestion that the pineal gland, it has been suggested that the pineal gland secretes dimethyltryptamine. DMT. DMT. I think that the more recent work on that suggests it probably doesn't,

but that it's a locus for endogenous. All of us have DMT in our bodies. We're all illegal here. We're all carriers. We're all carriers. It's a natural brain hormone. The exact question of where in the body it's generated, some people

think it might be the lungs these days. Wherever it is, it's there. The pineal is associated with it in a number of ways. The pineal is the third eye. It was an eye. The pineal was an eye. It still is in some

amphibians. That's why it's called the third eye. It has a lens, a cornea, and a retina. We've just evolved out of it. Yeah. It's gone deeper into the brain. It's no longer light sensitive, but it's still arguably the third eye. So the connection of the pineal and DMT is not absolutely clear, but there is there is likely some some okay So the idea of us looking for ourselves in the past we're looking at how people build the pyramids and we're going well You know we have these cranes. Where are your crane? Where are your cranes instead of looking for the things that we are not utilizing that they may utilize which are psychedelic drugs and maybe that gave them access to

It's stupid to use the word powers because I think it kind of dismisses everything, but it may be to give them access to some sort of like otherworldly knowledge that could have helped them create. Well, it's an interesting discussion, actually. The interesting thing about psychedelics, one of the many interesting things about psychedelics is, um, for a start, new evidence that's emerging from scientific studies. At last, psychedelics have been taken out of the closet and are being examined for their therapeutic potential. And one of the things that it's very clear that psilocybin definitely does is mushrooms, which is closely related to DMT. It's a kind of orally edible, orally ingestible form of DMT. They promote neuroplasticity.

They cause new neurons to grow in the brain. They make us smarter. Let us pay great tribute to Terence McKenna, a brilliant thinker in this field whose book, whose stoned ape hypothesis, and whose book, The Food of the Gods, was one of the early recognitions that psychedelics may have been the trigger that took our ancestor out of millions of years of boredom

and put them on the path that we recognize as modern humanity. Yeah. It's a perfectly reasonable thing. Also, the way that psychedelics are very helpful with depression is very interesting. And why is that the case? Depression, and I speak from experience because I've suffered myself from a long period of depression back in the early 90s.

Depression is a very narrow, rigid frame of mind where you get locked into recurring patterns of thought and they're very negative and you keep on repeating them to yourself and you start hating yourself and you just can't bear anything and you're locked and you can't escape from it. And what psychedelics seem to do is that they break that pattern. They just break it completely. And in this case for depression, what seems to work best is a massive dose rather than

microdosing. Microdosing is great as well. You have to snap yourself out of it. You got to snap yourself out of it. Yeah, there's also like, I think in depressive states, there's a narcissism wrapped into it. Maybe so, yeah. Not a narcissism in terms of like, I'm the best, look at me, everything's about me, but in the negative side of that.

It's all about you still. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that constant negative thought, but taking and having a psychedelic experience will make you realize maybe how small you are in the grand scheme of things, or how you are intertwined into the fabric of humanity so it can break out of that. Yeah, I like that.

Ego death will disconnect you from the universe conspiring against you. Yeah, exactly. You're not that important. And if you belong to a species that has been making the same kind of stone tool without any changes for more than a million years two things are happening clearly cultural information is being passed down and clearly you're locked in a very narrow frame and then suddenly it changes and our ancestors start producing this extraordinary cave art this amazing cave art whether whether you're talking about that that site serrania de la

lindosa in in colombia or whether you're talking about Lascaux Cave in France, the art is stunning, and it is classically psychedelic art. It is featuring geometry, patterns of swirling dots, zigzag lines. There's Serrania-de-la-Lindosa, and there's one of the extinct Ice Age megafauna with the arrow pointing at it up there. The geometry that's in there, the swirling dots, the sort of interlinked chains

that are shown out there on the left, these are all classic psychedelic visions. Very often, as people enter a deeply altered state of consciousness, it starts with geometry and patterns, and then it manifests more into entities. And those entities are often therianthropic in form, Greek therion, wild beast, anthropos, man. They're part human, part animal in form, not something that you see every day, but something that is frequently common, very very common in egyptian art and very very common uh in deeply altered states of consciousness brought on by brought on by

psychedelics is the encounter with entities who then appear to communicate with us and again this is where the archaeologists roll their minds because they like to think that uh you know consciousness is entirely local to the brain it's all manufactured by the brain and this is just our brain on drugs whereas in fact the the the opposite seems to be true the brain. It's all manufactured by the brain and this is just our brain on drugs. Whereas in fact, the opposite seems to be true. The brain seems to be acting as a receiver for consciousness rather than as a manufacturer of consciousness. What does that mean? Well, what it means is that we have to function

in a very tough physical universe. This is this world. We got to know the laws of physics. Even if we don't know them, you know, as written down in scientific textbooks, we got to know the laws of physics even if we don't know them you know as written down in scientific textbooks we got to know that if we bump into that wall it's going to hurt yeah we've got to understand all of that and naturally our main focus is on our physical survival in this in this physical realm but there but there and and what's useful for that is what what is rightly called the alert problem solving state of consciousness

but there are many other states of consciousness that are available to us. And psychedelics unleash a completely different state of consciousness from the alert problem-solving state of consciousness. And in that state of consciousness, we have these extraordinary experiences. And amongst those experiences, the most important are the encounters with entities that communicate with us. we have a problem in trying to decide what is what is going on here a very important project just underway at imperial college in london and another project that's going to be launched in colorado i think in denver itself within this year where human volunteers, I hope to be one of them in Colorado, they turned me down in London because I've suffered from epilepsy since 2017. And there's no indication whatsoever that DMT would cause epilepsy and I've smoked loads

of DMT and I know it doesn't cause epilepsy. But understandably, having gone through all the legal hoops to get permission, they don't want me dying in their lab. So they've not accepted me as a volunteer, but I'm hoping I might get accepted as a volunteer here in America. What it is is extended release DMT, DMT-X. DMT is normally a very... So it's just going to keep you high?

Keep you high for an hour, yeah. Instead of, what is DMT, like five minutes, ten minutes? And how long does it feel on your high for five minutes, ten minutes on DMT? Oh, when you're in the DMT space, it can feel like forever. So an hour is almost horrifying. Does time not exist? Well, yes, this is what many of the volunteers say, is that it's an alarming prospect to be in that space for an hour. They're being delivered it by drip constantly and directly into their bloodstream. They can signal at any time, I've had enough if they're really feeling overwhelmed. But by and large, most of the volunteers went through with it. I moderated a panel with five, four of the volunteers.

Anything interesting that they say about it? And a gentleman called Andrew Gallimore who's invented the technology that's going to be used in Colorado. Yes, the very interesting thing is that all appear to be meeting essentially the same entities. These are the gnome-looking things? They might be machine elves, they might be gnomes, they might be therianthropes, but they're playful, they're tricksy, they're tricksters, and they convey knowledge. And they're also moral teachers, this is the funny thing.

They make us confront our baggage. How so? moral teachers, this is the funny thing. They make us confront our baggage. How so? Well, I can say in my case, I recently had an experience with the other kind of DMT, very recently, which is 5-MeO DMT. The DMT we're talking about is NNDMT. And that is the one that most frequently produces entity encounters and the sense of telepathic communication with entities. And science is not in a position to write that off. You know, quantum physics is looking at the possibility of multiple dimensions, very open to that possibility. Maybe what's happening is that

our consciousness is getting retuned by DMT to gain access to dimensions of reality that are normally close to us. We think reality is just this, but actually it's all this. And in a deeply altered state of consciousness, the need for the alert problem-solving mindset is damped down, and we can open up to other areas of reality. Who knows what's going on there? But the issue is, are people learning something new in this state? This would touch on the question of whether psychedelics were helpful in energizing an ancient civilization and getting it going.

I would cite the case, very well-known case of Kerry Mullis, the polymerase chain reaction PCR test, which has been fundamental for all DNA work subsequently, he admitted openly that he would never have made that discovery if he hadn't taken LSD. LSD gave him that discovery. You said you recently had an experience with the other type of DMT. With 5-MeO. Yeah. What was that? It was beautiful.

Okay, so 5-MeO DMT is a bit controversial because in the basic form it comes from the secretions of a particular kind of toad. And those secretions can be scraped off and smoked directly. In that case, the smoke is quite cloudy. And you're ingesting not only the 5-MeO-DMT but other elements that are in the secretions of the toad. not only the 5-MeO DMT, but other elements that are in the secretions of the toad. It's possible to have synthetic 5-MeO DMT, which is pure, which doesn't have the other elements in the secretions of the toad, and which doesn't involve killing toads. And that's the kind of 5-MeO DMT that I had, was in a pure synthetic form. I was alarmed before I did it it because I've had alarming experiences on the

other DMT and NDMT. Our facilitator helped me out and helped others in the group out by giving us MDMA first. We had, we had, wow. You were getting it in, Cram. We're totally getting it in. It's only the second time in my life I've ever experienced MDMA. Oh, it's great, isn't it? What a great thing. Oh, it's amazing. Oh my God, I mean, it's just wonderful. Yeah.

You feel so just overwhelmed with love. It's just such a beautiful thing. So we had that three or four hours before we had the 5-MeO DMT. And then three at a time, we lay down, and well, we first sat up to take one massive deep inhalation on the on the pipe and then hold it in and then release it and then my wife santa can do this and sit up she does it with

nndmt and and and she does it but she did it with the 5meo as well just sit sit up and she does these mudras very very present i have to lie to lie down. I can't be seated. I can't be standing up. I got to lie down flat. And I actually pulled on an eye mask as I was lying down. And then just this, the only vision, revisionary element of the 5-MeO was like a feather with an eye at the end of it. But most of it was about how I need to honor and respect and love my wife. And how I...

That was the mantra she was doing, is get you to see that. You know, that I have to, yeah. But that I have a problem with anger, I get angry too quickly, and that anger can be very hurtful to other people and particularly hurtful to my wife. And it showed me that and basically said you gotta fix this. And how does it show to you? Is it intuition or?

It was more intuition. It wasn't a scene of me shouting, but it was a recognition that that's what I do and that it's harmful and useless. And it's harmful to me and it's harmful to everybody around me. So there's a communication with a celestial being without any words at all, without any words, but you get, you get it. The other thing that I, the other intention that I said, I had three goes on the pipe on that day, um, with about an hour and a half between each one. And on the third go, my intention was more selfish. My intention was that I should, could it help me to get rid of my migraine headaches?

Because I suffer very badly from migraines. In fact, it's a kind of curse. And I wanted to focus on that. Maybe there's some way that it could affect me. And I did feel, perhaps it was my imagination, but I did feel fingers massaging the back of my head where migraines often start and then massaging my temple and then and then abruptly it stopped and it returned to the issue of my relationship and i thought i thought i thought that i thought that it stopped like that because the 5-MeO DMT had fixed my migraines. But the very next day,

I had another massive migraine. And I think what happened was that 5-MeO DMT was saying, actually, we can't fix this. Let's report it. It was an extraordinary experience. I wouldn't recommend anybody to do it completely alone or any kind of DMT. I think it's important to have a responsible facilitator who's used to handling people in this state. Everybody responds in different ways. Some people can really freak out. It's not necessarily a bad thing to freak out.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to feel fear. But you want somebody around who's a sitter, who understands the medicine, and who can help you through that. You said earlier that it removes you from the problem-solving consciousness state. Yes, which we're normally in. We're normally thinking of the next problem

we have to deal with. And then I think oftentimes in that state, we're not dealing with the problems that we have internally. We're not dealing with the trauma, the relationship, those things. Often we're blaming them on other people. Exactly. Yeah.

So what's kind of interesting to me is even the way that you describe it, it's put a pause on those problems that we feel like we have to solve in every second to do kind of like self-work. Inner work, yeah. I wonder what is on the other end of self-work. Like I wonder when you get through a lot of those things that you need to work on, where else they can take you. Because I don't think they go, you're good. See you later. Maybe you start to seek some of that.

Maybe like, maybe you need to deal with all of your stuff before you're ready for that higher consciousness. Maybe both things can happen all the time because virtually every powerful psychedelic journey I have, and ayahuasca is certainly that, and my last ayahuasca journey was in 2019, DMT, NNDMT more recently, and then 5-MeO DMT, they all sooner or later deal with my baggage. I carry a lot of baggage. Those of us who carry less baggage tend to have a gentler trip, but in my case, it's right in my face and you've got to deal with it.

And you keep going after it. I keep going after it because it's very useful teaching and I keep slipping back into bad habits. So it's a reminder. Yeah. And it's really important to recognize that these substances are not a magic pill. It's going to fix you overnight. I think people use them as that. They're not.

I think they've become trendy in a way. And I think a lot of people are seeking out ayahuasca because they're like hey I have this block and if I just do this ayahuasca it's gonna fix them for me and then it's done chances are it'll be Done for a few weeks and then you'll fall back in field. It's like a chiropractor or something Yeah, you have to carry on the work. Yeah, the real work begins after the session So it's a recognition of what's going on right you have to confront and then you have to do that work Then you have to do that work afterwards. And then you have to do that work. But as to novelty, I mentioned Kerry Mullis

and the Polymerase chain reaction. The other interesting one is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Did I mention them? No, but they've been dabbling. They also were very forthright, particularly Wozniak, that the Apple computer would not have been invented without LSD. Wow. And Francis Crick, who's the discoverer of the double helix form of DNA, along with other colleagues, was a regular user of LSD in the 1960s before it was illegal, and the 50s. And he also suggested that he first got it.

He got the double helix form under the influence of LSD. So these are scientific examples of people who are making a quantum leap forward in knowledge as a result of their psychedelic experiences, not as a result of their alert problem-solving state of consciousness that we value so highly, but as a result of a completely other state of consciousness. In my case, the novelty I got was,

I was given a novel during five ayahuasca sessions in Brazil. I had never written novels before. I always write nonfiction, and I still mainly write nonfiction. But I was given a novel, I was given the whole plot of the novel, and I ended up writing nonfiction. But I was given a novel, I was given the whole plot of the novel, and I ended up writing that novel.

No. The session was in 2007, I finished the novel in 2010, it was called Entangled. I had no idea that I had a novel in me, and perhaps my readers don't like it, I don't care. I found an area of myself that was new to me, and I was able to.

The entire story existed to you? Yeah, yeah. Now, explain to me how it existed. It existed like plot, beginning, middle, end? Or existed like, yeah, character? I saw the principal characters and I saw the setting. It was two young women, one living in the time of the Neanderthals

and one living today, who were literally entangled in space and time. And it was the use of psychedelics in both times that enabled them to be entangled. And that they were brought together by an entity that they referred to. Sorry, my critics are going to go wild with this. They're going to drug shame me forever. But, you know, they were brought together by an entity called the Blue Angel,

whose purpose was that there's a demon who travels through time called Sulpa, and he's seeking to destroy everything that's good about humanity, and he's doing that in two time frames, in the time of the Neanderthals and today. And this Blue Angel entity brings together these two young women in these two different time frames to do battle against the demon. That was the story that I was given, and that was the story that I wrote. Do you see it like a movie, or how does that present itself to you?

I did see it a bit like a movie, yeah. I saw scenes. I saw my young character from the Stone Age, Rhea stones very, very brilliantly at her enemies. And I saw the connection between these two, between these two women and the sense of a supernatural battle of good against evil, against which the human story is played out. And that ultimately, we humans always have a choice. We always have a choice. We always have a choice between good and evil.

It might be at a very small scale or it might be at a very large scale. If it's at a very large scale, it can do enormous damage to human society as a whole. If it's a very small scale, it can do enormous damage to us and those immediately close to us. But it was that sense of that happening.

Anyway, I didn't have a novel in me before that. I've never tried. Have you seen other works, not just literary works, but film, music, that you've immediately connected to and thought, oh, this is inspired by hallucinogenics. This reminds me of an experience that I had. It could be a cartoon for children. Avatar.

Right, 100%? Yes. Isn't Avatar from, what was that, the original people say that... Pocahontas? Pocahontas, I think. No, no, no, no. There's almost like an anime thing that people thought it was a little bit too... I'm not sure, but somebody involved in that story was definitely experiencing altered states of consciousness.

Apparently JFK had experiences with psychedelics. I wouldn't be surprised. Oh, wow. Again, this is a mistake that our society has made, is to cut us. And maybe it's not a mistake. I don't really do conspiracy theories, but maybe it is a deliberate. Maybe it was a deliberate thing back when the war on drugs was declared. Well, we did a lot of research with psychedelics. Psychedelics lead people to ask questions. Maybe it is a deliberate, maybe it was a deliberate thing back when the war on drugs was declared. It's under, you know.

Well, we did a lot of research with psychedelics. Psychedelics lead people to ask questions. They don't leave us comfortable with the prevailing order of things, both in ourselves and with the way society functions. And we begin to become critical and questioning in a way that we might not have been before. And I think this was felt to be dangerous and and they were demonized with lies and

and complete dishonesty but they were they were you remember when psychedelics were gaining popularity this is what 19 when you say gaining popularity mainstream popularity well I don't think you could call hippies mainstream in any way. It's so funny. The way that we look back on them, they were the mainstream. Woodstock. Yeah.

It was like the dominant culture, but I guess they were fringe and odd for the time. They were fringe and odd, and they were feared by those rooted and grounded in mainstream culture. Yeah, hippie was a pejorative, right? It was a pejorative. He? It was a pejorative. He's just a hippie.

Yeah. You know, it was a negative term. So I guess that we're looking at a shift in human consciousness that certainly began probably in the late 50s and was well underway in the 60s. And had it been allowed to continue, it might well have transformed society in many, many ways, but then it was clamped down

upon and all these lies and propaganda were spread uh false stories about how dangerous psychedelics are i want to be very clear about that psychedelics are extremely serious business yeah and this needs to be understood i i do not believe that psychedelics are for children or cannabis for that matter i think that i think we'd be much better keeping them out of the hands of children if they were totally legal and it was accompanied by wise advice. Um, they can also unearth existing psychological issues. You have to be really dangerous. Yeah. If somebody's suffering from, from schizophrenia, psychedelics could be very bad news. So, so, and a lot of people don't know that they have schizophrenia. A lot of people don't know.

Especially if they're. So there is an element of danger and risk. And this is why a sitter who's deeply experienced with the substance is. Sitter is your shaman, essentially? Yeah, yeah. We haven't yet invented a word for shaman in Western culture, but we need to.

The word comes from Tungus Mongol. It means one who sees. And it was then applied by anthropologists because they found that that figure, that person who played that role was found in multiple different cultures all around the world. And they said, let's just call them all shamans. But the word comes from a specific culture. And we don't have a word for that in our culture yet. Facilitator or sitter are the ones that I use. This is one of the many areas where Western culture would do well to learn from indigenous cultures that have been using psychedelics responsibly for thousands and thousands of years.

What is responsible psychedelic use to you? What do you start with? When you do it with intentions meditation things like that. Yeah, it's intentions meditations. It's not recreational You're not you're not taking it to have a party You're taking it to make contact with the dead ayahuasca means the vine of the dead or the vine of souls Ibogaine is the iboga is the plant that enables people to see the dead. That's what these things mean. There's so much of a connection to the afterlife with them.

And that's a serious inquiry. If you've lost a relative recently and you've not had closure, it can be very beneficial to have an afterlife contact with that person. And many people report this experience. I've had the experience myself with Iboga. Really? Yeah, I met my dad.

Get out of here. He passed away shortly before that. Now again, the scientists could say, ah, you were just fantasizing that, it was just your imagination, but I met him. Fuck the scientists. So what happened? He came to me in the vision.

It was shadowy, but he basically made me feel okay about the key issue, which was I was not with him at his deathbed. And I was haunted by that. And after that, I didn't feel haunted by it anymore. And increasingly with my experiences with psychedelics over many decades now, I have no fear of death. I don't fear death. I do fear pain. I do fear of death. I don't fear death. I do fear pain.

I do fear humiliation. I'm 72, 73 next birthday. I have to be realistic about this. I only have so long in this incarnation. And as we get older, our bodies get infirm, get weaker. We become more and more dependent. I don't like being dependent on others in any way. And I detest pain.

And I would like to, who doesn't? And I'd like to avoid it as much as possible. But death, I don't fear. And I'm not even anxious about it. When it comes, I regard it as the next great adventure. And I hope that's what it's going to turn out to be. But who knows? Nobody can say the definitive word on death.

Yes, our bodies die. But does our consciousness die? We don't know that. Any scientist who says you're just a meat robot, there's nothing else to you but your physical body, they're stating an opinion, not a fact. So for me, it's the beginning of a next great adventure. And I think psychedelics have helped me with this. And I know from the recent science that's being done that they are helping people who are terminal who are anxious about death again Psilocybin is the one that's most generally trialed in this respect. They tend to lose the fear of death

They don't fear and losing the fear of death is I think there's a difference between a fear of death and a fear of Maybe missing out on what's going on For example, like let's say you were to do some sort of like rock climbing thing with no ropes. You would probably be afraid of dying? I'd be afraid of falling and I wouldn't, look, I regard life as a precious gift. I am fortunate enough and so are you

and so are all of us in this room to have been born in a human body. Yeah. And to have this big brain and to be able to actually to be able to make choices between good and evil and to live the experience of life. This is a theater of experience.

We will come into it as children. We will go through it all our years. We will be confronted by all sorts of opportunities to learn and to grow and to develop. And I regard that as a gift. So I'm not into taking foolish and unnecessary physical risks. I have taken them when they're necessary.

Santa and I both nearly lost our lives more than once during our diving expeditions. We've been into war zones on our research. We've had bullets fired at us. If the risk is worth taking for a project that I'm pursuing that is close to my heart, I will do it. But I won't foolishly or unnecessarily take a risk. Seems like a waste to do that. Risk in itself has no virtue. It's necessary risk that has some virtue.

But I don't know if that answers your question. It does. It does. Yeah, because I think it's important to have a fear of death. And I think as we have more things that we don't want to leave, loved does. Yeah, because I think it's important to have a fear of death. Yeah. And I think as we have more things that we don't want to leave, loved ones, family, the beautiful things that success brings,

I find myself going, is it worth doing this stupid, frivolous activity where I could potentially lose out on all these beautiful things that I've been able to get? Exactly, no. It's not. So that's not the type of death.

No, I'm speaking to you as a man whose next birthday is 73. And you're like, one of these days, it's going to happen. I mean, in truth, the door of death stands right beside us, all of us, every minute of every day. It can happen at any moment. Whether through an illness or an accident, you can be gone just like that. But by and large, as you get older, it does get closer.

And you start to think about these things. And inevitably, I've thought, well, I don't know how long I have left. But what is clear to me is that I'm not going to hasten my death, but that if it comes, I'm not going to regard it with fear and horror. I want to be as alert as possible and as awake as possible. my death, but that if it comes, I'm not going to regard it with fear and horror. I want to be as alert as possible and as awake as possible. And I hope to be ushered through the doorway of death with a psychedelic journey. All right, guys, we're gonna take a break for a second because listen,

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Now let's get back to the show. Are you spiritual? Like, do you believe in God? I'm not a Christian. I don't belong to any of the mainstream religions. I don't, and I haven't for a very long time.

But I think that life is an enormous mystery and that fundamentally, for want of a better word, it is a spiritual mystery. We're on a spiritual journey here. I think that the mainstream religions have narrowed that journey down into dogma and into creeds, where in most of the mainstream religions, most of the time, whether we're talking about Christianity, Judaism or Islam, the Abrahamic faiths, the monotheistic religions, people, there are exceptions, but a lot of people are not having

any direct contact with spirit. They're being taught what to think. They're being told what to think by basically a bureaucrat who happens to be a priest or a rabbi or a mullah who's saying, these are the teachings, you must adhere to these teachings, and actually if you don't adhere to them, we're going to censor you, and censor you in some way or another. To me, that's no more spiritual than doing business on the stock exchange. It's an expert telling me what to think. Whereas a spiritual experience is direct contact with the quote-unquote divine, which is not necessarily some old bad-tempered guy sitting up on a cloud. Far from it, as a matter of fact. That is not, in my view, that is a misrepresentation of what spirituality is.

We could get into all kinds of controversial areas here. Have you been in direct contact with a higher power through your experiences? Yes, on psychedelics. Particularly on ayahuasca, I have felt the presence of the entity that I call Mother Ayahuasca. You felt the mother. I felt the mother. And I felt her teachings. And I felt grateful.

What was that like? and I felt grateful. What was that like? In the most compelling case, she took the form of an enormous serpent who wrapped herself around my body. Serpents always coming back to serpents. Always coming back. And mother ayahuasca often takes the form of a serpent,

sometimes takes the form of a jaguar, sometimes takes, not the motor car, the puma, and sometimes takes the form of a human being. Was there any fear? The message was, no, I didn't feel fear. the puma and sometimes takes the form of a human being. But, but. Was there any fear? The message was, no, I didn't feel fear. I felt enormously. The serpent was wrapping around.

No, I felt enormously comforted. And again, I got a message that I've had many times is that you, that you won't be good at giving love to others if you don't love yourself. If you're constantly hating yourself. And I, I've gone through long periods of myself, my life where I have felt very negative about myself so so that you know that was that was a positive experience for me i would say every experience i've had with ayahuasca has been positive even the most challenging ones yeah what was the toughest um the toughest experience I... I hesitate to share this.

In an ayahuasca group, when you're drinking with, say, a dozen other people, there becomes an element of telepathy or communication that can take place. And it happened that I was in one group where it turned out later, we got the facts later, there was one individual who shouldn't have been there. later, we got the facts later, there was one individual who shouldn't have been there. In ayahuasca, there's a tendency for you to lower your barriers. Your heart opens. You're very vulnerable to other people. And unfortunately, and this is a phenomenon that I would warn anybody of

who's drinking ayahuasca in the West today, or anywhere as a matter of fact, is that there are people who are using that vulnerability to gain psychic advantage over you. And it was the feeling, first of all, it happened to my wife, Santa, who was beside me, and then it happened to me of an individual trying to enter our heads and take control of us. And we learned more about him the following day, and it turned out he'd been there the year before and done exactly the same thing. We didn't know that at the time. He seemed to have developed some sort of psychic power. And when we questioned him about it, he said, I'm this basement shaman. I go around ayahuasca groups because I benefit from them. And what he meant by benefiting from them was basically I'm a psychic vampire.

I draw people's energy. I take it away from them. So these dangers can occur. And that's where a good shaman will stop that happening. What did the ayahuasquero do? In this case, he did not do anything. It was most unhelpful. But I think he's learned greatly from that experience.

But how does the ayahuasquero know that that is happening? Well, that's something where you have to tell them. And in this case, my wife, Santa, did tell the ayahuasquero, but he did not. He said, this person is trying to enter my mind they're trying to take from me. Yeah, yeah. And there's a natural tendency to assume you're making that up as well. And you're lucid in that moment. You're lucid enough to describe what's happening. Yes, yes. You can often be lucid during an ayahuasca journey.

You're speaking English to that person. Yeah, you can be. You can be. And the person who is entering the mind, is he sitting in another area? Is he hovering over you? He was on a, not a bed, a mat on the floor, just two or three people away from us. And we were not the only people who he affected.

He affected other people in that room. And there was a gentleman in that room who literally fell down the stairs from the ceremonial space upstairs trying to get away from him. It really got very, very, very dark. Did everyone confront him afterwards? I think I described it in a lengthy article on my website. Yes, two days later he was asked to leave because he kind of said, yeah, I do this. I benefit from the energy of others.

And then what exactly, what type of energy is he getting? Like how is he benefiting? I can tell you particularly in the case of others. And then what exactly, what type of energy is he getting? Like, how is he benefiting? Yeah. I can tell you particularly in the case of my wife. My wife, Santa, and I are both the same age. She's 73 next birthday as well. But Santa looks a lot younger. I look my age.

You look your age. But Santa looks a lot younger. And he focused on her. He homed in on her when he asked her her age. And she told him his age, and he said, you're that young? And that's when he focused in on her. It was like she had some energy, and she does, that was energizing her and that was making her a fantastic grandmother and a fantastic mother

and the most wonderful wife on the planet Earth. But she has that energy within her. Oh, and he tried to absorb that fuck. He wanted that energy. He asked for that verbal energy. And she got the... No, he did not. What he did was, at a certain point,

when we were gathering to drink the brew, he put his arms on her shoulder and blew in her face. Like that. Now, in Amazonian shamanism, the breath can be used for different purposes. And one of the purposes can be used for attack. They fire things called virotes, psychic darts, at another individual. Again, only people who've worked with ayahuasca will really get this.

And a lot of your audience will not get this and they'll think Hancock's a lunatic. But I'm just reporting to you what happened. but I'm just reporting to you what happened. And not only was she psychically damaged by this attack, but she also became physically ill after the attack. She developed shingles. She still has shingles as a result of that, would crop up again and again on her back in exactly the place that one of his hands touched her.

Wow. So it's just a- Okay, this is great. Hold on. So there's a physical manifestation of an emotional and spiritual experience that she had. So if that can happen within your body, why can it not happen within anybody else's body? Why can it not happen outside of our bodies? Well, I think it depends, I think it depends on, on how much you've lowered your guard. We're all on guard, you know. We all defend ourselves, psychically as well as physically.

But this is the danger of the ayahuasca state, that your heart opens. So maybe there's an argument to be made for, let's say that there was this war on drugs, right? Maybe they saw it as something that was too vulnerable to be handed out to the masses without a way to, if we're giving them the best case scenario. Sure, yeah. I don't think that we want to treat the they's, whoever the they, the people in charge is with best case scenario. But this is a very vulnerable situation. You use people,

you're seeing a perfect example of somebody using it for nefarious intent. Imagine the average person doing it on a Friday. I spoke to a psychologist that does psychedelic therapy and he even reported in a clinical trial these telepathic sort of revelations. That even in a clinical trial inside like an actual medical room, there was a person on I think high dose ketamine or high dose psilocybin, I can't remember. And the clinician that was observing them basically thought about their dog at home. This is a purely anecdotal example. But thinking about their dog at home, like, oh, did I go let the dog out? And then the patient that was on high-dose ketamine took the shade off, took off the headphones and said, I'm thinking of dogs or whatever.

And was sharing effectively the same vision that they were thinking. Even though only one of them was on high-dose psychedelic. Okay, so here we go. It's surprisingly common. Real quick, right? Mark. How do we build the pyramids? How do you organize 20,000 people, 30,000 people

to be all on the same page and deliver the blocks in the exact same ways and cut them in the exact same shape and, well, maybe not the exact same shapes, but to certain specifications? You end up with this perfect thing that weighs six million tons and is almost perfectly oriented to true north and is 481 feet high, you know,

and contains two and a half million individual blocks of stone. And the slightest tweak or the slightest miscalculation can turn the entire thing off and it won't even be able to stand on itself. You end up with a corkscrew instead of a pyramid if you make the slightest error down at the base.

If you could find a way to, I don't want to even say manipulate, but access that sort of telepathic ability, it's just a better communication tool for a project of this size. Yes, and let's not forget that there are other tele-abilities such as telekinesis, which are also sneered at by Western science. But you believe it. Well, it's not so much a matter of belief. We do everything in our society through mechanical advantage. We're used to leverage. We're used to machines which do stuff. We look at cranes for building, so on and so on and so forth.

It may be that there are innate human abilities that we're not, that have actually lapsed in our society, but that are still there. And this is where, again, to those who sneer at such ideas, I would say take a close look at the work of Rupert Sheldrake. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist, and he's done a great deal of work on telepathy. For example, this may sound trivial, but dogs who know when their owners are coming home.

Now, he did randomized trials where the owners would come home at very different times. And other issues like the scent and so on were excluded. They always knew when their owner was coming home. Not always, but at a statistically significant level. Telephone telepathy. We've all had that experience, I suspect, where the phone rings

and you actually know who's on the other end of the phone. How often does a woman make a part of your body rise without even touching it? Interesting, interesting observation. This is the most- That's kind of telepathy too. Yeah. You're talking about Homo erectus. Oh yeah, Homo erectus. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My favorite type of human. What I would say is that I, in all my books, in the thousands of pages that I've written, I have probably written no more than two or three pages on these extraordinary possibilities and extraordinary abilities. But when archeologists attack me, they say Hancock believes in levitation by the mind. You're in a really peculiar situation because it seems like you're unbelievably passionate

about this specific, I guess, part of your life, right? But writing about it, even speaking on it, I even can tell as we're talking about it right now, you're like, people are going to use this to discredit this other thing that I've dedicated my entire fucking life to. Oh man, what a tricky situation. It is a tricky situation.

But we don't do it to other people, all right? Like we don't look at Wozniak and be like, your computers aren't good. Yeah, yeah. That's right. No. You should have just invented Apple, dude. That's because there's a narrative about the past which archaeology tells.

And it's supposed to be a pretty much straight line evolutionary story. It's much easier to digest like that, yeah. Through early agriculture to advanced industrialized societies. And the notion that there might have been a lost civilization, that we might have forgotten the whole episode from the human story is very threatening to that narrative. And it's particularly threatening when it appears on a major platform like Netflix. I've always been attacked for my work since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. But the level of the attacks and the characters ramped up enormously since the Netflix series. It's also, sorry to cut you, but it's not only it's eyeballs, it's like a validation. It's like Netflix putting the stamp on this makes people go, oh, this must be true, right?

If it's on YouTube, it's like, oh, that's that guy. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas I try to make clear throughout the series that I'm expressing my personal views and that I don't claim to be 100%. I'm not saying this is how it was. I'm saying this is how it could have been.

There's a difference. There's a part of this, and I want to get back to this because I'm really fascinated about this, but there's one part of the Netflix series that I actually was really excited to talk to you in person so you could explain it to me.

When you were talking about the difference in the color of the bedrock, I think you were in Mexico, was it? New Mexico. It? New Mexico. It was New Mexico. We were at... There was like a line that showed like... That's the Younger Dryas boundary.

And it was at Murray Springs in New Mexico or Arizona. Pretty certain it's New Mexico. Was at Murray Springs. I was with one of the scientists from the Comet Research Group, Dr. Alan West, and he was showing me the Younger Dryas boundary. Well, it's about the width of a human hand, and you see it running all the way through this draw.

Now, we see it at all because there was a flash flood which cut the draw down, and the sides are exposed. It was always there, but you wouldn't know it was there unless the land had been cut and opened up as it was. And this Younger Dryas boundary contains charcoal from wildfires. Wildfires are what you expect when you have a bit of a comet air bursting up above you. It has platinum, which is very rare on planet Earth. It has iridium, which is even rarer.

Yeah. There's the Younger Dryas boundary at Murray Springs. There it is. And it contains shocked quartz, evidence of quartz that's been melted at temperatures of more than 2,000 degrees centigrade. It contains carbon microspheres. Yeah, they call it the black mat. It's not only found there. It's found all around the world.

It's found in Belgium. It's found in many different sites in America. It's found as far east as Abu Huraira in Syria. This was a global event. Got you. And it wasn't one object hitting one place. Comets have a habit of breaking up into multiple fragments. Excuse me.

Some may be quite small, so small that they don't reach the Earth. They blow up in the sky. The most recent example we've had is the Tunguska event, June 30th, 1908. Yeah, in Russia, right? And that was in Siberia, and it was fortunately over an uninhabited area of Siberia.

They calculate that that object was maybe 60 to 100 meters in diameter. It did not reach the Earth. It blew up in the sky. Therefore, there's no crater. But it flattened 2,000... There, the flattened trees.

2,000 square kilometers of trees were just flattened by this thing. And they're flattened by air? Yes, the massive pressure releases. It's like an atomic bomb going off in the sky. Massive pressure release. Oh, so instead of the mushroom cloud going up, the massive pressure releases. It's like an atomic bomb going off in the sky. Massive pressure release. Oh, so instead of the mushroom cloud going up,

the mushroom cloud is pointing down at Earth. If this happened over any city, it would wipe out the entire population of that city. And still nothing has grown ever since? I'm not sure. I think it's probably regrown. These areas regrow. The one on the right is Tunguska event, yeah.

I'm not sure because I've not been to that part of Siberia. But it's interesting because it was the 30th of June, 1908, which is the peak of the meteor shower known as the Beta Taurids. The Earth has a relationship with the Taurid meteor stream. We pass through it twice a year. And the astronomers who are working on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis are pretty certain that the progenitor comet of the torrid meteor stream was what caused those impacts 12,800 years ago. And we're still in relationship with it. The comet Enki is the best known bit of the torrid meteor stream.

It's about six kilometers in diameter. But it's a fragment of an originally much larger, maybe 100 kilometer diameter that broke up into multiple, multiple pieces. And many of those pieces hit the earth or air bursted around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. I'm not saying that as a fact. I'm saying that is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis documented in probably 100 scientific papers. Can you bring up that image that you sent me about the asteroids or the comets that have hit Earth? Yeah, yeah, Mark sent me this picture.

I believe it was you, Mark, that sent me it. And it was, these are the, yeah, he sent me this picture. And here are the comets that have hit Earth. And I just looked at it and I thought this was- It's in perspective, doesn't it? But wait, and I thought this was throughout It puts it in perspective, doesn't it? And I thought this was throughout history. This is since 94?

Right. 1994? Yeah. Yeah, it's like the universe is telling us to wake up. Rogan said, we exist in a shooting... We live in a shooting gallery.

Yeah. It's a matter of time. It's absolutely a matter of time. And particular attention needs to be paid to the torrid meteor stream. Because we're going to pass through it twice a year.

We go through it in late October, early November. And we go through it in late June, early July. And it's 30 million kilometers wide. It takes 12 plus days for the Earth to pass through it on its orbit. There are large objects in it. There are many small and harmless objects in it. It's only a matter of time before we go into it right now have an encounter yeah before we have an encounter and to clarify those some of those are actually just asteroids that uh explode i guess in the earth's atmosphere so that's not the vast majority sometimes they'll hit sometimes

there have been recent cases of a of a bit of of an asteroid or comet that's hit a house. Really? Yeah, there have been two recent cases this year. There was one in Alabama that was hit by a large asteroid that left a bruise on her leg. What? I'm pretty sure, yeah. They do make it to Earth sometimes. Somebody throw it around.

The vast majority are airbursts, shooting stars, but they do make it to Earth. airbursts, shooting stars, but they do make it to Earth. So we are in a cosmic shooting gallery, and attention needs to be paid to it, and not because we have to live in fear of gloom and doom and our planet is going to be destroyed, precisely because we have the ability and the technology now to do something about this. If we pay attention to it, rather than paying attention

to all the shit we we pay attention to it, rather than paying attention to all the shit we are paying attention to, like making war on each other and investing vast quantities in weapon systems to kill one another on an enormous scale. The human race has got its priorities wrong. We're still locked in

a frame of mind, a state of consciousness that is not serving the human race anymore. It's based on scarcity. Hatred and fear and suspicion. The media are particularly good at that, it's very nice, it gets audiences, but it's so unhelpful, you know, when we should be spreading love and confidence and hope. So how do you, sorry, how do we,

how do we allow people to experiment with mind-altering drugs without it being abused? My concern when weed became legal was that it was going to be immediately abused, and not in terms of the quantity used, the potency of it. Like the weed now, it's not even reminiscent of weed, I feel like, right? It's like, this is, if we're actually trying to get to the natural part of it. I bought some New York edibles last night. Ow!

Well, first of all, it's little pieces of chocolate, and each one contains 25 milligrams of THC. Why would you need 25? They're tiny. Well, it depends how much you use it. If I use cannabis very regularly, which I sometimes do, and I really want to get seriously stoned, I might need 40 milligrams.

Really? And I felt in need of more than 25 milligrams last night for various reasons. But trying to slice that second piece up with a plastic knife wasn't very and i think i just possibly had a little bit too much also very potent you know apparently heat activates the thc in a different way is that is that right um like when it's baked versus like when you smoke it interesting i mean edibles of course as we know are you're looking at five or six hours

certainly on edibles i peak after about two and a half hours, and I'm still in there two or three hours later. Whereas vapes, if I'm writing, I prefer to vape cannabis because I can titrate the dose. I can keep myself just at the place I want to be without falling deep into it. Yeah, where you can't even write anymore. Yeah, where I can't write anymore.

Yeah. So, you know, there are different uses and purposes for it. So how do we do that with psychedelics? First of all, you legalize everything because the hasty and careless and irresponsible use of these substances is largely happening because of the illegal regime. And there are people making money out of pushing and selling these things as drugs. The first thing to do is to make them all legal. But legal for adults, not legal for children.

It would be much easier to explain to our teenage son or our teenage daughter that we would like him or her to hang on until they're 21. Because when you're 21, you can do whatever you like, just like everything else in our society, as long as you don't do harm to others. And as I often point out, we have multiple laws already which completely govern every issue of doing harm to others. What's bizarre about the war on drugs is that they govern what we may or may not experience in our own consciousness while doing no harm to others. What's bizarre about the war on drugs is that they govern what we may or may not experience

in our own consciousness while doing no harm to others. I think it'd be much easier to explain to a teenager who's keen to get started, this is very serious, very serious matter. Take your time, the time will come. Your mind is a little immature at the moment, wait until you're 21 and then it's your choice. You think 21, would it be even later maybe? I think because we allow so many other things to 21-year-olds, I think that that would be a natural age to put on it. Of course, every individual varies. Some 18-year-olds are very mature mentally, some are not. It depends. But if we're going to put something on it, I would say

21 is a good age. The best example of why good advice works better than illegalization is tobacco, in the sense that tobacco has never been legal. It's never been illegal. It's never been a criminal offense that could put you in prison and ruin your reputation for life and make you unemployable to smoke a cigarette. But as it happens, we have seen a huge decline in cigarette consumption. Not because people are afraid of getting locked up, but because they've had good advice.

Good education. And they believed it. And I think we can do that with psychedelics, but the whole thing is tainted by the war on drugs at the moment. And we need to get outside of that. I'm just, go out. You don't think it should be,

like off Akash's comment, you don't think it should be a little bit later when our brain is fully developed? Yes, perhaps it should. Okay, I'll tell my personal story. My first ever experience with psychedelics was when I was 24 years old. And that was in 1974 at the Windsor Free Festival just outside of London, when I split a tab of acid three ways with a couple of friends. Had the most amazing experience ever. But I saw one of my friends had a really bad experience.

And I actually didn't go back to psychedelics until I was researching the specific book in which I write about psychedelics, which is called Supernatural. And it's recently been republished as Visionary. In order, I believe strongly... How old were you then? Sorry. When I... Second time. So 2003, so I was already 53. Wow, okay. Between the age of 24 and the age of 53, I had no psychedelic experiences at all. I also did not consume cannabis as a young adult. I was 38 when I started cannabis. Yeah, same, 38 actually.

And I initially found that it was something that I would have of an evening to help me get off to sleep. But when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, and here my critics are going to say, that's why he wrote that book. When I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I decided to experiment with basically smoking all day, which I switched to vaping. Interesting. It relieves the physical boredom of sitting in that chair for hours and hours every day. Yeah.

And I feel it helps me loosen up connections in my mind. It doesn't work the same for everybody. I don't get dreamy or dopey or lose connection. I stay focused. So I was 53 when Santa and I went down to the Amazon and had our first ayahuasca experiences in 2003. And I was 38 when I started to become acquainted with cannabis properly. So I don't know.

The problem is people are different. I just think the key thing is let's stop making it illegal. Let's stop making it a crime. Let's stop shaming people because they're interested in psychedelics and ruining their lives. And then let's see what the best system we have. But this is where we need to sit at the feet of shamans in hunter-gatherer societies and learn from them how to handle these powerful experiences which which we're not and and i i feel strongly but i i'm not in a position to tell other people what to do i can only share my advice these medicines are not are not for recreational

purposes yeah not not the psychedelics and can you speak now that's a different man white supremacist that actually had like moral revelation on a high-dose MDMA clinical trial? I shared it. Basically, he was in a clinical trial to study MDMA's effects on something completely unrelated to race relations. He happened to be affiliated with white nationalist

groups. He was at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and had been involved throughout a long period of time, was fired from his job after his job found out that he was affiliated with these white nationalist groups. He happened to enroll in the trial, did the study, and then as he left the study, he basically elected to discontinue and said, I have to go do some work. Look up my name. You'll see my history and you'll see why I have to leave. And then basically re-engaged with the researchers again to say, I was a white supremacist. And through this chemical that gave me dramatic empathy, I now understood why I was in such a hateful place and I just needed love in the first

place. Yeah, absolutely. That guy's racist though. Like if you gotta be on Molly to like black people, bro, you are racist. Obviously not everyone has this experience, but it is interesting. You know, human beings are filled with all kinds of prejudices and all kinds of ideas about other human beings. And one of the I think one of the great things about psychedelics is they can shake that up. They can

shake it up and get us out of these fixed patterns. But the question of legalization is complicated. I'm against bureaucracies. I'm against government. I think governments are the most unhelpful things in the world today, next perhaps to the mainstream religions. I think they're causing so much misery and chaos.

If you're in government, it's in your interests to maximize the negative light in which you put any kind of opposition. That's what politicians do, and it happens at an international level where one state hates on another state. So there's no exchange of ideas. No exchange of ideas.

Collaboration. It would be a thoroughly good idea if every leader of every country, anybody running for political office, were required to have a dozen sessions of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca. That, ayahuasca. Yeah. That would be the prerequisite?

Yeah, that's the prerequisite. You don't apply for the job. If you haven't done this, this is the bar that you have to set. You have to have a dozen sessions of ayahuasca, and then you can apply. If you just gave the alt-right molly, that would probably help a lot. What is a molly? The alt-right molly is MDMA. Oh, it's MDMA.

They're also called ecstasy, right? Ecstasy, yeah. Oh, man, yeah, we've had some. This experience I had with MDMA was my first real experience with MDMA. Okay, so when you first try it, you've never had it before. You are familiar with Molly. It's not quite true. I had it once at Burning Man.

Oh, dude, you go to Burning Man? Yeah, years ago. When did you go? Sometime in the 2000s and late, maybe 2007, somewhere. I don't know. I don't remember exactly. Where did you go? I was with Santha.

Oh, this is great. But Santha, at that time, didn't want to take the MDMA. And I did, and I took it. And we got into a bit of a state about it because I felt I felt she should be in there yeah all the wrong things I was thinking as usual of course but I didn't thoroughly enjoy that experience but this one that I had more recently where something I took it together before we took the 5-meo was just beautiful there's a pill called it and it is an ecstasy pill so it's got MDMA but it also probably has some like Coke and some other stuff in there, whatever.

But it's probably the most amazing feeling I've ever had in my life. I mean, it was at Burning Man. And we had a third of it. We were just sharing it. And it was, don't get me wrong, at Burning Man, you're already filled. You know you've already filled with so much love and appreciation. And like your walls are down and it's like everybody around you is also giving so much

so it puts you in this great giving state. But it enhanced it and I don't know. How long were you in the state? I mean it was several hours, but what was really interesting about it was the music that I was listening to, I don't even know if this is possible, what I'm gonna explain, but let's just say.

The music that I was listening to while I was in the state kind of captured the state. And when I would listen to that music afterwards, it would like trigger that emotional state for months. Now it's stopped, but for the next few months, just hearing the music gave me a little bit of those feelings. It was a fraction of what those feelings actually were.

And something was happening in here. It was like Pavlovian. Like I heard that. We were listening. There's this great DJ, Blondish, that we were listening to. And all these things kind of came together. They're all connected together in your mind in some way.

It's a flashback experience. Why would we seek to deny adults the right to have these experiences? I mean, what's the sense of it? I just don't get it. What would you say worst case scenario, like if we were making the argument for worst case scenario, what would it be?

I think that we have the worst case scenario right now. Which is not giving them the opportunity to do it. Yeah, not giving the, or if you take that that opportunity you're breaking a law and you're running yeah risk and people got the right to break down your door and ruin ruin your reputation but that's the worst kid we're already in the worst case there so anything can be better than I just don't want people to I want people to try these things and like it was great obviously going with these guys in different times to bury a man and like having them experience this amazing you know uh i don't even i don't want to call it a festival

or party yeah like this amazing communal experience communal experience right like it was it was really awesome i also know that there's somebody who is bored out of their mind in a place that has very little opportunity. And they don't know what they're going to do with their life. And they're probably taking meth out of boredom. And I don't want them to be able to take meth. I'd maybe rather them take this other stuff. So, like, I know worst case scenario in that regard, not in terms of what you've obviously been through and what so many other people have been through.

guard, not in terms of what you've obviously been through and what so many other people have been through. So as much as I just want to open up the floodgates, I still want to pack them with enough, like you said earlier, information. So it just doesn't get abused. I think the important thing to realize is the floodgates are already open. If somebody wants to have that experience, they're going to find it. They're going to find it. And chances are that the product they are sold will not be as good as they would be

if it were fully leaked was fully legal and you have the danger of the black market with the fentanyl and everything what if it's only accessible through a therapeutic setting um i'm not i'm not in favor of that because then that that that empowers the so-called experts in our society to decide what we may or may not experience and i think that i think that this is an issue of individual sovereignty where we have we we should have yeah absolute sovereign right to make decisions about our own consciousness. Sorry, you're not traumatized enough for ayahuasca. Some guy who's not even ayahuasquero could potentially say that.

I don't want it to be that way. But I do want people who would like to experience psychedelic therapy where therapy is offered with it to have the opportunity to do so. So maybe the question is... And this issue of end of life and old people's homes, you know, I would like to pay tribute to Amanda Fielding, who runs the Beckley Foundation near Oxford in the UK. Amanda is now in her early 80s. She has been a vigorous advocate of psychedelics since the 1960s. She has funded a lot of the great research that's now going on in scientific labs into psychedelics.

And she feels strongly that the misery and horror of old people's homes would be greatly facilitated if psychedelics were allowed. Yeah the fuck else they got to do? Yeah. And again, being offered by experienced practitioners. The lady who facilitated the 5-MeO DMT session with MDMA that Santhe and I had, she actually, her main role is to go and offer psychedelic therapy to old people. But it's having to be done under the carpet rather than above. It's a bummer. Have you experienced holotropic breathwork?

Yeah, I'm not very good at it. I need to do more work. I know that it can be beneficial. I have tried. But the monkey mind keeps going off in other directions. And psychedelics work better for me. What is that? Perhaps I'm just being lazy. Well, you put yourself into an altered state of consciousness

through breathing. Yeah. Which you can, and which reminds us that nature offers us many ways to get into it. I've done something like that, and it was fucking intense. Yeah, really? It can be very intense. Did you hallucinate?

No, I didn't hallucinate, but I, like, started crying. I was sweating. Yeah. I was, like, it was a weird fucking experience. I was so tired afterward. So tired. Some people suggest it's a natural release of DMT. It's just like a coach.

Maybe so. Yeah. Maybe so. Yeah. Anybody who's really, really interested in the whole DMT story, I highly recommend the work of Dr. Rick Strassman from the University of New Mexico. Okay. His book, DMT,, I highly recommend the work of Dr. Rick Strassman from the University of New Mexico.

His book, The Spirit Molecule, he was the first scientific researcher to work with human volunteers in DMT legally in the 1990s. And Rick is a beautiful person and he's written a fantastic book about that experience. And he will be involved also in the new project that's going to take place in Colorado. So I highly recommend Rick Strassman, DMT, The Spirit Molecule. Yeah. Aliens.

Well, you see, this is the thing. The DMT volunteers and I myself on DMT have repeatedly experienced encounters with what might be construed as aliens. Because again, I'm handing a stick to my opponents to beat me with. And so I would like to point out, and I went into this in depth in my book, Visionary, now titled Visionary, used to be called Supernatural,

that the experiences that shamans have with spirits, the experiences that people in the Middle Ages up until about the 1950s had with fairies and elves, and the experiences that people in the Middle Ages up until about the 1950s had with fairies and elves. And the experiences that people have with aliens today, they're all the same experience construed through different cultural lenses. The details of the experience in every case are almost identical. Once you get down to the phenomenology and examine the exact experiences that are reported, it turns out that they're all the same experiences, just that different cultures construe them in different ways. And right now we're construing those encounters as encounters with aliens.

Well, certainly they are alien to this realm, but are they coming in spaceships or are they crossing interdimensional space or are they all within our minds somehow? Mark, the guy that you spoke to, did you put that episode out yet? With Rick Barnett, yeah. So Mark spoke to a guy who claims to have been abducted. Oh, that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By aliens, right? And... J. King.

Yeah, has he dabbled with psychedelics at all? I don't know. I asked him sort of like... Peripherally? Yeah, peripherally and he didn't really seem to... He didn't elect that information outright. I didn't press on it. He may be a natural overproducer of DMT. It's notable that people in the Middle Ages

were repeatedly reported being abducted by fairies. Shamans are repeatedly abducted by spirits. Shamans have sex with female spirits in the spirit world. Alien abductees today have sex with aliens and in the spirit world. Alien abductees today have sex with aliens and often produce hybrid children. It was the case with fairies as well. It's the same thing.

We're just viewing it through different cultural lenses, I think. And I think it's very useful to analyze this experience if you look at these earlier examples of how it was construed. There were ancient civilizations that spoke of the star people or like is that a version of that? There's a fascinating imagery on the second shrine of the tomb of Tutankhamun

which is in the museum in Cairo now and what it is it's a gold the whole shrine is covered in gold and on one side of it is an image of individuals

who are in mummified form but they're looking up at a star and rays from the star are coming down into their forehead right into their forehead and talk about star people and talk about the pineal gland. I mean, that's what it seems like.

Let's see if we can find it. Any of these, perhaps? That's actually from the second shrine, but that's not the image I'm talking about. That may be the image. Let's have a look at that. Yeah. My eyesight's so shit, I can't see.

Yeah, it's not very high quality. No, that's not it anyway. But anybody who searches far enough and spends enough time will find it. It's a very famous image. And there's this direct connection with the stars that is manifested in that image. So as far as global knowledge is concerned, all these ancient cultures building pyramids, building different mound structures connected to the stars in some capacity, I know it's been positive that there's ancient civilization

that's potentially going around. Is it possible that it's just connection with psychedelics that occur naturally all over the earth, and even internally with us through holotropic breath, I think that can give us revelations. My view on a possible lost human civilization is first of all that that civilization, like all other civilizations on Earth, emerged out of shamanism.

And that psychedelics and the use of consciousness-altering plants and fungi were fundamental to that shamanistic culture, just as they were to every other shamanistic culture, but it took a different direction from some other ones and became capable of navigating and exploring the earth at a very, very early date and studied astronomy in an almost scientific sense. Do you think it's possible that this same experience happened to pre, what are we, Homo sapiens? We're Homo sapiens, yeah. Did it happen to, what were you bringing up earlier? Homo erectus, Neanderthals. Could they have also dabbled? I think it certainly happened with Neanderthals. There's more and more evidence that cave art

that was attributed to Homo sapiens was actually done by Neanderthals. Wow. And it may be that the Neanderthals taught the ancestors of anatomically modern humans how to paint that is that is even possible uh there's there's there's very strong evidence now that neanderthals were doing cave art and the same geometric patterns and the same entities appeared there they're not

so different from anatomically modern humans in any way they live on in us because there's so much neanderthal dna up to up to you know, these may be some examples of Neanderthal cave art. But did Homo erectus, I think you mentioned that they were sailing? Well, they certainly did sail because they got, as far as I recall, even as far away as some of the Pacific islands, Micronesia, maybe even New Guinea. But the problem is we don't have any evidence from that period,

apart from a few skeletal and fossil remains. The evidence for psychedelic use in cave art is fundamentally derives from the art itself. Yeah. That was why I went to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca in 2003. I thought I had finished my inquiry into the possibility of a lost civilization. I was wrong.

I went back to it later because new evidence, particularly Gobekli Tepe, came out. I was looking for a new subject that really interested me. Human origins interested me. And then this sort of burst of symbolism and creativity that occurs 100,000 years ago or less. And that's when I started to look at cave art. And then I came across the work of a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, David Lewis Williams. His neuropsychological model of cave art suggested that cave art

was documenting experiences in deeply altered states of consciousness. And he made a strong case for that then I thought okay Let's look at cultures that are using deeply altered states of consciousness now So I started looking at the Amazon and I came across an amazing book written by Luis Eduardo Luna and and with paintings by Pablo Amarillo and Amazonian Shaman Depicting his ayahuasca visions. And lo and behold, there were so many common points with the K-Bar. I'm a boots-on-the-ground researcher.

I can't write a book about something if I don't experience it. That's why I spent seven years scuba diving. So, you know, I said to Santa, we have to go to the Amazon and drink ayahuasca if I'm going to write this book authentically. Does K-Bar make more sense to you now after having the- Oh, completely, yeah. Yeah, it makes complete sense to me. It certainly wasn't about hunting magic.

They weren't trying to cast magical spells on the animals that they wanted to hunt. Only about 2% of all animals shown in cave art are pierced by any kind of projectile, as a matter of fact. And there's no evidence that they were eating the animals that are depicted in the cave art. A lot of animals are depicted, but shamans often experience themselves

transforming into animals. And spirit animals. So it all makes much more sense to me, and the geometry that accompanies it, and the scintillating patterns. It's all psychedelic art, in my view. Is it odd to have had these experiences and speak to people who haven't?

Because as I talk to you right now, I feel like you've existed. It's not another country. I feel like you've existed in like a different dimension or reality. Yeah, like we know the spider verse like a different, yeah, like as part of the multi, that's kind of what it feels like. And you've existed in both and you can relate to me on the things that I'm saying because you know what it's like. But the things you're describing to me, I can't even really wrap my head around them. Go drink some ayahuasca.

It makes me want to do it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm done. Go drink some ayahuasca in a properly controlled shamanic setting where the shamans know what they're— You've got to give me the name of that fucking vampire before I go do it. Because I don't want to be there, right? That's terrifying. He's on everybody's watch list

now. Good. Yeah. Yeah. He won't be going, but, uh, but there are some, there are some, some good places. And I'm not saying that there aren't good places available in the West as well. But is that a common experience you've had with people? Like I'm fascinated by how, what you're describing, but it is so foreign. Yeah. It's, it's very difficult for those who've not had the experience to relate to it. For those who have had the experience, it's very easy to relate to it. So I'm kind of bridging two worlds. I'm trying to use my functionality in this realm as a storyteller, as a person of words, to bring across some element of that experience.

And fundamentally, to say to people, we shouldn't demonize this. We should consider that it's played a huge role in the human story. Has it dulled your experience within this reality that we share it all, knowing that there's this alternative version? No, it seems more precious. So it's enhanced it.

It's enhanced it. That's cool. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had this incarnation, to still be in this incarnation, as a matter of fact. That's another thing which I can't prove, but I do think reincarnation makes a lot of sense. Why is that?

Well, firstly because of Ian Stevenson's amazing study called Children Who Remember Past Lives. Ian Stevenson was a psychologist and he was interested in reincarnation and he went to India. Our culture discourages children from remembering past lives. In India they don't. And he went to India and he interviewed children in India up to the age of seven.

After the age of seven, it's all forgotten. Tends to be all forgotten. We get so absorbed in this life. But up to the age of seven, there are distinct past life memories. And this appears to be true of all children. It's just that some cultures allow those memories to be manifest and others don't. And he did scientific work. So an example might be a child who remembered his name living in a village three or four hundred miles away from where he's living now. his name, living in a village three or four hundred miles away from where he's living now.

He remembered the house that he lived in. He remembered an object that he'd concealed in that house in that past life. Then they would go to the house, they would find the object, they would know that there was a person. There's some crazy stories I've heard. Now this is proper work.

This is not woo-woo. This is, again, recommending a book, Ian Stevenson, Children Who Remember Past Lives. How stupid do you feel? Wait, why? Catholic. And, you know, that's another reason why I'm... Is it transhumanism that seeks to make us immortal in our physical bodies?

Yeah. Is that what it is? Yeah, the singularity. I'm not a big fan of that. I like the idea of the deck being reshuffled and coming back and having multiple lives rather than being stuck in this one forever. Speaking of religion, I've actually been wondering, how do religious people take your theories?

Badly. Badly, because here's what's interesting. The only thing that generally rings a bell is the story of the flood. The story of the flood is very important to my work, and of course it's found in the Old Testament and it's found in Islam, and it's found in Judaism as well. And it's found in many other religions.

And all jokes aside, I've actually been kind of like questioning my faith recently, and I was thinking this would actually make it way easier, because one thing I'm struggling with is the Earth is billions of years old, humans have existed for what, 100,000 years? It's such a blip on the radar. Anatomically modern humans, about 300,000 years.

300,000 out of billions. If you told me there's a reality in which, or a history in which humans are here and then a cataclysm happens because God's not happy with them, and then we restart, and then the same thing happens over and over again throughout history.

As a religious person, I'm like, oh, that can explain away me being like, if God made all this for humans, why are we here such a small time in the Earth's history? It can help. And whether the realm we live in is created or has developed accidentally, the absence of certainty about everything is an important part of the human experience. And if we were all certain, absolutely scientifically certain that death was the end and there's nothing beyond it, which we can't be, then we would have a particular attitude to death. If we were all certain that reincarnation occurs, then we would also, we might not take this life so seriously. We might have a flippant attitude towards it,

but I'm going to come back. Whereas the lessons that this life has to teach are lessons that are based on the uncertainty of everything. We don't know what death is. We don't know what consciousness is. These are all mysteries. We must make our choices against that background of mystery and decide what we're going to do with the gift of life that we have, however it came our way. So the Greeks believed in reincarnation and their view was that we drink of the waters

of forgetfulness before we come back into this life. And that's part of the deal, that we should forget the past life. In Buddhism, the only individuals who come back with full memory are the bodhisattvas. They are those who have been through life's multiple incarnations. They've learned all the lessons that life has to teach us. They've achieved nirvana. But they choose not to do that.

They choose to come back to the earth plane to teach others, to be guides to others. And they remember all their past lives. Many different religions have different views on these things. It's only the Abrahamic faiths that are convinced that we just have this one life and we've got a heaven or hell depending on what we do.

Graham Hancock, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for being here. This is awesome. This is so good. Thanks for having me here. It's been fun talking to you guys. Make sure you check out the debate in October. October 24th.

October 24th is the date. Check out all the books. Check out yourth. October 24th is the date. Check out all the books. Check out your website. I'm sure all the information is located there. GrahamHancock.com. We'll post it in the description and everything. But thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you. That was excellent. Thank you. It's been great fun. Thank you.