Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 543: Graham Hancock

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Graham Hancock, brilliant author, documentarian, and wonderful person, re-joins the DTFH! You can watch Graham's new documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, streaming now on Netflix! And visit GrahamHancock.com for more info on Graham, including his published works, social media links, and upcoming live appearances! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self. Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

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Membership eligibility and product restrictions apply and are subject to change. U.S.A.A. means United Services Automobile Association and its affiliates San Antonio, Texas. Greetings, friends. How long do you think human civilization has existed on this planet? What if we had actually been here much longer than is currently accepted in most realms of archaeology, anthropology, and whatever ology maps out the age of species? What if we were here longer? What if the stories of great, beautiful, mystical, powerful civilizations wiped out by some global catastrophe

were not just mythology, but were actually true? There is one person who comes to mind. When we speculate on this matter, and that person, of course, is Graham Hancock. His amazing series, Ancient Apocalypse, is now available on Netflix. It's so good. Please watch it. And then when you're done watching this series, dive in to the vitriolic retribution that has been dished out to Hancock from a variety of places, most surprisingly, a Guardian article that sounds as though it were written by somebody

who had a horrible, horrible rash on their undergunt. You know what I mean? That tone of journalism that's just mean for mean's sake, a kind of way of reviewing or critiquing things that has within them what feels like some kind of personal animosity towards the subject. It feels like in this article written by Stuart Heritage about Graham Hancock's show, Ancient Apocalypse, that their neighbors are something and Graham Hancock's dog's gotten to Stuart Heritage's yard and shit all over his roses. I'm just going to read a little bit from this article. At the time of writing, Ancient Apocalypse has been comfortably sitting in Netflix's top 10 list for several days.

This presents something of a mystery because the show closely resembles a sort of half-baked filler documentary that one of the lesser discovery channels would slap up at 3 a.m. between shows about plane crashes and fascist architecture. Ancient Apocalypse obviously has an audience, but who on earth is it? Fortunately, you don't have to watch for long to find out. In quick succession during the pre-show Sizzle Reel, we are treated to a clip of the show's host Graham Hancock being interviewed by Joe Brogan. Finally, we have an answer. Ancient Apocalypse must be a TV program exclusively for people who like to shout at you on Twitter. They're mean to me on Twitter.

Don't you guys get it? Why is there a mean to me? That's me, not him, the mean to me part. He did say exclusively for people who like to shout at you on Twitter. Of course it is. These people are Hancock's bread and butter, the quote-free thinkers who through some bizarre quirk of nature are often more perennial outraged than anyone else on earth. They're drawn to Ancient Apocalypse thanks in part to Hancock's loud and persistent claims that his life's work is being suppressed by big archaeology. Now, I'm going to cut towards the end here.

Which is to say we shouldn't dismiss Hancock's theory out of hand, of course, because if he's right and the history of humanity really is just the first five minutes of Prometheus, it would change everything we know about ourselves. But we certainly shouldn't treat his hodgepodge of mysteries and coincidences as fact. That's the danger of a show like this. It whispers to the conspiracy theorist and all of us. And Hancock is such a compelling host that he's bound to create a few more in his wake. Believing that ultra-intelligent creatures help to build the pyramids is one thing, but where does it end? First of all, this ultra-intelligent creatures help to build the pyramids part.

This is not in Ancient Apocalypse. Maybe ultra-intelligence people, but not creatures. He's insinuating here that Ancient Apocalypse is Ancient Aliens, which it is. I think he got the two shows mixed up, maybe. I'm wondering if maybe he watched Ancient Aliens and didn't understand that this was not Ancient Apocalypse. Believing that ultra-intelligent creatures help to build the pyramids is one thing, but where does it end? Believing that election fraud is real? Believing 9-11 was an inside job worse? If you are feeling particularly mean-spirited, now here comes true cowardly writing.

If you want to see cowardly writing, the way that he writes this is cowardly, because it's like this way of darting around the fact that he's the one saying it. It's a way that some mean journalist write to avoid seeming like they're the ones being the asshole. If you were feeling particularly mean-spirited, you could suggest that Netflix knows this and has gone out of its way to court the conspiracy theorists. He doesn't have the guts to say, I think Netflix knows this and has gone out of its way to court the conspiracy theorists. He puts it on us. If you were feeling mean, this is what you would say. Really shitty, pissy writing.

Anyway, this is just one of many articles where the tone and the venomous tone doesn't seem right for a show theorizing that humans have been on the planet longer than we have. Like what's the big deal? If he's wrong, he's wrong. So what? It's still an entertaining show. It's still fun to watch. I mean, the other aspect of this kind of writing, which is really annoying, is it's so condescending because the implication is that the individual human is not capable of discerning fact from fiction. The implication is that we're all little buying sheep that we have no control. We have no autonomy over what we do.

And if you watch a show like Ancient Apocalypse, which truly, of all the shows available on Netflix, it's got to be one of the least conspiratorial of the documentaries you could watch on Netflix, which is really just like a fun show at the very least. It's a travel log. I mean, it's just beautiful. The cinematography is incredible. It's beautiful. But also what Hancock is talking about is fun. I personally subscribe to it. I believe it. It wouldn't shock me if we found out that we had been here much longer and that whatever we were was wiped out by some kind of cosmic event. It wouldn't be shocking to me. It wouldn't change the way that I live.

It certainly wouldn't send me as Stuart Heritage seems to think skittering towards the nearest government building to attempt an insurrection. I mean, it's a show about prehistory. It's not Alex Jones. But the outrage that came from a lot of different places related to this show speaks to what a great show it is. And that's how you know something's good is if it stirs up people like Stuart Heritage and some of the folks that we discuss in this conversation with Graham Hancock to the point that they express intellectual outrage, which is one of the funniest forms of outrage when someone is doing some version of I never in my life at the historical society felt so insulted at this moment when that clown dad say that the earth is not the center of the galaxy. We know the sun orbits around the earth. It's very funny and quite often people express intellectual outrage are shown to be wrong.

But sometimes they're right. Regardless, I love it. You know, if you ask me anytime you have people debating each other over prehistory, that's a good sign. That's what we want. That's nice. It brings us all together. I've got no hard feelings for Stuart Heritage. I don't know why he's so pissed at Graham Hancock. But anytime we have this level of intellectual fisticuffs happening on social media and publicly, it's good news. It's funny. It's just a lot better than some of the other shitty debates that are happening out there. And so, regardless, ancient apocalypse, you got to watch it read some of Hancock's books. He also writes wonderful fiction to he's just a brilliant author. And he's a wonderful person having had the good fortune to have a few conversations with him. He just radiates warmth and sweetness and a kind of like beautiful seriousness regarding his theories. And I just love him to death. And if you have yet to cross past with him, I think you are going to love him too. He's right around the corner. But first, I want to invite you to join the DTF Patreon. It's patreon.com.

Sign up. You can hang out with us twice a week. We've got a Friday family gathering we do. We have a wonderful meditation group that's been going on for this will be our 138th sit. So if you're interested in meditating with a group of weirdos, then we are your family and we can't wait to meet you. You can subscribe at patreon.com forward slash DTF H plus you'll get commercial free episodes of the DTF H. I'm going to be in Nashville soon at Zany's. I'm going to be in Madison, Wisconsin soon, comedy on state, lots of shows coming up next year. I hope you will come and watch my stand up show. I'd like to see you there. But now, everyone, please welcome to the DTF H, the creator of Netflix's incredible documentary, Ancient Apocalypse. Green Bangkok. Graham, welcome back to the DTF H. It is so great to see you. How's it going? Hi Duncan, it's really good to be back with you. Seems like years. I think it must be. It has been years. Oh, a lot has happened between the last time we chatted and today. Not only did we go through a global pandemic, but you have released. It's got to be my favorite Netflix documentary of all time.

Ancient Apocalypse is incredible. So how long did it take you to make that show? Well, the idea was originally floated in 2019. And the show was ready to get on the road in 2020 when COVID hit. And we got just a massive series of delays. If it hadn't been for COVID, I think we would have finished it by the end of 2020. But that's spread it out through 2020, 2021. And finally, we released in November 2022. And the two or three episodes were filmed in 2022. It was a major logistical exercise. I can't imagine. Can't imagine what went into that. And for example, we wanted to film in Peru. I love the megalithic sites up there at Cusco, Sacsay, Juaman, the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu. There's extraordinary mysteries there. And I would like to have done an episode there, but COVID got in the way. Peru locked down for like a year and a half, a very long time at any rate, just when we were wanting to be there. So we couldn't go. So we had to work around it. And like any long-term television project, it's a compromise between what ideally I would like to have done and what could be done under very difficult circumstances.

That's right. When I made the Midnight Gospel for Netflix, I remember Pendleton, who I made it with, telling me, look, here's how it's going to go. Things are going to go real fast and you're going to have to get something done and turn it in whether you think it's done or not. And that's just the way it works. And it can be quite frustrating when you know you're giving, you know, you're turning into something great. You certainly did, but there's that sense of, oh, I've only had one more month. I learned a lot about storytelling during this production. I mean, I'm a storyteller. I have been on my working life, but I tell stories in the form of large books. And the way I do things with a nonfiction book is, yes, I will write a synopsis, which is the pitch for the publisher. But after that deal is done, I throw the synopsis aside and just let the story carry me wherever I want it to carry me. Whereas with television, with a crew of 10 people and, you know, substantial budgets and flying all over the world, you can't do that. You have to have a pretty clear idea of what you're going to do and what you're going to shoot and where you're going to shoot and even on which day you're going to shoot it. And, you know, you need to unfold the story in a different way. So it's been a fascinating exercise for me. And, you know, I'm glad you liked it and glad you saw it. And I think it's possibly the first time that a work of alternative history like this, really proposing a radical relook at the human past, has got out onto a mainstream platform and been seen by tens of millions of people.

And I welcome that. Well, you really threaded the needle. I mean, when you're making anything like that, you are having to decide how deep do I want to go into any given aspect of the show? And, you know, if you veer too far in the direction of what some people call woo, then you could throw a lot of people. You have to thread the needle. And this is what you do when you're writing, too. You threaded the needle. And so I just found myself riveted not just by the way you told the story of these ancient civilizations, because I already knew what we've talked before. I knew what the ending, what the culmination of it all would be, but the cinematography, the music, the fonts you picked, every single aspect of it built this real, like, tangible tension, you know, a real connection to the fragility of human civilization that I think a lot of shows that are about history, about the reality of what it's like to live in a tumultuous planet, that they don't quite hit that pitch. They don't quite hit that pitch that helps, that throws cold water on your face and reminds you, hey, things don't stay the same on this planet. And sometimes they change fast. And that was pretty intense to watch, especially when I was lucky. Yeah, absolutely. I was lucky to work with a really fantastic team of professionals who were very dedicated, every single one of them, in their hearts, to telling the story in the best possible way.

And, you know, that makes it a comprehensive work. It's not just me. It's a team effort with a group of people bringing different skills, whether it's graphics, whether it's camera work, whether it's sound, to try to bring this story across as forcefully as possible. And my goodness, there's huge opposition. It's really surprised me, the reaction of mainstream archaeology to this series. I mean, I've always had a sort of complicated relationship with mainstream archaeology, ever since I published Fingerprints of the God back in 1995. They like to call me names and try to diminish my work. So it seems to have created a sort of fury that suddenly Hancock ends up on Netflix with an eight episode series proposing the possibility of a lost civilization of the Ice Age, which they just absolutely don't believe is possible. And it just seems to have pushed all kinds of extraordinary buttons. I find myself being called a racist and a white supremacist, which I personally find very offensive and hurtful. Because, you know, I married to Santa, a woman of color. We have four mixed-race children, seven mixed-race grandchildren. And to have archaeologists, you know, pressing that particular button to try to smear my name fucking infuriates me as a matter of fact. And it's so lazy and so idle. But in a way, it shows how desperate they are to, you know, to have to do. This has been to me. I mean, obviously, I didn't make the show. So I can't imagine what you're feeling. But I was just so thrilled with the show. It ends. I'm excited. I've had you on my podcast. I know you. It's a great show. I just tweet how good the show was. In that comments thread, someone's like, oh, it's a racist show. I'm like, what the what? I didn't even expect it. And then, of course, the Guardian article pops up.

Now you have, oh, God, this poisonous. Why was this even allowed? Why was it allowed? It's in this lazy, just, just venomous article. This author suggests that Netflix, by allowing this show on, is enticing people to believe in election fraud, to entice people to believe in all the other conspiracy theories that you're like a gateway drug that leads to Holocaust denial or something like that. It was crazy. And so, you know, of course, if you want to trigger conspiracy theorists, or just people like me, you know, I love a lot of the conspiracy theories. I don't believe in all of them, but some of them are interesting, but suddenly seeing, not just from archaeologists, but from sites like The Guardian, this not just pushback, not just like, oh, this show's bullshit, but like suggesting Netflix needs to take it down. We all got weirded out, like, wait a minute. Why are they so intent on suppressing this information? What is the danger here? Yeah, it's a very strange thing, because it's almost as though archaeologists are at any rate a group of archaeologists within the archaeological profession, but believe that they are the entitled gatekeepers of the human past, and that nobody may enter the sealed realm of the human past without their expressed permission and without their guidance and instruction as to how to behave in there. And how dare, you know, some journalist come along and suggest the possibility that there may be a forgotten episode in the ice age. The thing is, the thing that really surprises me, because archaeology is so incomplete. There's so much of the world that hasn't been studied by archaeology. The classic examples are the Sahara Desert, 9 million square kilometers, the flooded continental shells, 27 million square kilometers, the Amazon rainforest, still five and a half million square kilometers under canopy. You know, just for a start, none of these areas have really been thoroughly investigated by archaeologists. That's a huge area of the Earth's surface, particularly those flooded continental shells.

And so for archaeologists to then stay with absolute certainty that there is no possibility whatsoever that there could have been some kind of civilization during the ice age, when there's so much of the planet they just haven't looked at. It strikes me as extraordinarily irresponsible, and I just don't understand it. It really defeats all kind of logic. Well, can I present what the conspiracy theorists are saying? I don't know what message boards you go on, but I can tell you the consensus among conspiracy theorists who really enjoyed your show is that, holy shit, Hancock's on to something here. They know this thing is coming. They understand that there is some kind of global, cyclical, apocalyptic event that happens at a predictable time, and this documentary plugs into that reality, and they don't want us to freak out. They want us to stay calm while they, and again, I'm not saying this is necessarily my theory. I just adore conspiracy theories. They want us to stay calm while they raise interest rates, get as much resources as they can, and then slither into their bunkers until whatever this thing is happens, reemerge, start a new global civilization. They get to be the guys on the sides of these ancient ruins with the purses who teach agriculture. They get to be the kings of Atlantis. What do you think about that theory, and no offense if you don't want to respond? Well, no, I just don't think it's necessary to go that far. We have here a group of so-called professionals who are actually very insecure, I think, in their own grip on the past. They desperately want to be recognized as proper scientists, but they aren't proper scientists because there's so much that can't be reproduced and can't be weighed and measured and counted that is important in the past.

I mean, you can't weigh and measure and count spiritual ideas or astronomical knowledge. They have a fixed and firm view of the past. They have been the unchallenged gatekeepers of the past. Their ideas about the past are what are taught to all of us in school, what are reflected by the media. I mean, I've been surprised in a horrible way, but in a way I expected it by the supine manner in which particularly the British media have just lain back and taken whatever the archaeologists told them without questioning a single thing. Just repeating, like parrots, what a few archaeologists told them to say and not investigate. I mean, journalism in my day wasn't like that. We actually checked stories before publishing them, especially if we're going to do a hatchet job on somebody. The very least we could do is get in touch with that person and see what they've got to say, but nobody ever did get in touch with me. They just do these hatchet jobs. Well, at some levels, it's quite depressing and upsetting. As I mentioned, the race thing particularly disturbs me because of my own family. My grandchildren are now hearing that their grandfather is being labeled as a white supremacist and a racist.

Can you help me understand that? Because I still have yet to piece together how you... So there are some ancient traditions. First of all, one of the things that's wrong with it is projecting current ideas about race onto a period of 12,000 or plus more years ago. That's the first thing that's wrong with it because we cannot assume that current ideas about race were the same 12,000 years ago or even that races existed in that way. But what is being... The argument that underpins this accusation is that when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, I quoted a number of indigenous myths and traditions from North America, from Mexico and from South America, particularly from Mexico and from Peru and Bolivia, which speak of a white-skinned, bearded, civilizing being who comes and brings the gifts and teaches civilization to these people after a great cataclysm in a time of darkness. And in Mexico, that individual is called Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, and in the Andes, he's called Viracocha. Now, these accounts were taken down from indigenous peoples by early Spanish conquistadors and friars who were in Mexico and in Bolivia and Peru at the time of the conquest.

They were interviewing local people and they were getting local traditions from them. And these are the earliest versions of local traditions that have been passed down to us from that time. And we have to remember that there was also an enormous destruction of written documents by the Spaniards at that time. So anything that is passed down to us is precious. Up until quite recently, nobody questioned these reports at all. But there's been a movement in archaeology now to say, oh, these reports were doctored by the Spanish, that they deliberately introduced the notion of the white-skinned bearded civilizer to promote and underpin the Spanish conquest. I don't know if that's true or not. I've started looking at some of the documents on that.

I'm going to write an article about this eventually, but what comes across to me is that this is an opinion that some archaeologists have. For example, Bernardino de Sahagun, who was one of the great translators of ancient Mexican culture to the west. He was there in the 1540s in Mexico. He's one of those who passed down this tradition of the white-skinned bearded deity, Quetzalcoatl, and how Cortes was seen as a fulfillment of the prophecy of the return of Quetzalcoatl. Bernardino de Sahagun, in 90% of what he passes down to us, is regarded as an absolutely reliable reporter and the world's first true anthropologist. But in this one, where he steps dangerously into woke territory, he's suddenly described as being unreliable and as making the whole story up. Well, I'm not convinced of that at all. I think these are genuine indigenous traditions, but beyond that point, which definitely requires further investigation,

I think that projecting current sensitivities and current ideas about race onto the past is an irrelevant thing to do anyway, because we don't know how people felt in the past about these issues, or if they felt about these issues at all. I mean, if we already don't have the datasets to help us truly understand how they built some of these structures, how do they think we have the datasets to understand how they interacted, how they dealt with multiculturalism or with melatonin in the skin? And also, what's wrong with the notion of ideas spreading from culture to culture around the world? This is the other thing that archaeologists seem to object to, that each culture is now supposed to be sort of island unto itself with no outside influence. And that any hint of outside influence is somehow taking away from the pride of the achievements of that culture. And again, that's imposing modern ideas on the past. I don't see it that way at all. I see the world as an interrelated place.

Human ideas are constantly fertilizing one another across vast distances. That's one of the reasons why we're a successful species, because ideas are shared. Refuting the accounts of people saying what their myths are. Isn't that more racist? Isn't that true racist? It's not what they meant. They were manipulated. I do think it's more racist. But see, it's part of what I mean to see as a sinister project. Just as now there are some archaeologists who refuse to confirm a gender for a set of skeletal remains found in some archaeological dig, because they don't know what the fucking pronoun of that skeleton was. That can't be true. That's real. It is true. Yes. And there is now an attempt to go back and sanitize the past and make it acceptable to the present ethic. So the notion that it suddenly becomes unacceptable that there are indigenous accounts of somebody with white skin which meant nothing 12,000 years ago.

Somebody with white skin coming and bringing ideas of civilization. That's all got to be rubbed out from the past because it doesn't fit with the current agenda. And the way to rub it out from the past is to try to discredit those original reporters back in the 1500s who were the first to bring these myths to the West. I want to thank Masterclass for supporting this episode of the DTFH. I was very excited when Masterclass approached us to support the podcast because I'm already subscribed to Masterclass. I love them. They are incredible. They have some of the coolest courses that you can find out there right now. I got lucky. I ended up getting a part in this show that's coming out in the spring probably called Crapopolis that Dan Harmon created. And so suddenly I got to do real voice acting and I was doing voice acting with super pros. Hannah Waddingham being one of the people on the show. These are people who have been acting for their entire lives. And so I had to figure out a way to get good at voice acting as quickly as I possibly could.

And thank God for Masterclass's awesome VO course with Nancy Cartwright, a legendary voice actor, truly helpful. Something that I actually implemented in my own life and that is just one of the many awesome courses that Masterclass offers. I'm just going to read a few of them to you right now just because these are fucking insane. Like are you kidding me? You want to take a course with Aaron Sorkin on filmmaking? You can. It's there for you. Aaron Sorkin. What the fuck? How is that even possible? You want to do filmmaking with James Cameron? It's there acting with Samuel Jackson. It's there for you. You want to do disruptive intrapreneurship with Richard Branson? It's there for you. And the list goes on and on and on. This is one of the coolest things on the internet right now and I hope that you will try them out. I'm sorry if this commercial is too long, but I'm telling you, I love Masterclass. They are the shit and I highly recommend you check it out.

This holiday, give the perfect gift of an annual Masterclass membership and get one free. Go to masterclass.com slash Duncan today. That's masterclass.com slash Duncan today. You can sign up for your own membership and then you can give someone in your life who you love, a membership to Masterclass, something that will definitely improve their lives. Thank you so much, Masterclass. I mean, it seems like if they wanted to whitewash the myths, like if I'm a Spanish conquistador and I really want to do a number on these things, why not just say they said Spanish conquistadors were going to come? Why not just put that in there? Why make it ambiguous using skin color? Also, I don't know if there's any record of this, but has anyone looked into albinism? Has anyone looked into the potential that this was an albino? The other thing that really pisses me off about this is that race is just such a fucking unimportant issue. It's fundamentally so unimportant. It's one of these artificial divisions that has been brought to human race in the modern age. It's been my privilege to travel the world,

to live amongst many different cultures around the world, and what I can see again and again and again is that human beings are the same all over the world. The minor exterior differences hide an incredible unity amongst the human race, and our abilities for everything that matters, for creativity, for love, for care, for nurture, our hopes, our dreams, our fears, they're all the same all over the world, and we should not be giving importance to this issue of race. The parallel I often make is would we seek to discriminate against people on the basis of the length of their colons? The colon is a large organ just like the skin is, but neither nor the colon say anything about the quality of the human being. The quality of the human being has got nothing to do with such superficial characteristics. Look, I'm sorry, I disagree with you there. I just don't trust people with short colons. They have done me wrong in the past. I don't know if you trust me. Trust me. If you have someone with a short colon comes to your house, hide your jewelry. They will take it. The notion of this is a relatively recent notion, and it's something that's hot in the present age, but to seek to go back and impose it on the past and make the past conform to present ideas,

I think is a mistake, and until some archaeologist actually proves that those early Spanish reporters deliberately misrepresented those indigenous myths that they were bringing to us, but didn't misrepresent the other ones, until that is actually proved, I'm going to go along with the earliest reports that we have, which happened to have been made by Spaniards who'd learned the local languages and were working with local elders. Okay. Also, with all of this static regarding like the culture wars and the stuff going on right now, this only adds to a sinister level of your show, which is, and also as you're shooting this, you must have felt the weirdness of being in a global pandemic while going to these ancient sites that all seem to, in one way or another, point to this disaster that happened. You were in the midst of a global disaster. You're going to all these rooms that are talking about a global disaster. And then finally, when this shows up, instead of maybe all of us being like, Holy shit, there's more important fish to fry right now than the ones that we're currently ripping each other's throats over, they just use it as cannon fodder to demonize you. That is really apocalyptic. To get ready for this conversation, I started watching various documentaries on volcanoes. I watched this incredible documentary on the earthquake in Everest when the climbers were up there and, you know, a village disappeared. I don't know if you saw this documentary, but they show, you know, oh my God, it's so, so breathtakingly horrible because people who were going on the climb stop in this village. It's a Buddhist village. They're having a funerary celebration for, I think it's the 49th day after the death of this person when the soul has moved through the bardo and reincarnated.

They have a big celebration where everyone in the village shows up. So they have the last gathering of this village. And then this earthquake hits and a landslide literally vanishes that village. It is gone. Gone. Like just gone in a second. It's gone. So as I'm watching that, as I'm watching like Iceland, cities covered up by ash, other places where pyroclastic flows have just completely eradicated everything that was there. It just hit home. You're one of your one of your teachings, one of the points that you are making in the show, which is that how can we say how can we say there wasn't something here before because the way the earth works is it just wipes it out completely gone. Nothing at all. That's right. And the earth did pass through a truly horrendous cataclysm that lasted for about 1200 years, which is called the Younger Dryus. And that's between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. And that's why we call the show Ancient Apocalypse. I'd like to wait just before we perhaps move on to other more refreshing subjects. I'd like to just take one more point about these archaeologists. Okay, please. And that concerns our mutual friend, our mutual friend Joe Rogan. Because I was with Joe a few weeks ago. And we issued a call for an archaeologist to debate me live, well not live, these days Joe recalls, but on the Joe Rogan experience.

And it turns out that there's one archaeologist in particular, he's called John Hoops of the University of Kansas, who claims to have been following effectively stalking my work for the last 30 years, and who has been responsible for multiple attacks on my on my name, and, and, and, and my reputation. Over, over the years, who guest edited a special issue of the Society for American Archaeologist Journal, a large section of which was devoted to attempting to completely discredit my most recent book, the 29 book 2019 book America before. And John Hoops is the one who's been most stridently advocating that I'm some sort of supporter of racism and white supremacy. So I felt since he claims to know so much about my work and since he's been attacking me for years, and since he's very active behind his keyboard that he'd be the ideal archaeologist to sit opposite me on Joe's show, which Joe kindly offered, offered to host and do this, do this debate. But then the bloody coward refused to debate me. He declined. I issued the public challenge with his agreement and he declined. He said, wouldn't debate me. He said, I can't debate, can't debate metaphysics with science, calling what I do metaphysics, although he's been, although he's been pouring scorn on it and insulting it for, you know, for years. But when it comes to actually sitting down in a face-to-face debate on record and, you know, putting his reputation on the line, he doesn't have the guts to do it. So I'm going to maintain that position if John Hoops ever manages to pluck up the courage to actually come on the Joe Rogan experience and sit opposite me and debate me. I'm ready to debate him at any other time, but no other archaeologist is going to get that space. John Hoops has to man up. Hoops, stretch out your colon. It's time to go on and debate Hancock. You've got to do that. And also I think that saying that what you're doing is metaphysics is deceptive and ridiculous. And to, and even if it were metaphysics, wouldn't it actually be easy if you had some kind of unprovable, untestable, unquantifiable data set that you were claiming to be real, but we can't find it? Wouldn't that be the easiest thing in the world to shoot down?

I mean, isn't the problem that what you're presenting is... Exactly. I mean, John and I gave him the opportunity, you know, to win his argument against me on, you know, the biggest podcast on Earth. And he declined. Wow. And he declined for totally bogus reasons. So I just think that the archaeological community is full of shit, frankly. And the more this goes on, the less respect I have for them. This seems to be something that is happening across the board right now. It feels like everyone is getting a really dark lesson in how naive we have been in ascribing, you know, some kind of extra power, some extra information, some kind of weird, I don't know, academic authority to people who maybe don't have it quite right. And it's not just in archaeologists, it's happening in science, it's happening in politics, especially in all of this. We've had it over too much of our power to people who claim to be experts in one thing or another. Of course, there's a place for experts, but they should never have a monopoly on knowledge. And, you know, this is where the human race needs to grow up. So many of our problems are caused by bad leadership, really lousy, shitty, uninspired, greedy, selfish, stupid leadership.

Yes. So many of our problems are caused by that. It's time the human race woke up and minimized the power of these harmful individuals that are destroying the world, by which I mean the politicians and their friend. That's it. That's it. And because of the internet, it seems like being able to hide some of the things that used to be a lot easier to hide. Everybody is having to sort of looking at each other, and we really don't know what to do. I mean, I don't know anything about evolutionary biology, but I would bet that it's at some genetic level, we're set up to need a leader to have the best in the tribe, to have the best in the group that you turn to, or at least a few of the best that you turn to when you're young and you don't know what's going on. And maybe that's carried over into an age where people are aware of that and have figured out how to hack humans, to psychologically hack humans in a way that makes us believe, oh, look, he talks like a leader. They dress like a leader. They're surrounded by other powerful people. So I guess that's who we listen to. That's who we obey. Part of a huge confidence trick. I mean, there is a place for leadership of some sort or other, but it needs to be completely with the agreement of the people, not the kind of overlordship, which it is at the moment, which we see in, fortunately, it is changing a little bit, but the war on drugs, that incredible invasion of individual adult privacy by the state. There's just so many places where these people should not go. And if you look at the state of international relations today and the way the world is being stirred up into endless hatred and fear and suspicion,

it's all being done in the interests of leaders. So I think we need to, perhaps we can never get rid of them entirely, but they definitely need, as I always say, 12 doses of ayahuasca first. And they need a bit more humility. You know what? I wish I'd screen grabbed it. I was on a message board the other day and I wanted to, for a second, I'm tweeting this because it's like, it refutes the dream all of us psychonauts have that if we gave psychedelics to sociopaths, there would be some healing. Because this person said something on the lines of, I have now taken three mega doses of mushrooms and am certain that black and white people need to be segregated permanently. That was what the mushrooms did for him. And I was like, no. Oh, my God, you know, that's it. Oh, no, yes. I mean, they, in a way, they tend to reveal what is in the person already to a large extent. This is the problem. I mean, you know, the, the, the Mexica, the Aztecs in ancient Mexico where we're performing human sacrifice at an almost industrial scale. And that was, and that was being under the influence of mushrooms as well. So it's not all sweetness and light in the, in the psychedelic garden by any means. At the same time, I feel compelled to say, while it is true that the Aztecs were carrying out human sacrifice on an industrialized scale. So was the Catholic Church at that time, which was burning people at the stake in the name of their God, which is purely an act of human sacrifice and nothing else. Right. You know, so, so the West is nothing to teach anybody in this area.

Yeah. And human sacrifice continues to this day. I mean, anytime you drop bombs on groups of people and make money doing that, you've transformed that life into money, essentially, it's human sacrifice in a different way. And especially when the war is being waged over ridiculous, stupid reasons, things, reasons that might even be more idiotic than believing in offering a human heart to a deity. I think that people just the way we're sacrificing people these days might seem a little more chaotic, but it's human sacrifice nonetheless. It is exactly, call it exactly what it is. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So I have to ask, because you are, and as you should be invested in your theories regarding human history, let's imagine a scenario where hoops, hoops, the nemesis somehow recovers something that absolutely disproves what you're saying. I don't know what that thing would be, and I don't think it's out there because I subscribe to your theories for a lot of different reasons, not just your writings. But let's just imagine as a thought experiment, this does come out and now suddenly with all your belief and good intentions and all the data and all the connections you made, you realize, oh my God, some fundamental aspect of this is flawed. What are you going to do? What would you do if that happened?

Oh, if there were absolute disproof that I'm wrong and I've spent the last 30 years of boots on the ground and detailed research pursuing a fantasy, well, I'd have to just accept that and admit it. There's no other point. I'll then go away to my other pursuit and write novels. I really enjoy writing novels. I have much more fun writing novels than I do writing nonfiction books, but it just happens that I feel the nonfiction work is important right now. There's so much going on in this field. I actually got out of it completely after 2002 after I'd published Underworld after seven years of scuba diving, looking for submerged structures on the continental shelves. I published Underworld in 2002, and then I thought really I was done with the lost civilization. I wrote Supernatural, which was a book about the role of psychedelics in, well, a very complicated story about psychedelics and cave art and aliens and all sorts of things. And then I wrote a series of novels. I wrote Entangled, and I wrote three novels about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. I loved doing that. So if I turn out to be proven wrong about the possibility of a lost civilization, then I shall gently retire to my novelist's garden and write novels. But I'm not sure that's likely to happen, and this is why I think what's needed is a more cooperative relationship between those of us who think that there may be big missing pieces in the past. And those of us, mainly archaeologists, who are convinced that there's not much more that they need, or let's put it this way. It's not that archaeologists are saying that they know everything about the past. No, they're not saying that. What they're saying is they know enough about the past to be sure that there was no lost civilization of any kind. And I'm not at all persuaded by that argument.

God bless you, Loomie Labs, for supporting this episode of the DTFH. God bless the chemists at Loomie Labs who went through whatever they had to go through. I can't imagine what it was like trying to dial in the perfect dose of an edible. I imagine that for science, for all of us, there were chemists at Loomie Labs who ended up curled up in the fetal position. But at last, they did it. In the same way Oppenheimer discovered how to split the atom, Loomie Lab scientists figured out the perfect micro dose of edible THC, and they now offer it to all of us in the form of an edible. Loomie Lab scientists figured out the perfect micro dose of edible THC, and they now offer it to all of us in the form of their delicious micro dose gummies. It's the perfect dose. It gives you that nice, warm feeling as though a hobbit created a cozy home inside your heart. Even better, microdose is available nationwide. You can get it anywhere. You can fly with it. To learn more about microdosing THC, go to microdose.com and use code Duncan to get free shipping and 30% off your first order. Links can be found in the show description. But again, that's microdose.com code Duncan. God bless you, Loomie Labs. God bless you, microdose gummies. I'm not at all persuaded by that argument, partly on the grounds that I laid out earlier, that there are so many areas of the world that have never been investigated by archaeology at all.

And partly because of the refusal of archaeologists to look open-handedly at evidence like the precipitation-induced weathering on the body of the Sphinx, for example. This is something that really should be taken more seriously by archaeology than it is, and which speaks to that ancient time between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, like the astronomy of the Giza Plateau, like the equinoxial orientation of the Great Sphinx and the constellation of Leo. There's just so many things which our archaeologist friends just dismiss and say, well, that's not evidence, so we don't need to look at it. I mean, therefore, I've spent the last 30 years, you know, written a series of enormous books, many of them with as many as 2,000 footnotes, carefully referencing everything. And they just write me off as a pseudo-archaeologist and won't even look at the evidence that I present and say, I should present peer-reviewed papers. Well, who are my peers? I'm not an archaeologist. I'm never going to be an archaeologist, so they're not my peers. I don't know who my peers are. My peers are the public. I write my books for the public. The public are grown-ups. They can make up their own mind, you know. Well, have you been following any of the controversies surrounding the James Webb telescope?

Have you noticed that there is a strange synchronicity, a connection between the pushback that you're getting regarding the origin of human beings or the age of human culture and the age of the universe? I don't know if you've been following any of this, but... No, I haven't. I've been so absorbed in my own corner of the universe that I've missed this. Tell me about that. Well, it's, you know, again, not a cosmologist here, but I do love this sort of thing. And apparently there is a few articles have popped up in this regard, which has something to do with a problem in what the James Webb telescope is picking up. The idea being we're going to look back to the beginning of time, meaning that we should be looking at, you know, preformed galaxies. We're looking far enough back. We should be seeing the soupy. I don't know what the stuff is. I don't know. But the images that are coming back seem to be fully formed galaxies.

Now, this, based on the 13.7, 14 billion-year-old time frame, based on the... This is the supposed big bang, yeah. Yeah. This kind of messes up the whole potentially, like, our idea of what the age of the universe is. We know it is. Now, Anne, when this... I love it. People are pushing back. You know, obviously there's a really vitriolic, controversial pushback from, you know, physicists and cosmologists saying, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. It's just... It's something to do with the telescope.

Yeah, because they're invested in the old model. They're invested in the previous model. Right. That's where the parallel... I absolutely see the parallel with what's happening here. So, as above, so below. Yeah, exactly. It's interesting that the implication is that the universe is just older and older, because that's my sort of pet saying, my kid's made a T-shirt for me. You know, stuff just keeps on getting older. I love it.

And that is, you know, the point about that is that as we push these horizons back further and further and further, it becomes more and more ridiculous to suggest that civilization is just an artifact of the last 6,000 years. You know, we've got these vast expanse of time. Anatomically, modern humans have been around for more than 300,000 years. You know, why did we take so long? And, you know, secondly, the other thing I think it's important to be clear on is, I don't think we're looking for a civilization like our own. I think it's different. I think they were masters of geometry and of astronomy and of particular spooky kinds of construction, which we cannot replicate today.

They navigated the world. They explored the Earth. They understood the shape of the Earth. They understood what the Earth is. They understood the place of the Earth in space. But they, you know, they weren't making cell phones and flying around the Earth in airplanes, in my view. It was more a spiritual-based civilization, I think, that we're looking for. And that's not just an intuition. That comes from years of research into the sacred literatures of many, many different cultures. Do you think that, you know, whatever the academic competitiveness is or whatever weird points I guess some of these archaeologists must get for, like, feeling like they got one over on you or whatever that may be? Isn't there something deeper that makes people recoil a little bit from that possibility? Isn't there, and this is what I, you know, there was, maybe I was like, I don't know, maybe I was too relaxed when I was watching this, taking too much medicine when I was watching your incredible documentary.

But I found there to be something so sad, especially in the last few episodes, something so poignant and so almost unbearable about the reality that here were these beings, these people who spent so much energy erecting these incredible monuments, aligning these monuments with, you know, the Pleiades and the clearly in tune with the universe as a whole, clearly sending some kind of message. And all that's left are these barely discernible etchings on these ancient ruins. I just, it was sad to me. Do you think some of the pushback is that that there's something tragic about the reality of where we are as humans in the universe? Yeah, although the phrase is borrowed in part from Velikovsky's Mankind in Amnesia, I kind of adapted it in Fingerprints of the Gods and spoke of humanity as a species with Amnesia. And I think it's characteristic of Amnesia to have trauma. You know, there's a trauma at the heart of the Amnesia. And I think we are, I think we are, this is just my personal view. I can't prove this, but I think we're a traumatized species. Something really bad happened around 12,800 years ago. And that's just a blink of an eye ago in the human story. It's just not that long ago. It seems like a long time, but it's not. 12,800 years ago, something really bad happened.

And we know it was bad because we can see from the climate records that the radical things that happened on the Earth, the sudden rises in sea level, the plunging global temperatures, everything is very, very weird. The extinction of animal species, those great megafauna of the Ice Age, all die out at this time. There's evidence of massive disruption of human populations. Clearly something very, very bad happened. And the evidence is that it affected a very large proportion of the Earth's surface from North America down as far south as Antarctica and as far east, at least as Syria. So you've got this huge swathe of the Earth's surface that was subjected to a catastrophic event. And I think that the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which is a mainstream hypothesis, although it's a hotly disputed one, put forward by about 100 leading scientists, that this hypothesis best explains what happened 12,800 years ago, that we ran into the debris stream of a disintegrating comet. And there were multiple impacts, some of them on the North American ice cap, which was then about two kilometers deep. There were multiple air bursts, objects that weren't big enough to hit the Earth, but that exploded in the sky, maybe 100 meters in diameter, all over the Earth. And this caused that sudden radical shift in climate, sudden rise in sea level, and all the extinctions that took place at that time.

And if there was ever a moment when a civilization could be lost from the human record, that's it. That's exactly the time. And it's a time that then goes, it lasts for 1200 years, it's not a moment, it's an episode, and it ends equally suddenly, equally cataclysmically, 11,600 years ago. And that's when sea levels shoot up even faster than before. It's called Meltwater Pulse 1B. And I've made this point many times before because people, archaeologists, roll their eyes when you mention the word Atlantis. I have no idea why that eye-rolling reaction has come into place, because Atlantis is one of hundreds of stories that have come down from us, to us from the ancient world of a great global flood that destroyed an advanced civilization. And the story of Atlantis has a peculiarly excellent pedigree, since it comes down to us from Plato, who said he got it through his family line from his ancestor Solon, the Greek lawmaker who visited Egypt in 600 BC and was given the story of Atlantis there. And the bottom line is that when Solon in 600 BC asked the Egyptian priests, when did this happen? When was this great civilization submerged beneath the sea? And they pointed to inscriptions on the pillars of a temple, and they said 9,000 years ago. So that's the date. That's 9,600 BC. That's 11,600 years ago.

That's Meltwater Pulse 1B. That is the cataclysmic end of the Younger Dryus and of the Ice Age. And it's also the date that Gobekli Tepe is suddenly created in Turkey, just pops up out of nowhere, the largest, most sophisticated megalithic site on Earth. So, you know, I think for archaeology, just to ignore all this and say, actually, we don't accept any of this as evidence, we have nothing to discuss with Hancock. It's just metaphysics is really slippery. What is the explanation for that? This is one of the thoughts that popped into my head watching your show is, why do we suddenly irrelevantize what cultures are saying by saying, oh, that's myth. That's not real. Those are folk stories. What is that? How do they rationalize that? Why does that make sense? It's incredibly arrogant. And it's, again, because they can't sort of weigh it and measure it and count it in the way that you can a pot shirt or a fragment of bone. There is really no archaeology of ideas and myths have traditionally been not taken very seriously by archaeology and often completely ignored by archaeology. And yet, they're really the only memory we have of the time of darkness out of which civilization emerged. We have no other memory apart from these myths. And these myths universally speak of a global cataclysm. They speak of an enormous flood. They speak of serpents in the sky. They speak of huge fires of earthquakes.

These are very excellent and precise descriptions of what happened to the world during the Younger Dryas. And I have no doubt in my mind that the myths have a bearing on that and that they are a memory of that. And that certain sites, like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, were designed to preserve that memory in stone and to pass it down to the future. Our next partner has created a wonderful supplement that my body adores. I started taking athletic greens because I'm not a vitamin person. I just can't pull it off. My wife can. She's got hundreds of different types of vitamins that she, in an organized, disciplined fashion, takes every single day. I can't pull that off. I'm too dumb. I need something easy. I need something that I can just throw down the old YAP box into my tum-tum and get all of the vitamins, minerals, whole foods, foods, source superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens that my body needs.

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Again, it's athleticgreens.com forward slash Duncan to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. I have no doubt in my mind that the myths have a bearing on that and that they are a memory of that. Certain sites like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey were designed to preserve that memory in stone and to pass it down to the future. It's really, I don't want to say criminal, but it's really a vile thing. When you think of these, you know, these sites is like a message in a bottle floating across the temporal ocean and landing to where we're at. And then to say, it's almost as though to take the last bits of data from a lost civilization and say, well, they're all like babies. That was just baby talk. Like when my kids make stuff up, that's not real. That's just baby talk, the whole civilization. And yet somehow you have to square that with.

But these people who are doing baby talk were building these astounding structures that we can't replicate today. But they were basically human babies, making no sense babbling about the stuff in the sky, spending countless years constructing these things, putting these petroglyphs in. To me, that's where the two, I don't understand how archaeologists square these two things. I don't get it. It doesn't make sense. Part of the mission of archaeology, and perhaps there's some reason for this. I don't know deeply ingrained in the DNA of archaeology, but part of the mission of archaeology is to drain all mystery out of the past. To leave the past completely empty of mystery, like a husk of an insect that's been sucked dry by a spider.

So there's just nothing left at all. Just stuff that you can weigh, measure and count, deprived of all meaning or purpose. That seems to me to be part of the mission of archaeology. And it may have something to do with a sort of early rejection of superstition or religious ideas. I don't know, but it's got ingrained now where the project seems to be, let's demystify this in any way we can. Rather than saying, actually, this is an extraordinary mystery. Let's try and understand it and see what's going on. The Great Pyramid is an example.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is an incredibly mysterious structure. Nobody's ever successfully explained how it was built, or even what it is. It's amazing precision, the scale of the structure, the mathematics within it, the geometry, the astronomy within it. It's never really been explained, and yet archaeology just wants to reduce it to the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh. It really has no more to say about it than that. Because somehow that's considered more, I don't know, safer and more reasonable than saying, well actually, would they really have aligned a six million ton monument with a 13 acre footprint within three sixtieths of a single degree of true north to make the tomb for a pharaoh?

And by the way, no pharaoh was ever found in there anyway, or in any of the other Egyptian pyramids. It's this tendency to deprive the past of mystery. And I think archaeologists are also losing contact with the public in this way. Because we all know in our hearts that the past is mysterious, that there are huge unsolved issues in the past. And we cannot accept this so-called scientific priesthood. Again, I hesitate to call archaeologists scientists, but I don't hesitate to call them priests.

They're a sort of priesthood of their discipline. And they are supposed to be the sole guardians of the past, and we must have their permission in order to speak about the past, and we must speak about the past in a way that they tell us to speak about the past. And if we don't do that, then they'll do their best to inhibit us from doing so. The recent example of that is that I and my film crew were banned from filming at Serpent Mound in Ohio. Unbelievable. And I've seen now that the Ohio History Commission's connection is trying to deny that and say that we weren't banned.

But unfortunately, they put it in writing. They sent us an email banning us. And the email banning us states the specific reason for banning us is not to protect the site. It's not because it's a sacred site. It's because my ideas about the past do not conform with those of mainstream archaeology. So I've had to put that because there's so many lies being told about this. I've had to put that email up on my website. It's the latest entry in my blog on my website.

It's called For The Record. And it shows the email specifically banning us from filming at Serpent Mound. If anybody hears a rumor that we weren't banned at Serpent Mound, just go check out that email from Serpent Mound itself. From the Ohio History Commission, which runs Serpent Mound. Unbelievable. And also, I'm sorry, but that's a really cool thing to be banned from Serpent Mound by scientists because they disagree with you. I'm sorry. You can't get cooler than that.

Like, I can get being banned because you're some drunk. I wasn't able to stop us completely because there are such things as drones, you know? Yes. So we were able to do quite a lot and people have adjoining properties where we could fly the drones from and we managed to do quite a bit. But it's nevertheless, it's just a feeling of this censorship of ideas that's taking place. Of course, they can't stop me talking about Serpent Mound, but they wanted to inhibit the manner in which I could talk about it by making it as difficult as possible for me to be on site and to be there, which is what I like to do. So it is definitely a form of censorship and rather an effective one, actually.

Okay. My final question for you, Mr. Hancock. And I'm sorry if this seems a little too woo-woo-wee or whatever. I'm sorry. And again, you can shoot it down. All right. Okay. So I'm watching this and realizing in the face of all this adversity from, you know, the priesthood of archaeology.

That there's an intensity to your work. And to me, it feels like a sense that these people, whoever they were, that they just need someone to be their voice, someone to be their mouthpiece, someone to transmit this information that they were trying to encode in a way that it would last for as long as it possibly could. Yeah. Now, that might just be in my head. I don't know if that's in yours, but if you were that or if they had a message for us. Well, first of all, I'd like to say I'm not that. I've had the privilege to be one of a group of people who've spoken up over the last 30-plus years about things that are missing in the story of our prehistory. And so I want to pay tribute to John Anthony West, the late, great John Anthony West, who was the first to draw attention to the water weathering issue on the Sphinx.

Professor Robert Shock of Boston University, who cued us to him for speaking out, even though he has an academic position and confirming that the geology of the Sphinx makes the Sphinx 12,000 plus years old, not 4,000 plus years old, as archaeologists claim. Robert Boval, whose great work on the astronomy of Giza should never be forgotten, the Orion correlation, the connection of that to 10,500 BC. John Major Jenkins, who worked on the Mayan calendar, who sadly passed away, I think is heart broken by the attacks on him by archaeologists. So many of us have worked in this field and are trying to at least put another narrative in front of the public, rather than this dominant monolithic narrative that archaeology has stuffed into our heads from the moment we go to school. And every moment we watch a historical documentary on television. So I'm glad that Netflix broke with the mold and we're willing to broadcast a series with an alternative take on the past. But if these people, and all the people you just mentioned, if there were the ancients, if there was a sort of collective message. Let me mention Randall Carson. I'm sorry, I need to say this as well. Because Randall Carson. Randall is a classic example of, you know, a man whose boots on the ground, he's taught himself everything. He's a master of his subject of the cataclysmic geology of North America. He can take on any PhD any minute in any debate.

And again, you know, he's also out there arguing that we have not understood the human past properly, that there is something missing. And we will not be shut down by a bunch of hysterical archaeologists. Hear that hoops. Now, if these people had a message, and I don't know, maybe there isn't some singular message that they have. I don't mean to be that ridiculous, but certainly based on watching your show, they were connected. There is some kind of transfer of information happening among them. What do you think they would have to say to us? What do you think this fabulous interconnected civilization that got wiped out by some kind of cataclysm, what do you think if they could see our culture and what we've achieved? What message would they have for us? I think that message is very clear. I think it's be careful, or you're going to be the next lost civilization.

Because we tick all the boxes in ancient mythology for a civilization that the universe cannot abide. We are filled with pride and conceit. We impose our power upon others around the world. We sit back in our arrogance and comfort and ignore the beauty of the planet upon which we live and the universe in which it floats. Ringing phrase from Plato, we have ceased to wear our prosperity with moderation. These are all of the boxes that lost civilizations tick. We have fallen out of harmony with the universe and with one another. That is the message from the past. What has happened before can happen again. We still pass twice a year through the debris trail of that same disintegrating comet. It's called the Torrid Meteor Stream. There are huge objects up there in it.

If we were a collective human family and could put our heads together in love and care for the future of our children and our children's children and generations and generations into the future, one of the first things we'd do as a human species would be to sweep the Torrid Meteor Stream clear so that it doesn't any longer pose a hazard to civilization on Earth. We're too busy hating each other and fearing each other and suspecting each other and being wound up by our leaders to all kinds of horrible actions against one another. I think that's the message of the past to us today. Wake up or you will be the next lost civilization. Graham Hancock, I love you. I love your work. I hope you keep making more shows. You're very photogenic, sir. I don't know if you've been getting that message, but you're great on camera. You're riveting. I hope you keep making these shows and keep writing. And I hope Hoops has some guts and takes you up on your debate offer because that would be an incredible thing to watch. Thank you, Graham.

How could people find you? Well, the best way is my website, GrahamHancock.com, and then if you just search author Graham Hancock or Graham Hancock author on Facebook. Well, anyway, my Facebook and my Twitter accounts are linked on my website, so just go to GrahamHancock.com. Everything is on there. My blog is up there. This for the record email from the Ohio History Connection is on my blog, the latest entry, GrahamHancock.com. That's the point of contact. Thank you, Graham. It's always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you so much. Thank you, Duncan. Really good to talk to you. That was Graham Hancock. Everybody, all the links you need to find him are going to be at DuncanTrussell.com.

Definitely watch Ancient Apocalypse. Let me know what you think. Big thank you to all of our sponsors. And I want to wish all of you Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Yule Log, Happy Solstice, whatever your particular, happy conglomeration of particles into a universe, experience, happy being alive, whatever it is for you during this time of year. Happy making it through another Christmas with your sanity intact. Happy managing to maintain some level of equanimity and compassion for your family. If you find yourself in a cauldron, a hell cauldron of neurosis. Most of all, I love you and thank you so much for listening to the DTFH.

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