The Joe Rogan Experience - #142 - Graham Hancock, Duncan Trussell

Episode Date: September 25, 2011

Joe sits down with Graham Hancock and Duncan Trussell.

Start recording. Okay. That should be it. Okay. Okay, how do I even begin this one? The internet has been a very fascinating thing for me in the many years that I've been on it. But one of the most fascinating things about it is the ability to get in touch with people that if you were younger, like a long time ago, there was no chance I would be able to sit down with you and do a conversation. You would just be some author whose books I admired. But now, because of this crazy thing, this podcast, here we are sitting down. Graham Hancock has joined us. And if you don't know who Graham Hancock is, Graham Hancock is probably the one guy who's influenced my view

of history more than anybody ever. It's from this book, Fingerprints of the Gods. And Fingerprints of the Gods is, what is it, sold like 5 million copies or something crazy like that? We're not about that, yeah. It's an amazing book that basically challenges our view of history. And you have spent an enormous chunk of your life uncovering all these different structures and all these different monuments and all these different things that you attribute to a lost era of humanity. And one of my favorite terms that you use is that we're a species with hypnosis or excuse me with amnesia with amnesia yeah and that please tell me where how did all this get cracking how did this get started for you well it's everything that's happened in my life has

happened kind of by a series of accidents i i never i never planned out anything except I kind of knew when I was young that I had one gift, which was some ability to write. And the other thing about me was, it's when all through my childhood, I always felt I was on the edge of things, not in the middle of things. Other people were in the middle. I was on the edge. I just always felt that way. in the middle, I was on the edge. I just always felt that way. And when I got through university,

I kind of drifted towards writing, current affairs, journalism. And it was while following journalistic stories, my last journalistic role was as the East African correspondent for The Economist, quite a serious newspaper. And I was based in Nairobi in Kenya. And I was covering wars and famines and politics and all of that stuff. And on my beat was Ethiopia. And I used to go to Ethiopia quite regularly. It was in the news a lot. And on one journey to Ethiopia, I flew into a city that at the time was in the middle of a war zone, in a DC-3, that kind of dived down out of the sky to avoid the machine gun nests in the surrounding hills, and landed in the airport. This was an ancient city called Axum, and it had incredible history.

It had obelisks. It a palace supposedly of the queen of sheba had an ancient cathedral the most ancient christian cathedral in africa dating back to 300 after christ and in the grounds of that cathedral in a chapel outside the chapel i meet a monk and he tells me in the conversation we have that he's got the Ark of the Covenant in that chapel. This was, I had heard that the Ark of the Covenant was important to Ethiopia, but now I'm sitting in front of a monk with cataracts in his eyes and he's telling me behind him in that chapel, but I can't go there, is the Ark of the Covenant. And I said, you know, can I go? Can I see it? And he said, no, no, nobody can see it.

Even the former emperors were never allowed to see the Ark of the Covenant. You know, the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie had come out only like a couple of years before this. This was in the early 80s. And so I left that place impressed by this man, but not really believing it. And then I started to look into it.

And I discovered that actually, Ethiopia is the only country in the world which has a living veneration, almost worship of the Ark of the Covenant. Ethiopia has ancient Christianity but it also has ancient Judaism. There's a Jewish community in Ethiopia called the Falashas.

They call themselves the Beta Israel. How did they get there? They practice a very ancient form of Judaism. They don't have rabbis. They have priests. They perform sacrifice. Other Judaic peoples do not. It's like an Old Testament world frozen in the highlands of Ethiopia.

So I started to get interesting. This is weird, and this is exciting, and what can I find out about this? Then I went to the academics, and they said, ah, it's all rubbish. Those Ethiopians, they just made it up to make themselves look big. Okay, but then why is it the case that in every single church in Ethiopia, more than 20,000 churches, there's a replica of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies? What does it look like? Well, mostly it's a box. And sometimes, actually, they reduce the replica to simply two tablets,

which are supposed to represent the tablets of stone inside the Ark of the Covenant. But the Ark of the Covenant is not a Christian object. It's a pre-Christian object. What's it doing in all these churches? Where does this all come from? Why do we have the black Jews of Ethiopia practicing their very ancient form of Judaism? So I really started to dig. And I kind of, it was the first time I realized that you don't want to

listen to academics all the time. Professor X and Dr. Y may be very, very impressive people with their credentials, but they have prejudices. They have a fixed view of the past, which they're going to stick to come what may. And as I started to investigate this, this is what drew me out of current affairs and into ancient mysteries. I found that here was a real investigation, a story that had never been told. Could this remote country in the Horn of Africa really have the Ark of the Covenant? And if so, how could it have got there? And I spent several years of my life trying to answer those questions. And by that time, by the time I got to the end of that investigation, I had left current affairs behind.

You were hooked. I was hooked on the past. Did you ever wonder if you were going crazy? Like, here I am really investigating if some people in Ethiopia actually have some crazy thing from a book. No. That makes no sense. You really thought it was real? It wasn't that I thought it was real. I neither thought nor didn't think that.

I was impressed by the Ethiopians themselves. And I was impressed by the purity of their belief and the passion with which they held it. And the fact that here, after thousands of years, this object disappeared from the Bible at the time, well, around about 650 years before Christ. It's not mentioned again in the Bible after that. It vanishes. And yet here is its worship in 20th century Ethiopia today. How do we explain this? And as I dug deeper, I began to realize that actually there was a real possibility they did have the Ark of the Covenant and that it is connected to the mystery of the Ethiopian Jews and that the story they themselves tell about it, which connects it, it's a very romantic and lovely story.

They say, in brief, that the Queen of Sheba, famous Queen of Sheba, was an Ethiopian queen and that when she traveled to Jerusalem to meet Solomon, which is described in the Bible, big episode in the Bible, she didn't only exchange wisdom with him, she also exchanged bodily fluids, and she became pregnant with King Solomon's son, who was to be called Menelik, which actually means the son of the wise man. And pregnant, she left Jerusalem, returned to Ethiopia, gave birth to her son Menelik there. At the age of 20 or 21,

he wanted to visit his famous father in Jerusalem. He traveled north, went to Jerusalem, spent a year there, and at the end of the year contrived to steal the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem and take it off to Ethiopia. And there it's been ever since. That's the Ethiopian story. I believe behind that legend, there's a true history of how it really got ever since. That's the Ethiopian story. I believe behind that legend there's a true history of how it really got there. And that's in the end what I ended up writing my first book of historical mysteries about, which was The Sign of the Seal.

And wasn't the speculation about the Ark of the Covenant that it was some sort of a technological device that was actually radioactive? Yes, I got into that speculation myself at some length because as I started to investigate this subject, not only was the Ethiopian side of it fascinating and mysterious but the object itself is quite extraordinary I mean it dominates the Bible at the beginning of the story from the time they're in

Sinai the Exodus there there's a tremendous role for the Ark of the Covenant and they follow it through the wilderness and it's marched around the city of Jericho it knocks down the walls of Jericho it's hugely important the temple of Solomon is built with only one function and that's to serve and this is a quote as an house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord that's the only reason that the temple of Solomon is built it's like at a certain point it's got to be placed out of the public view it's always a dangerous object as they're uh carrying it it strikes people dead if somebody touches it by chance bolt of fire comes out of it actually i mean spielberg and the indiana jones movie the way they portrayed the arc was spot on how it's described in the old testament as an absolutely devastating deadly instrument

so it's the the israelites use it in it there's a accounts of it flying into the air rushing towards the enemies of Israel emitting a moaning sound they all fall down dead then there's a later account whether the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant they take it off to the city of Ashdod then they make the huge mistake of opening it and they treat it like a tourist object. People walk by, and the Bible says 50,000 died. And how did they die? Cancerous tumors.

That's what's actually described in the Bible. The Ark of the Covenant is supposed to contain within it what's left of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, correct. That's what's inside of it. That's what's supposed to be inside of it. And also, isn't there a... Written upon by the finger of God himself if you if you if you take the old testament and that's and that they're the kind of power source of the ark of the covenant now what that power is

uh i did get into some speculation on this it it seems obvious to me that that at one level the ark of the covenant is an out ofof-place technology. It's a strange technology which has presented itself in a surprising context where you don't expect to find it. And there it is. So I started to look into the background of this. Where did this come from? And where it comes from is Egypt. Moses is intimately connected with the Ark of the Covenant. Moses is raised in the household of the pharaoh in Egypt. He's groomed to be a future pharaoh. And then the falling out comes and he leaves with the children of Israel

and builds the Ark of the Covenant in the Sinai. Now, if he was raised and groomed as a future pharaoh, then he would have been a magician. He would have been versed in the high magic of ancient Egypt. And those guys could do virtually anything they set their minds to. I mean, anybody who can build the Great Pyramid of Egypt, if it was built when we're told it was built, it's an extraordinary and absolutely stunning... Even if it was built before then.

And for people who don't understand what you're talking about here, your premise or a big part of it is that there is somewhere around, what is it, 10,000 years ago, somewhere around then, towards the end of the last ice age, humanity was probably mostly wiped out or wiped out in a big way, and we had to rebuild from there. We had to rebuild. And I believe that we lost a civilization at that time.

An entire civilization. Yeah, which has not been recorded by history, and that it went underwater with the rising sea levels. And what led me to this, the reason I became interested in pursuing that line of inquiry was the Ark of the Covenant, because it seemed to me like a piece of technology that was out of its place in history in the way that it was described. I'm not wishing to put down the spiritual aspects because they are there, but there were definite technological aspects to this device. And then I had to ask myself, well, where could that knowledge have come from? And through

Egypt, we then start to find that Egypt itself looks back to an older time. The ancient Egyptians didn't regard themselves as the beginning of their story. They regarded themselves as quite a late point in their story. And they look back to the time of the gods, which they called Zep Tepi, the first time when there was a golden age. And they speak, and there are texts, the Edfu building texts, which speak of the gods living on an island, a gigantic flood coming, most of the gods are killed, odd thing to happen to gods, and then they come and settle in Egypt. The survivors come and settle in Egypt. So Egypt is the product of an even far earlier civilization,

but the history of Egypt goes back way, way further than people think it does. That's my view. That's my view. I support that view, and I was astonished when you had Robert Shock and John Anthony West, when they brought their findings about the erosion on the Temple of the Sphinx. They brought these findings to these academics, and just the tone of their voice, the way they were approaching the information, the mocking attitude that they had of it. Well, where is this civilization you speak of? Because they're talking about a civilization that was possibly, what, 10,000 B.C. or something like that?

Yeah, I would put the figure right about 10,500 B.C. for the end of it. If you don't know the story behind it, there's water erosion on the edge of the temple where the Sphinx is done that could only be attributed to thousands of years of rainfall. That's right. The last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was... This is the breakthrough work that John Anthony West and Robert Shock did. The initial observation came through John, who is an astonishingly knowledgeable man

about ancient Egypt. He's not an official Egyptologist, but he spent his whole life working in ancient Egypt. And through his research and his background, he came to realize that the erosion patterns on the Sphinx are really odd. And he then went to Schock, Robert Schock at the University of Boston, who is a geologist and an open-minded one. And he said, would you come to Egypt with me and give me your geological opinion on this monument? So Shok went there, and it was immediately clear to him that this monument had been subjected to thousands of years of heavy rainfall, at some point in its history. And that's where the mystery begins, because the study of ancient climates is quite well advanced,

and we know that 5,000 years ago, 4,500 years ago, when the Sphinx is supposed to have been built, Egypt was as bone dry as it is today. And you have to go back some thousands of years before that, at least to about 9,000 years ago, to get the very heavy rainfall that would have caused the erosion of the Sphinx. But that only means that the Sphinx was standing there 9,000 years ago to be rained on. It may be much older than that. Shock is cautious and he will not push the date back beyond what the hard evidence suggests. He does accept that the Sphinx may well have stood there before the heavy rains began, but how long before is a matter that he cannot be certain on. And that's where Robert Boval and I were able to take the matter on a little further

with the astronomy of the Giza Plateau. And you find there's just this stunning thing that happens in the sky. I mean, this is one of the great things. I have some problems with technology, but I have to say one of the great things about computer technology is the way that it can speed up access to information in an incredibly efficient way. And there are computer programs now which will show you exactly how the stars were positioned at any time in the last 30,000 years over any point on the Earth's surface.

You can literally wind back the ancient skies and see them. And the skies do change because the Earth is the viewing platform can literally wind back the ancient skies and see them. And the skies do change because the Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. There's a wobble on the axis of the Earth. Procession. That's right. And the wobble takes 26,000 years to complete a cycle.

So it's a cyclical process. Eventually, the stars will all return to starting point and begin the cycle again. And because of that, we can say that the Sphinx was gazing at his own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo, at dawn on the spring equinox in 10,000 BC, while 90 degrees away, due south, Orion was lying on the meridian in exactly the pattern of the pyramids on the ground.

And doesn't John Anthony West go even deeper? He believes it's like 30,000 BC or something crazy. You're right. John thinks it might be pushed back another processional cycle. See, we take it back to 12,500 years ago, but you would have the same alignments another 26,000 years earlier. So 38,000 years ago, you would have the same alignments as you had 12,500 years ago. And doesn't he base it on actual hieroglyphs to depict, you know, the ages of the pharaohs?

You're absolutely right. And again, this is the area where the Egyptologists, the academic Egyptologists, are incredibly annoying, because they will not listen to what the ancient Egyptians themselves had to say. It's as though they, the academics, know more about ancient Egyptian history than the ancient Egyptians did had to say. It's as though they, the academics, know more about ancient Egyptian history than the ancient Egyptians did themselves. And the ancient Egyptians were really very clear. They pushed their history back well plus 30,000 years. Why are they defensive?

Why won't they budge? Why are they so against this idea? I wondered that myself when I first got into this. I initially couldn't understand it. But I think it's a problem with science in general. I think that... wondered that myself uh when i first got into this i initially couldn't understand it but i think i think it's a problem with science in general uh i think that uh was it a late discovery did they have an established timeline they already established the timeline the timeline was set literally in stone uh over the last sort of last 50 50 years of the 20th century i mean really by

by the beginning of the 20th century a timeline had, really by the beginning of the 20th century, a timeline had been worked out. And by the 1950s, it was very much set. So they are just not willing to consider any previous date that would anything... It throws the whole timeline out. And because they've been teaching it for so long, they're reluctant to open up to new ideas. I would say so.

But also, they themselves, I'm not suggesting any dishonesty on their part, they themselves absolutely believe their version of the past. And in all fairness, you know, Robert Shock's depiction of the erosion, there have been dissenters, and I've read some different people's papers, but they seem very illogical. I looked at it myself. I know what water erosion looks like. Obviously, I'm not a geologist, but when I look at it,

and you say that that's wind and sand, and then they show extreme examples of wind and sand erosion, it doesn't look the same. It looks like there's crevices. It's been created by water. It's really obvious. It really does. Yeah. And then there's so much else that adds to that.

I mean, the Sphinx is not alone. There are other weathered structures out there on the Giza Plateau. And deeper ones. And they find ones that are underground that are these old-style construction ones that were built much like the Temple of the Sphinx, but not like the later stuff. It looks like two different eras of construction. It definitely does. It looks like two phases of construction, one very ancient, one more recent,

and they've got muddled up in the academics' minds. Watching Dr. Schock try to talk to the Egyptologists about that, it was a fascinating thing, because the guy got super defensive, and he was like, where is this civilization you're speaking of, this 10,000 people? That's right. It was like this weird... One of the classic remarks was Mark Lehner,

who's an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and one of the lead Western archaeologists working in Giza. And his remark, which we caught often, was, you know, show me the potsherd. Where is the potsherd from this lost civilization? Well, the argument was, at that time, that the Sphinx cannot possibly be of that age because there's nothing else in the world of that age.

How could there just be this one unique thing, is 12 and a half thousand years old or maybe older uh this amazing monument how can that be alone so show me the potsherds of the rest of that civilization well some years later those potsherds have started to turn up and they've turned up in turkey uh in the form of Gobekli Tepe, a gigantic megalithic circle, which dates back to precisely 12,000 years ago. And even has carvings of animals that don't exist anywhere near Turkey on this thing. And they're trying to attribute it to hunter-gatherers, which is hilarious. It's really hilarious. These were people who had an organized and systematic civilization. And it was somehow or another intentionally covered up.

Buried. They buried it. They buried these gigantic, like 12-foot tall, beautiful stone carvings with like lizards on them and stuff. Fascinating. By the way, the ancient Egyptians themselves decommissioned some of their temples when they knew their system was going down. They knew it was going down. The Romans were the end of it for Egypt. The Egyptians thrived through the Greek period.

When the Greeks arrived in Egypt, what happened was the Egyptians colonized the Greek mind. And the Greeks became Egyptians. But when the Romans took over, it was a different story. That's my people. They fucked everything up. And worse still, worse still, yeah, when the Romans made this alliance with Christianity and the Christian church pulled on the jackboot of Rome, it was Christians who really wanted to take Egypt apart.

They wanted to destroy everything. And the Egyptian priests themselves, rather than let their temples fall into their hands in that way they went around and destroyed certain things in the temples and they did so quite quite deliberately to to remove that power from the others who were going to come and take it in i've only i've only been to a couple places uh i've been to chichen itza i've never been to uh egypt but i've been to uh at the um one of the museum of fine arts in boston had an egyptian exhibit they had all this amazing old shit and the it is so hard to wrap your head around even the established timeline of 2500 bc when you're looking at these structures it's so hard to wrap your head around like when you're looking at a beautiful gold and covered sarcophagus that you know had king tut inside of it it's like what what was that like you know what kind of a weird alternative way

to live did these guys figure out where they thousands of years ago figured how to build these almost perfect geometric structures of two million three hundred thousand stones where if you fuck up just a little bit here or there, by the time you get to the top, it's done. And they're like, well, they did screw up a few of them. There's a few of them on the lopsided. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they got them right, too. Who knows who the hell was doing the screw-up ones?

That could have been imitators. The screw-up ones were done later by people who lost those skills, basically. That's the mystery of Egypt, and John West makes this point, that it's perfect at the beginning, and it slowly declines. This is not what we expect. We expect to see civilizations slowly rise. We don't expect to see

them perfect, fully formed at the beginning, and then take 3,000 years to end. Well, even when you push back the established timeline, and you know, we can't even wrap our head around a thousand years. I mean, a thousand years is very difficult to wrap our head around. Why do you think it's so difficult for them to embrace the pretty obvious possibility that things get wiped out? I mean, there's craters all over the moon. We know there's all sorts of

spots all over, you know, you'll go drive by that giant crater in Nevada. It's a mile wide. Boom. Something hits. Everybody gets fucked. You know what I mean? That easily could have happened over and over again throughout history. And just that seems to me to be way more likely than we made it all the way from caveman to here without a hiccup.

Without a single hiccup. That's crazy. And this leads, you know, this leads to, it certainly led me to conclude that academic history is part of a, this sounds a bit paranoid, but part of an overall system of kind of mind control that operates. There are certain things that we're allowed to think and certain parameters that we're allowed to think within in our society. And when it comes to the past, those parameters are set by academics. And they get so territorial and so defensive when you try to break out of that and suggest other possibilities. See, I thought naively when I got into this at first that those who were specialists in this field would welcome some new ideas. They might throw them out in the end, but they would want to see whether there was any merit to the ideas. And so initially, I was really shocked that the attitude is, oh, this idea doesn't agree with us. We are going to destroy this idea in any way we can. And not only that,

we're going to destroy the individuals associated with this idea. We will attack the man and the idea. Ad hominem attacks. Exactly, exactly. In a very dirty tricks kind of way. It's only later on, actually, that I came to realize that academics all treat each other this way as well. They're all very territorial. They're all ego-driven. They have their power base in a particular view, and they defend that view to the death. you're not joking around about that and i always wonder when i hear some of the things that he says about other ancient structures i always wonder wow i wonder if he took too much heat from the sphinx and now he like backs off on stuff he's like the bosnian pyramid and even the japanese structure didn't yeah i went there i went there with shock and he's crazy and shock would not that's crazy he's shocked with the shock shock would not uh accept that it it was a man-made structure. But I have to say that at that point, Yonaguni is a very difficult dive. It's a very difficult dive.

The seas are wild. There's a huge current flows right in front of the monument. And you have to be an accomplished diver to do any work. Schock was on his second open water dive at this point. Shock was on his second open water dive at this point. And on those initial dives that we did on Yonaguni, he was largely fighting for his life. Jesus Christ. You guys have balls. I know.

I love it. It's very, you know, my wife, Santa, who's a photographer, and I. Santa's right here with us. Have done more than 200 plus dives on the Yonaguni Monument. We went through the process of learning to dive and really getting the skills to be able to handle that kind of

current, which is literally going to rip your mask off your face and take your regulator out of your mouth. It's like swimming in a river against the current, actually. What I would say is that I think Shock was a little premature with that conclusion. And I think I have huge respect for Robert Schock. I have huge respect for his openness of mind and his geological acumen.

But not enough time was spent on the monument to reach that decision. And it's not just one monument. It's a whole complex of monuments. And further north, settles it for me, off Okinawa, which is about 400 or 500 miles north of Yonaguni, there is a majestic stone circle 110 feet beneath the water, which again, Santha and I have dived on extensively, which shock has not seen, which is there is just no way on earth

that that monument could have been built by nature. Do you have photos of this online? Yes, we do. We have photos on my website. What would would i look for um okay you go on to www.gram i'm sure if i just google it go to grahamhancock.com okay and then go to gallery and then go to underwater we have underwater on the gallery? Gallery, underwater, yes. Oh, man. And in the underwater section, you're going to see a stone circle somewhere there

with somebody above it holding a video camera. That's me holding the video camera. Oh, yeah. And down below you is a stone circle. And there's probably some more shots of it. I'm going to just come around and see what you're looking at there. I was looking at this right here.

Is that it? Okay, yeah. That's the stone circle. This is the central upright. And these are the surrounding uprights. Yeah, somebody made that. Get out of here. And this thing is 12 feet high.

Wow. Wow. And it's 110 feet beneath the sea. That's so cool. Wow. That's incredible. That's amazing. It's the most extraordinary thing and and 110 feet

beneath the sea tells us that it was made at least 13 000 years ago because that's the last time that 110 foot level was above sea level so well that makes sense with robert shock about these ruins the japanese ruins because there's one of them that really freaked me out i watched a documentary on it where they showed these two monoliths. We talked earlier, I described them as pizza boxes. They were like giant stone pizza boxes. They were so perfectly cut and laying right next to each other. I would just think you would look at that and you'd have to throw everything else away.

You look at that and you're like, that's not a natural phenomenon. There's right angles everywhere, and that sends off... It does. I mean mean the beauty and the perfection of the thing is is part of it but but part of it which needs to be needs to be taken into account i i can understand why some geologists feel that it must be natural and this is this this is the reason that the stone is a sedimentary stone it's laid down in layers and some of the layers are soft and some of them are hard and their argument is that the sea battering against these layers selectively removed the soft layers and left the hard layers, producing this stepped effect. The problem with that is that if

that happened, then you would expect to see the very large amount of rubble which was created by removing all these layers. You'd expect to see it lying in a disorganized mass down at the bottom of the monument, which from top to bottom the monument's about 70 feet high. So 70 feet down and all of it's underwater because the bottom is about 110 feet below the sea. So you would expect to find that rubble lying at the base of the monument. Actually what you do find is a beautiful path cut out of solid rock at the base of the monument and all the rubble cleared to the side pushed away uh forming a bank which is no way on earth that could have been done by nature it had to be done by man that's what that's what people do they clear away rubble tidy it up and

leave a nice looking site and that's what that's. And that's what is there. So it's little details like that. Plus, the fact that there isn't just one monument, there's actually about five along a good four miles of the coast, makes it impossible for me to accept that it's a natural phenomenon. And I guess the question comes up, when you talk about ancient monuments or ancient civilizations from 14,000 plus years ago, how much really would be left? It's a long time. So long. To put it into perspective, the house that we're in in 14,000 years will absolutely not be here.

If we leave, it's going to be completely gone. There'll be almost no evidence. The earth will devour these computers. It will devour the leather and the table and the chairs. The roof will cave in. It will all go into dirt. Dirt will fill it over. Lava will come. Earthquakes will shift things. It'll be gone. We'll be forgotten.

Forgotten. It will be very easy for that to happen. Consider the effect of ice. Consider the fact that during the last ice age, North America and Northern Europe were covered with these gigantic ice caps, you're talking ice

which is 2 to 3 miles deep your website's getting crushed right now you can't even get on your website, sorry about that I can't get on it it's getting smashed that's good news, yeah there's a lot of people on that sucker glad to hear it you know, so smashed. That's good news. Yeah, there's a lot of people on that sucker.

Glad to hear it. Sorry, I lost my thread there. Oh, I'm so sorry. We're talking about ice. The effects of North America, Europe. So the ice forms on the continental landmass of the US and of Europe. It builds up to a depth of two miles

and it's in motion. Consider what's happening to anything underneath that, under two miles of ice. It's being ground to a powder, to a fine powder. It's like just wiping out, literally wiping out the past. That's why it was such a big deal to find that Iceman, because he had fallen into a crevice. And so the glacier had passed over him and never touched him. Wait, what Iceman? What's this Iceman?

They found a guy who was... Let's see, in Italy. He's about 5,500 years old, and he fell into a glacier in the Alps, and he came out of it again in the late 20th century. Wow. It's an interesting story, actually. It's fascinating. It looks like he was murdered.

They found an arrow embedded in his body, and it looked like he'd been ambushed and shot up there. And he died there and froze and was covered with snow immediately, and then he was preserved, and then some hikers found his body. Yeah. It's an amazing story, man. But what's incredible is that if Graham's view of history is true, then this guy, 5,000 years ago, was really like some dude who survived

some horrible cataclysmic event. You know, civilization moved forward. like some dude who survived some horrible cataclysmic event you know the the the civilization moved forward people relearned things relearned hunting relearned you know making skins and turning them into fabric or turning them into clothes what's your what what's the your theory of where it all started where where did we come from why where did humans originate? Okay. Well, I think that I'm not against the academic reconstruction of the human family tree. I think they've done some quite good work. So to answer your question, I'll have to go back quite far to the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee, which is about six million years ago.

to the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee, which is about 6 million years ago. And then from then, you get a gradual emergence of a creature who begins to look more and more human. And by 2.5 million years ago, that creature is making stone tools. The first sign of real intelligent activity. I'm going to turn the air conditioning on. But the stone tools are very limited, and once the creature has invented them, it doesn't change for the next million years. The stone tools stay exactly the same.

So we know that they're passing down cultural information, and we also know that they're extremely rigid in their thought patterns, and they're stuck in that. Then a new type of stone tool is introduced and that one sticks for another million years as well and during this time our ancestors are looking more and more like us and finally the earliest surviving fully anatomically modern human skeleton comes from Ethiopia as a matter of fact and it's 195,000 years old. That's just short of 200,000 years old. Before that, the creatures were closely related to us, but they

didn't look quite like us, and their brains were not quite like ours. But by 195,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans have evolved. But their behavior has not evolved their behavior is stuck uh in in that archaic period and they're still using the same limited unimaginative stone tools that were being used a million years before and then it's a really extraordinary thing happens and it's within the last 50 000 years is that you just get this incredible surge forward in human behavior. The dawn of spiritual beliefs. They're very, very clear because they started burying food and water with the dead. Anybody who does that, they definitely believe that some aspect of the individual continues after death. And they created the great cave art, the amazing, amazing paintings, stunning works of art.

All of this symbolic behavior seemed to just switch on kind of overnight somewhere after 50 000 years ago and i so i would i would start the clock about there where where where suddenly you've got these incredibly intelligent artistic creative creatures on the planet who are us and they are doing this stuff and i and i believe that some of them uh stayed in the hunter-gatherer mode all the way through all the way through history uh the and and those were the the cave artists and the of what's called the upper paleolithic and i think some of them moved in another direction and formed a civilization and just as today on in in our 21st century world uh we have highly advanced

technological civilizations coexisting with hunter gatherers you do still have traditional hunter gatherers in the amazon in botswana for example uh i believe it was the same in the world then uh and i think that the what i think of as the lost civilization was largely a maritime civilization living along coastlines living on the best lands during the Ice Age, because inland it was arid, it was cold. The ice meant there was no rain. It was totally desert. Very, very difficult to live. But on the coasts, things were much better. And it was precisely the coasts that were inundated when mysteriously and suddenly the Ice Age ended and all that ice started to melt

down and went back into the ocean and the sea levels rose and you think that i mean i read i've read all your books i read a supernatural as well which is one of my my more favorite or more uh what i found more fascinating because if you really stepped out on some serious limbs on that one yeah you know i kind of did yeah yeah i mean you come from the journey from being a journalist who's covering this thing in ethiopia to supernatural which insinuates that humanity has probably learned a good deal of what we are and what we've become because of psychedelic drugs i believe that's absolutely the case and and i think that uh with the current demonization of

psychedelic drugs in our society, it's a huge mistake. How much resistance have you felt from that book? Well, I've had an enormous amount of resistance to it because we have had a mind programming exercise called the War on Drugs for the last 40 years, which has been designed to create an internal enemy in our societies and convince people that there are these evil, wicked groups who are doing these terrible, sinful things, smoking these drugs and doing this and that. And this very dark image has been created around it,

and people get very upset irrationally about this whole issue. And actually what's been forgotten in all of this, and for me has become, I regard it as an extremely important issue, is that when the state sends us to prison for essentially exploring our own consciousness, this is a grotesque abuse of human rights. It's a fundamental wrong. If I, as an adult, am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I'm absolutely not sovereign over anything. I can't claim any kind of freedom at all. And what has happened over the last 40 or 50 years under the disguise of the war on drugs is that we have been

persuaded to hand over the keys of our consciousness to the state, the most precious, the most intimate, the most sapient part of ourselves, the state now has the keys. And most precious, the most intimate, the most sapient part of ourselves, the state now has the keys. And furthermore, they've persuaded us that that's in our interests. This is a very dangerous situation. Have you ever, there was an article that was recently published about people and creativity, and that, you know, everyone says they love creative ideas, but the truth is, amongst non-creative people, creative ideas make them confrontational, make them upset, make them defensive. When you start talking about experiences like psychedelic experiences, one of the things that always freaks me out is the people's inability to even consider that there's a difference between a psychedelic experience on drugs and a drug that's going to ruin your life. They're not even interested in considering that possibility.

It's like the same thing. It's like someone resisting. Definitely. And again, that's the result. Let's remember that funded with our money, our taxpayers' money, there has been 40 years of programming, more than 40 years on this subject

to make us all develop a kind of aversion, a fear, a hatred of aversion of a fear a hatred a horror of Drugs and this is it's just fundamentally wrong in so in so many ways look Quite a number of illegal drugs are actually really bad and really dangerous and they they will totally fuck you up in all kinds of in all kinds of ways, but I believe that the sovereignty of the adult over his or her own body and his or her own mind trumps everything else and we must have the right to make

our mistakes yes you know we already have laws in our society for punishing bad behavior if somebody on drugs goes out and gets in somebody else's face and causes them trouble, we already have laws to deal with that. We don't need new laws that control our consciousness and rigidly place it in a prison and actually place us in prison if we explore that consciousness. That's the point, what you just said, that we already have laws to keep you from doing bad things. Yes. It's so important. We don't, yeah. It seems so logical.

It's like so clear. If you can drink and not do anything bad, go drink. Exactly. If you can smoke pot and not do anything bad to your fellow human, go smoke pot. If that's what you want to do. If that's your adult decision, that's your choice. What does liberty mean if it doesn't mean that? People get into this ridiculous, just obey the law.

Why is it such a hard time? What are you, a druggie? You need drugs to get through this life. And I always say, this is such an illogical argument because imagine if we were on an island we were the only people on the planet

and there was only four of us there was only four of us and one of us wanted to smoke pot and we said we've got to lock this guy up in a fucking cage he's crazy

it's nice to reduce it to that to four then you really see the dynamics you see how silly it is you would just lock this guy up in a cage you can't smoke pot we You see how silly it is. Like, you would just lock this guy up in a cage.

You can't smoke pot. We made a law against it. Yeah. Like, what? And that four is just as ridiculous as four million or 400 million or what. It's just as ridiculous. It's an extraordinary thing. And you have to consider what it's led to in our society in all kinds of ways.

It's led to the creation of huge armed bureaucracies who have the right to break into our homes, smash down our doors, humiliate us in every possible way, ruin our lives with criminal records. And all because what? We're smoking some natural herb, which affects our own consciousness in some way. So again, I say, if we get into the faces of others, the state may have a role to play and it does and it already has elaborate rules for dealing with that but for the state to have transgressed the consciousness of free sovereign adults is a grotesque abuse of human rights and it doesn't work this is the other thing if the state could turn around and say the war on drugs has worked we have reduced the

consumption of this that it's not true They haven't reduced the consumption of any drugs. The consumption of all illegal drugs has gone up, up and up and up and up and up. Let's take another drug, tobacco. You never got sent to jail for smoking tobacco. You never got your life ruined or your front door broken down. But some years ago, people cottoned on to the notion that tobacco actually may be making us pretty unwell if we're smoking a lot of tobacco. Seems to be a connection with lung cancer. And this information was put forward. Look what's happened with tobacco in the last 20 years. Millions, millions and millions of adults all over the world presented with that information have taken a personal sovereign decision to stop smoking cigarettes. I took that decision when I was 38 years old.

I'm 61 now. I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day. And I was a journalist, you know, cigarette hanging out of the mouth typewriter. I was a heavy smoker. But I took the decision. I came to the conclusion this is not good for my body. You know, Stephen King said that it was a neurotransmitter, an enhancer, that he suffered when he stopped smoking. So many writers. It helped him write.

When you were a writer, why did you smoke so much as a writer? It helps. Yeah, yeah, it does. It definitely did. It definitely did help, as does marijuana. But the fact is that there is – the point that I want to make is that if the state was really interested in helping us, this is how the war on drugs is presented. We're concerned about your health, so we're going to send you to prison. We're concerned about the harm this drug is doing to you, so we're going to send you to prison.

What's more harmful, the harm the drug is doing or being sent to prison? It seems to me pretty obvious that being sent to prison is a much more harmful thing that's being done. If the state was really concerned about harm, then the solution is not to criminalize people for taking drugs. The solution is to present them with very good information which they believe. Part of the problem is that the state has become to be regarded as so corrupt that any message emanating from the state about drugs is not believed anymore completely disbelieved um so so you know once again we come to this issue of adult sovereignty over over consciousness and our right also to make mistakes with our own body if we do that that's what we i believe we're here on this earth to learn and to grow and to develop, and we have to have adult responsibility to do that. It always astonishes me in America, where you have the Republican Party, which is strongly in favor of individual freedoms,

that it's often Republicans who are the ones who are most anti-drugs. I feel drugs is a Republican issue. I think that any true republican should absolutely champion the right of every adult individual if they choose to do so to explore their own consciousness uh with any drugs they choose yeah there's no real parties anymore it's just a mix mash i mean obama is just as much of a republican as any republican that's ever been in office i've seen this i've seen this happening it's weird assimilation yeah yeah it is it's just you're fucked no matter what it's it's either the same person basically because really our society is being run by uh gigantic faceless bureaucracies now and those are much

more dangerous than anything else because they don't even have a figurehead they just continue they roll on and they run and they run people's lives but But the aspect of society where powers that be are trying to control people's mental territory, this is not a new thing. This has been going on for a very, very long time. It's just the newest incarnation. We had witch burnings where it's a very old thing. Exactly.

I would say that in our society today, drug users play the same role as witches played in Europe in the 16th century. Absolutely. That's fundamentally what's going on. They're an internal enemy which the society can be mobilized to hate because that's what the state does. It makes people hate and fear and suspect other people because then they want to rely on the state for their defense and their protection. It's a game. It's a mind game. And it's been going on for a very

long time and it happens that the current victims are drug users. And, you know, the word, it's interesting that language itself has been deployed in this war, so that you very rarely find the word drug separated from the word abuse, that you never find the notion of a responsible use of drugs, you find only the notion of abuse of drugs. And so it's become impossible almost to speak about drugs without incorporating this notion that there's some abuse is taking place. Yeah. And the idea that you could actually benefit from them is an alien thought. Completely alien, very, very much hated by our society. And yet, you know, the research is coming through. We've had the research in the last year with psilocybin, easing anxiety of terminal cancer patients,

MDMA with post-traumatic stress disorder, fantastically successful results. And cancer, apparently. Have you seen that where they're saying that super doses of MDMA may treat cancer? Makes sense. All the joy and love that you'd feel just kills all the bad stuff. I know. answer makes sense all the joy and love that you'd feel just kills all the bad stuff i know i i mean these you know these these um i believe that well aldous huxley called the psychedelics gratuitous

graces there's something that nation nature just gave us for free a kind of grace to to allow us to experience uh something else and and um didn't huxley coin the term psychedelic? He's the one who came up with it. Quite possibly, yeah. It was Huxley and I can't remember the other person. Oh, shit, man. Yeah, I think that they had different, they were trying to come up with a word. They had another word that they were going to use for it,

but it sounded too unscientific. Yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right. Yeah, definitely. Psychedelic's the perfect word. They nailed it. They nailed it. They nailed it, definitely. Psychedelic is the perfect word. They nailed it. They nailed it. They nailed it, yeah. Do you subscribe to McKenna's ideas about the stoned ape theory,

that theory that human beings may have actually evolved from the lower primates because of the fact that we ate mushrooms? Yeah. I came to that idea, I'd like to say, Terence McK mckenna one of the great minds that fascinating what a wonderful man amazing person what a wonderful man an incredible loss that we lost terence he he was a remarkable individual and i i never met him unfortunately um but he uh i love listening to his voice I love his voice I have a whole section on my iPod

it's all Terence McKenna lectures we go down to Brazil sometimes to drink ayahuasca and sometimes in the late in an ayahuasca session as you're beginning to return to this reality it's nice to play a bit of music or a little bit of voice

and sometimes we play Terence McKenna and I just remember one line about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries. And he says, you know, they'll dissolve boundaries between you and your cat, even between you and your washing machine. intuitively very far far ahead of his time grasped the notion that this sudden advancement of humanity had to do with psychedelics it it what it did was it broke our rigid behavior patterns that we were stuck in and unable to change and it opened us up to new possibilities and you see this remarkable event taking place after 50 000 years ago definitely to do with psychedelics now you know since that time, there's a parallel track, which is the academic work on cave art and psychedelics, which is

Professor David Lewis Williams of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. And he has absolutely taken it beyond intuition and totally proved without any doubt whatsoever that all of the cave art was inspired by visionary experiences on psychedelics. There's just no doubt about it at all. How do you prove that? You prove it by the nature of the art itself. It's rich with what are called entoptic phenomena. Certain patterns, zigzags, grids, hexagons, honeycomb patterns, internested curved lines.

The caves are covered in all of these. Go around to the rock canyons in Utah, you'll see the same thing. Rock art all over the world is influenced by visionary experiences. And then classically, the absolute defining characteristic is the appearance of beings or entities in the art. And those entities are typically half human and half animal. They are, it's called a therianthrope, that's from the Greek therion, which means wild beast, and anthropos, which means man. And this is one of the definitive aspects of deep visionary experience, is encountering entities who communicate with you and who are often encountered in this half-man, half-human form.

So it's interesting that work done in the 1960s with, for example, Mescaline, they found that the volunteers were drawing the stuff they saw, and one of the volunteers drew a man in a business suit with the head of a fox. Wow. That was an entity that had come and spoken to him in the trance-like state, no different from the man with the head of a lion and the body of a human being that you find in Hollenstein Stadel Cave in Germany from 32,000 years ago. So what do you think is going on there? Do you think that you're dealing with entities that don't really have a form that we can understand, so they present themselves in some cartoonish combination of things that we're aware of? Yeah. I think that, and I'm going out on a limb here, but I think that we're dealing, I don't believe consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe the brain is more of a receiver

of consciousness. I think that's a really important distinction. The mainstream model of consciousness that we have in our society today definitely sees it as produced by the brain the same way a factory makes cars so so if you smash up the factory uh the car stopped being made the ergo if you if the person dies the brain dies consciousness is just blinks out gone finished that's the mainstream view but the, the other view that the brain is a transceiver or receiver of consciousness, that it is manifesting, it's the junction box that's manifesting consciousness on the physical realm, that raises whole different possibilities. Then when you destroy the receiver, the signal is still there. Just as if you destroy a TV set,

the TV signal is still there. And you get into all kinds of possibilities from that. So the suggestion that I derive from that is that consciousness is fundamentally non-physical. But that for certain reasons, and they may be very deep and very mysterious, consciousness has created realms in which it is possible to manifest physically. Because in a physical realm you have all kinds of consequences uh to your actions that you would not have in a non-physical state a physical realm may be a very useful place to spend time if you're an ancient soul who wishes to learn and grow and develop further uh and that's that's how i've come to see it i think

i think we and that's how all ancient spiritual traditions see it that we incarnate in these bodies in order to have the experience of life on earth but we don't die when these bodies die these bodies are like a suit of clothes that we're wearing for this incarnation I've always subscribed to the idea that creativity when I'm at my best and most creative

and when I'm performing doing stand-up comedy at my best and most creative I feel much more like a passenger than I do a driver. I feel like when I'm writing, when I write my best stuff, I have no idea where it's coming from. I'm not even really there. I'm just moving my fingers, and it's coming to me, and it's not even me doing it. And it sounds ridiculous, and you could say that, well, it's because really the ego gets

in the way of creativity because you're always worrying about yourself. And if you could just put the ego aside, then your mind can work better. And I see that argument, but I don't really – it feels like it comes to me in these great bursts of ideas that I never considered before. And I'm like, well, where is that? Maybe that's really something that I'm figuring out a way to tune in. Yeah, you're tuning into it and you're becoming a channel for the material, for your own material. Your consciousness is running the show,

but your consciousness is not limited to this realm and it's drawing down material from elsewhere. I've had the same experience with my writing. The more that I intellectualize the process, and that's particularly true since I've turned to fiction, the more that I intellectualize the process, and that's particularly true since I've turned to fiction, the more that I intellectualize the process, the harder the writing becomes. And the sooner I let off that intellectual control

and just let it flow, the better it gets. It's so strange how it comes in waves, though. It's almost like you can't keep tuned in to the spiritual realm for any long period of time. I shake it off. I know after like a few hours of writing, my writing just starts to turn to shit. I'm like, oh, I guess it's off now. It's back to me. Now it's me writing. And the right thing to do at that point is actually to say...

Close the laptop, by the way. Yeah, close the laptop and go and have a break. Yeah, save your work and try again tomorrow. But it's universal. You know, there's a Steven Pressfield book, The War of Art, that deals with the concept of the muse. And it's a fantastic book. And I used to buy stacks of them and give them to people. I gave you one, right? Yeah.

Thank you for recommending that. I'm a big fan of Pressfield. I didn't know he'd written that book. So I'm going to read it. It's a brilliant book. You know, I think I have a copy of it. I will give you one. And the brilliant thing about it is it's really no nonsense.

But it's all about, it's no-nonsense. Put the work in. Force yourself to do it. Don't make excuses. Put the work in. But then it's also about the muse. It's also about the idea that you are just sitting there and putting yourself in a position to tune into it. You just have to show up.

You show up. You move your fingers. And let the muse come to you. And the muse is real. Yeah. Well, let me tell you. I mean, I have been a-fiction writer all my life um i started out as i mentioned in journalism i moved into ancient mysteries but it was always non-fiction you look at book like fingerprints

of the gods or underworld the book about our diving adventures and you'll find that there's 2 000 footnotes you know um very they are I hope they're readable, but they're also, you know, detailed, researched documents. And that was the kind of writer I was until I encountered ayahuasca. And when I encountered ayahuasca, I started working with ayahuasca in 2003. And the reason I started working, I had had one psychedelic experience in 1974 with LSD. And after that, it was an amazing experience. By the way, I had an most incredible night at the Windsor Free Festival in England. I spent the whole night wandering around I had I kind of traveled back in time, it was like being in a sort of medieval encampment. It's just incredible. But when I came out of that experience, I thought to myself, hmm, I was 20, I guess I was 24 then. I thought, if that went the other way, that was a really powerful experience. If that went the other way, I'm not sure how I would handle it. I thought it might really fuck me up. And I got a bit and i and i'd heard stories of others who'd had scary experiences and i thought i'm not going to do that again and i didn't i didn't i didn't

take any psychedelics from the age of 24 until let's see 2003 when i was 53 years old and the reason that i started taking psychedelics again was because um initially it was my research project i was writing supernatural it was clear that the. I was writing Supernatural. It was clear that the cave art had been influenced by psychedelics. Here was something I could experience for myself. I've always felt as a writer. I shouldn't be writing something if I'm not in it myself. I have to experience it.

Which is why when you were writing Underworld, you learned how to dive. Diving. And ended up doing huge numbers of dives all around the world. It's the way that I work, and therefore it was logical for me to investigate psychedelics once I started to write Supernatural. And I wanted to investigate them in a shamanic setting, and I looked around and researched the subject, and it became clear that the Amazon was the place to go.

And ayahuasca, with thousands of years of indigenous use in the Amazon, was a very, very interesting substance indeed to investigate. use in the Amazon was a very, very interesting substance indeed to investigate. So, you know, I went down there and started to drink ayahuasca. Ayahuasca worked changes on me in quite a number of ways. It's made me a more thoughtful and reflective person in some ways about my behavior and the impact of my behavior on others. I've still got a long way to go on that. They say in the Amazon that ayahuasca is a school. Don't expect, you know, instant enlightenment. Actually, all enlightenment is hard work.

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

So ayahuasca has helped me to begin on that path. I do not claim to have reached any form of perfection. Very far from it. I'm a very imperfect, frail human being. But I have at least been set on the path that I believe is a more positive one. But then something else ayahuasca gave me. And it happened because I asked for it. else ayahuasca gave me and it happened because i asked for it i i'd reached a point where i felt that i didn't want to go on with the investigation of the lost civilization subject anymore not because i'd lost interest in it or because i turned against it but because i felt that i'd

taken it as far as i personally could after santa and i had done six years of scuba diving all around the world and literally put our lives on the line and had revealed a great deal of stuff underwater that people didn't know about. I felt, actually, I don't know where I take this next. There are a lot of young, energetic people out there. I would like them to take it on now, where I took it from.

And I wanted to look for a change of direction and I wanted to challenge myself as a writer. And I'd always wanted to write a novel. So down in Brazil, over a series of five ayahuasca sessions, I asked ayahuasca, can I write a novel? And if so, what would I be writing about? And something amazing happened. In those five sessions, i was given the entire story of the novel that i ended up writing which is a novel called entangled the whole story the

characters their dilemmas the time travel aspect of the story we just frantically writing it all down or would you try no it was very i wasn't even trying to remember it was just very very clear it was very clear that i was to write a story and that it would involve two young women, one in the Stone Age, one in the modern times, and that they would be entangled, that they would be connected through consciousness, and that they would be involved in a battle of good against evil. And certain scenes came through very, very clear to me and stuck vividly in my mind. So as soon as we'd finished in Brazil, I went back to England and started writing. So when you ask ayahuasca, can you do it? And what would it be about? Do you think that this the that ayahuasca wants you to do this? Because

if you do something like that, you have to I always think of any work that I put out, whether it's even writing a blog or putting something a funny thing up on Twitter, you you send out this signal, and then this signal is going to affect who knows how many people in a positive way, especially something that they really enjoy reading, like a book. And people can say, like, why would I want you to write a book? Because some books are fucking awesome. That's why.

And that feeling of getting really hooked into a book and really just loving it. I haven't read a good novel in a while. The Strain was the last one that I really liked for a while but then hated. I love the beginning of it. That's that vampire one, the Guillermo del Toro book. I haven't read it. My point is that feeling, there's a lot of positive energy associated with something that's really entertaining and gripping.

Definitely. Do you think that's why entertaining and gripping definitely there's it's a highly effective way of uh way of communicating i don't know whether ayahuasca did this for me but you they often say there's a song that i forget the song you know you was the rolling stones you don't always get what you want you get what you need you know ayahuasca does does that she tends to give you what you need not always what you ask for i i have set intents at the beginning of sessions and i found myself going in a totally different direction but these five sessions were different it was very very clear here is a story go home and write it it was very i felt compelled to do it so so if they affected you in that way if they created

this huge effect on you think about what would happen if it was legally available exactly people were so then you see how the war on drugs is actually suppressing uh human evolution if this is it seems like exactly you're saying that um throughout time uh the psychedelics have been why do you think the egyptians were the psychedelics have been wide. Do you think the Egyptians were taking psychedelics? Definitely, definitely. What psychedelics were they taking? Particularly the blue water lily, Nymphaea cerulea, which is a potent psychedelic. And William Embeddon at the State University of California has published detailed research on the blue water lily and on its psychedelic properties, and it was certainly used.

They were journeyers. When the ancient Egyptians explored the mystery of life after death, they were not sitting in some scribal room just making this stuff up. They were investigating. They were exploring. They were separating their consciousness from the body, and they were entering other realms.

And they were coming back and giving a detailed report about what they encountered there. The first I'd ever heard of any of that was from John Anthony West's work and the work on the Temple of Man, which is really fascinating. That there's a temple, and each area of the temple signifies like a part of a human being and there's a whole area about the pineal gland and the the the egyptians were you know they called it the seat of the soul and that they believed that you know the pineal gland was your connection to to the afterlife and and and hey they were right yeah you know this is because this is the this is the mystery that dmt which is the active ingredient of ayahuasca, is generated by the pineal gland. They believe that, though.

But that hasn't really been proven. It was Rick Strassman's hunch. But something in our bodies, and the pineal gland is the most likely suspect. That's a big sticking point with critics. Is generating DMT. Because the presence of DMT in the human body is not in dispute. Where it's coming from is in dispute. ButT in the human body is not in dispute. Where it's coming from is in dispute. Right.

But its presence in the body is not in dispute. It just sounds cool if it really comes from the pineal gland. It sounds kind of cool. If it comes from the third eye. Particularly, yes. Since the pineal gland was originally a sense organ. And so the suggestion would be that it's still a sense organ. It's a kind of sixth sense, which the lens that it uses is DMT.

And what people don't realize is that in reptiles, in certain reptiles, it actually has a retina and a lens. And it's light sensitive. It is a fucking eyeball. It's light sensitive, yes, in reptiles. In humans, it's not. It's sunk deeper into the brain. But a very mysterious organ. And I would still say, you're right, it's not proved.

I would still say the most likely candidate for the generation of DMT. Well, Strassman is working on figuring that out right now. They're working on more detailed studies to try to exactly pinpoint the location. Excellent. It's where it's created. I'm glad that's happening. I mean, you know, the point that you were making just now, I think that by cutting these ancient plant allies out of our life

and by demonizing them and creating this atmosphere of fear and hatred around them, this is a suicidal path that our society is taking, and we only need to look at the past in order to realize that that is true. There is a danger in the human species that we get locked into a particular frame. And right now, we are locked into the technology frame. Of course, we're advancing technology very, very, very fast. But that doesn't mean we aren't locked. We're locked into one frame and we are not thinking outside of that frame. And we can see the consequences of being locked into that frame, which is our world is in chaos. Our world is in a state of hatred and fear and

suspicion right now. There's all this horrible stuff going on. And we are literally on the edge of destroying ourselves. And there's never been a time in the human story when we've more needed to break out of our rigid patterns of behavior and start thinking about things from a different point of view. And nature has provided us with the means to do so. And those means are our plant allies. Right. Yeah. It's a fascinating concept. And the concept that human beings are working against themselves, and they're working to keep things fucked up and make them more, and that the only way to sustain a society as complex and large and invasive as the one we currently live in,

the only way is to do it the way we're doing it. And that if all of a sudden psychedelic drugs were introduced, and then materialism was sort of pushed in the back burner and spiritualism was something that people started really understanding and appreciating their connection more, who the fuck is going to go to work? Who's going to be killing all the chickens we need for chicken McNuggets? Things would become very different.

But the fact is that our existing economic model is falling apart at the seams anyway. And people are living in misery and doubt and chaos and confusion because it's just not working. It's not working. The whole thing is not working. Any society that can stand back while the Amazon jungle is burnt down at the sort of country-sized rate every year, this is an insane society. We obviously live in a demented society, completely insane. A lot of people aren't even aware of how crazy that looks if you watch it and you know you see documentaries on online

of the mass amounts of forest that they're chopping down it's bizarre that's why that's why it's interesting that this particular agent ayahuasca comes from the amazon yeah you know i can't help i can't help feeling either in the Amazon, they strongly believe that an intelligent entity lies behind the ayahuasca vine. She, they always speak of her as she, most of the cultures do, is using the vine as an access point to humanity. And, oh, I've just lost my thread. How did I get to that? Well, no, the idea comes from the Amazon, which is being destroyed by the Amazon. Yes, exactly. At the very time when our Western technological culture is responsible for mass destruction in the Amazon, which it is. And by the way, it's a problem that could be easily solved.

We don't need to destroy the Amazon. We really don't need those soybean farms in the Amazon to feed cattle so that people can eat hamburgers. We much more need the rainforest. So at the very time that the Amazon is under threat from the Western way of life, which has infected almost every culture on the planet, at that very time the Amazon is sending out its emissary in the form of the Vine of Souls, who is kind of extending her coiled, sinuous self all around the world and reaching into human consciousness everywhere.

Because ayahuasca is being drunk all around the world now. It's everywhere. I've met someone on Facebook who takes it regularly. That's a cop. No way. That's a cop and you're going to jail. That's no cop. He knits like, what are they called?

The Shibobo? There's a name for it. The Shibibo, yeah. Shibibo. He knits like, what are they called? The Shibobo? There's a name. The Shibibo, yeah. Shibibo. He knits these patterns. They knit the exact things you were saying that are on the cave walls, like the honeycomb patterns and stuff. So they create these beautiful quilts. Is it quilts they make?

They do, yes, yes. They're just incredible depictions of what apparently the ayahuasca experience is. Ayahuasca visions, yeah. The geometric aspect of that. Do you ever think of how much you play a part of that? Does that ever focus in on your mind? I mean, your instincts obviously were to produce this book and to talk about

it very openly and honestly and to do interviews like this and have discussions like this where you talk about it. And this right now is going to reach half a million people. They're going to consider what you're saying and they're going to look into it and they're going to go, whoa. Do you really think that there's some fucking vine that you can take from the jungle that allows you to communicate with the spirit world? I feel some responsibility in this area.

Let's explain to people what it does for noobs, for people who are not aware of what ayahuasca is. The first thing I'd like to say is that ayahuasca, and as a matter of fact, all psychedelics, are very serious business. I personally do not believe that psychedelics are appropriate for recreational activity. I think if somebody chooses to do that, that's their body, that's their choice, but I don't think it's the right thing to do. We need to treat these amazing substances with respect. And anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know absolutely that the set and setting in which the psychedelic is consumed is as important as the psychedelic itself.

Absolutely. What you are looking for from the experience and the company in which you take it and the reason for which you take it are definitely going to color and affect the experience. And I think it's a mistake to use these powerful agents of consciousness work for recreation. There are other great things for recreation and other great sensual substances, but the psychedelics are not for that purpose. And if somebody wants to have a really bad trip and have truly horrific experiences with psychedelics take it in the wrong set and setting and you can be pretty sure that's going to happen to you sooner or later so i would first thing i would say to people with with all psychedelics is be careful this is this respect respect respect deep respect for this this is uh this is a very serious thing you're engaging on

therefore um find a uh find a space that can be protected. Find somebody who knows what they're doing, who can sit with you and who can oversee this. And bring a ceremony to the table. Let's not just sit down disrespectfully and consume the substance. Let's bring a ceremonial aspect to it. And I would say with ayahuasca, I know that quite a number of people now have started to get the ingredients on the internet and brew up their ayahuasca. I honestly think that's a mistake. There are people who are enormously experienced working with ayahuasca. They are the shamans from the Amazon. More and more Westerners are being trained by those shamans. Those Westerners are returning to Western countries and are creating a new form of

shamanism relevant to the urban and industrial context of the of the west if you really want to work with ayahuasca seek out somebody like that better still if you can if you can get the funds together go down to brazil or go down to peru and work with the masters but but how do you find the masters if you want to do that um well it's all word of mouth there's a there is a huge network i'm I'm often reminded of sort of underground sects at the end of the Roman Empire, like the Gnostics, you know, being persecuted by mainstream Christianity, where everything was done by word of mouth. It's like that with ayahuasca now. Do some serious research on the subject and you will find your way to the right people. There are some charlatans working in this field. There are in all fields.

But there are also some very good people. And do some serious research first and look into the subject and find the right person, somebody who's deeply experienced, who understands the vine and work with them. And you can be sure you're going to have a much more worthwhile experience. Whatever series of events led you to go there and take those substances and have these visionary experiences and then relay them, do you ever feel as if you were compelled, that you were brought to it like this is,

like you have a purpose? Do you feel that way? No. If so, it's like the rest of the course of my life, a series of accidents. Like I flew into that city in northern Ethiopia in 1983 and found myself in front of a monk who said he had the Ark of the Covenant behind him. It turned the direction of my life. And, OK, I decided that after I published Underworld, which was my last book on the lost civilization issues, I had always been interested in human origins.

And that's why I decided to write Supernatural. But when I got into the subject I found that the story didn't get interesting until 50,000 years ago and it got interesting because of psychedelics and then so it was an accident that led me to that then well obviously the next research conclusion was that I had to go take some psychedelics and to do so in a shamanic setting and learn about it so I I it was a series of accidental decisions kind of led me led me to that process. So I guess I don't feel called or chosen, but I but but I found myself in the hot seat. Do you feel obligated, though, because you know so much about it?

I feel obligated, I feel and I feel a responsibility, which is which is to, is to share with others that these, that these agents can be transformational, and that and that they can be incredibly helpful, but that they are also extremely powerful and that they must be treated with respect. And they're real. And here's the thing. Everyone is running around looking for magic. Everyone is running around looking for a religious experience.

You can have that. You really can. It is a real thing. It doesn't care whether you believe in it or don't believe in it. It's not dogmatic. It is a legit thing. And if you take it, you'll have an experience that you cannot believe is real and available. You cannot believe that it's so easy that you drink this substance and all of a sudden you literally enter into some different dimension. Yeah, that's right. It is real. And that's why it's really not a matter for intellectual speculation. It's a direct experience that one can have, and then what you make of the experience is really what matters. It's almost like the people who ridicule it,

you know, when people mock mushrooms, I even talked to Michio Kaku, who's this amazing physicist and this really brilliant guy. And I was on the Opie and Anthony show, and I asked him, have you ever done mushrooms? And he said like I was a fool. He was acting like I was a fool, like I was a silly person. No, I need my mind to be intact and all this stuff so I can work on physics. And since he's never done mushrooms, how can he know what it does to his mind?

This is prejudice at work. I'm like, my God, man. What if it if it was real if it was real would you trust me would you if if i told you that there was some real thing and you take it and you're going to be in communication with some insanely wise entity from some parallel or constantly surrounding you dimension would you just try would you just try it you convinced that's the problem that we're talking about here is because uh the michio kaku he is a genius super genius conditioned and so now imagine if a genius came in contact with something because right now this spirit whatever you want to call it it's right now the majority of a lot of the

people it's contacting are like 16 year olds and trailers who are like playing xbox yeah it's like i am trying to communicate yeah high level information why are you sending me you need to be a kid to be to be fair i have to i have to say that that um that i'm not sure that's the case with ayahuasca no i think that's mushrooms for quite a whole number of reasons. Mushrooms for sure, but it's not the case with ayahuasca. It's too difficult. Yeah, ayahuasca is really a mission. I mean, you have to brace yourself. Ayahuasca is hard work.

Ayahuasca will make you vomit. It will give you diarrhea. They call it the purge in the Amazon, and it is an enormously effective purgative agent, take my word for it. We still haven't explained to the noobs, to people who really have no idea what we're talking about, what ayahuasca is, is an orally active version of DMT,

and that these amazing people from, how far does it date back? How many thousands of years? There's proved archaeological evidence for the use of ayahuasca going back more than 4,000 years in the Amazon. And so somehow another 4 000 years ago out of hundreds of thousands of different plants right they figured out i combined the vine of one with the leaves of another and sophisticated piece of chemistry that they're doing explain to people what it is so the ayahuasca consists of three ingredients one of

them is water the medium in which it's brewed. And the other two are a leaf. That leaf is from a plant called Cicotria viridis is the botanical name. They call it chacruna in the Amazon. And that leaf contains pharmacologically pure dimethyltryptamine. It contains DMT. Which your own body makes. Which your own body makes.

And with that, with DMT, you have a problem because DMT is not orally active. And the reason that DMT is not orally active is that we have an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase. And monoamine oxidase switches off DMT on contact. what they did in the amazon jungle was that they found out of actually there's you're right there's 150 000 different species of plants and trees in the amazon they found the one other that contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that's what the vine contains the vine actually does not contain the psychedelic ingredient it contains the ingredient that allows the psychedelic to become orally active so do you think they just ate the two of them at the same time once and had some crazy experience and went, whoa, write this down? When I've asked shamans about this, they all say the

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

predates definitely predates metal yeah no doubt about that it's an amazing thing that they've combined then do you think that it's not orally active because it's in so many different plants that if it was that people would just be eating and getting high on DMT all the time? Could be so. Nature is our friend in these matters. Nature looks after us, and that may be the case, that it's not so widely distributed. The mystery is that it is present in quite a lot, actually, and that mixed with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor,

you end up with an orally active substance. And would that work if you wanted to? And I, of course, 100% agree with you that you should go to a shaman if you're going to do this experience. But if you did have that leaf that you were talking about and just a classic MAO inhibitor, whatever it was, and you took that and ate the leaf, would you then have the experience? You would. It's very dangerous, though. Yeah, it's kind of dodgy to do. But there are what they call ayahuasca analogs,

and even pharmahuasca is being spoken of now, which does precisely that, which uses a pharmacological MOAI with DMT. I think personally we don't need to go there because nature has provided us with this beautiful and incredible possibility in the ayahuasca brew in these two different plants. Interestingly, it's not impossible to drink ayahuasca legally in the United States because the battle is already being fought here. In Brazil, the ayahuasca shamanism has come out of the jungle and into the cities, and it's taken form of several what you could call syncretic churches, which are mixing elements of Christianity with elements of traditional

shamanism so the best known are the santo deme and the unia de vegetal which both use ayahuasca as their sacrament i've sat down with the unia de vegetal group in brazil and drunk ayahuasca they were the most charming thorough professional hard-working people i could ever have hoped to meet they bring their children to meet, they bring their children to the sessions. They start their children on ayahuasca at the age of 14. They have a completely different view of psychedelics to the view that we have. They believe that it's a really helpful and important experience for humanity to have this. And fortunately, the government of Brazil agrees with them, and it doesn't persecute them for doing this. So they

have formed uh established churches and those churches have members in the united states and i think it started in new mexico the matter was taken up to the supreme court and the supreme court said yes if you're a member of the union de vegetal you can drink ayahuasca legally now that actually for somebody who wants to work with ayahuasca is something that i would recommend i I personally don't, I'm not drawn to establish churches of any kind. I believe that spirituality doesn't require a church and a hierarchy. But the fact is that the Unia de Vegetal and the Santo Demi both know what they're doing with ayahuasca.

They absolutely know what they're doing, and they are present in the United States, and they are drinking ayahuasca legally in the United States. Strassman told me he met with them in New Mexico, and he said they were all wearing outfits, and they're drinking ayahuasca and singing songs about Jesus. And he's like, they're on these really, really strong ayahuasca trips, and they're singing songs about Jesus.

And he was like, what the fuck are you people doing down here? It's such a strange hybrid of things it's a very strange trojan horse hybrid um but but um i mean interestingly enough if we if we separate christ off from the monstrous bureaucracy called the church uh you do find an interesting spiritual teacher uh at at work and and I suspect through ayahuasca, they're getting closer to the true spiritual teachings. And more important, ayahuasca is not mediated by a priesthood. Ayahuasca is your own direct experience of the spirit realm. That's really important. Whereas in most mainstream religions, the priesthood is telling you what to think.

They are the intermediary between us and the divine. In the case of ayahuasca, the brew is the intermediary, and it plugs us straight into the divine. It sounds like a badass church to join. I used to love taking acid in college and reading the New Testament. That was one of my favorite things, is getting really, really high, tripping and then reading the Gospels. Because it is a very, very psychedelic text. The Book of John, it's hard enough to read when you're sober. But when you're tripping, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh.

What is that? Then you start thinking, someone wrote this. Like, this wasn't, you know, someone really meant this when they wrote it. A long time ago. Yeah, a long time. And it's very, very trippy. So I can totally understand how being on ayahuasca, from what you described the experience as, and mixing that with Christ symbols could be pretty amazing.

Well, along the line with McKenna thought, do you ever, you're familiar with John Marco Allegro's work and the whole idea of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Yeah, the second mushroom and the cross. Yeah, yeah, very much so. And again, this has been, this is another thing that has been erased from history. But the fact of the matter is that if you go into early Christianity, what you find is a mushroom cult. No doubt about it whatsoever. No doubt about it whatsoever.

No doubt about it. Of course. In fact, there are even depictions of the tree in the Garden of Eden, and those depictions show a mushroom. They show specifically an Amanita muscaria mushroom, not a psilocybin. And Amanita muscaria, also a hallucinogenic mushroom. And Amanita muscaria, also a hallucinogenic mushroom. So, you know, when the entity called, you know, Yahweh or Jehovah or whatever he calls himself, you know, drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he was driving them out of the Garden of Eden because they'd done a mushroom trip. Totally makes sense. And then the apple.

The apple, even the word for apple also means red, and that the mushroom, the Amanita muscaria was a red mushroom. Yeah. And that this is what they ate. I mean, it makes sense, the food of the gods, you know, and the forbidden fruit. It makes total sense. And actually, I don't believe that we can understand any spirituality without dealing with altered states of consciousness. without dealing with altered states of consciousness. This is again something that's been lost in the modern world. You don't find in most of the mainstream religions much altered state of consciousness going on. But if you go back to the origins,

you find altered states of consciousness are deeply involved. And I'm not saying that those altered states of consciousness were always caused by psychedelics. There's other ways to get into deeply altered states of consciousness were always caused by psychedelics. There's other ways to get into deeply altered states of consciousness, including starving yourself, fasting, austerity, certain kinds of rhythmic dancing, but definitely altered states of consciousness were involved. So in the case of Christianity, it's St. Paul on the Damascus Road. You know, he has this blinding revelation which completely turns his life around in a totally different direction. Benny Shannon, who's the professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has made a very powerful case that Moses in front of the

burning bush is really a psychedelic experience that's being described there. You're sitting in front of this bush and it's kind of moving and glowing and a voice is coming out of it and speaking to you. It's a very psychedelic experience. And he even further argues that Moses may have been drinking an ayahuasca analog, Syrian rue and mimosa hostilis, I think. These are two prans which contain the same ingredients as are found in the Amazon, you know, the DMT and the MOAI, which grow in the Middle East. So that's, you know So that's possible too.

I've even heard scholars connect the acacia tree or the acacia bush with a potential source of psychedelic experience because apparently it's rich in dimethyltryptamine. Some acacias are. And a burning bush. Somehow or another, they had synthesized DMT from this and burned it, and then he has this experience. So they're calling it a burning bush.

Well, sort of. You know what I mean? If this bush that is common to that area actually has DMT in it, it's amazing. The whole thing becomes different. And so you begin to realize that when you scratch the mainstream religions, you get down to base ground before the money men and the bureaucrats stepped in and took it over. You find visionary experiences are at the heart of it.

They're at the essence of it. And then later on, those visionary experiences become banned and illegal and nobody's ever allowed to have them again. Now, I want to go back to something you said earlier that you said you have problems with technology. Now, I want to go back to something you said earlier, that you said you have problems with technology. And I think sort of a lot of people subscribe to the idea that technology sort of, even though it brings people together and it connects people, it's sort of pushing people apart, too. And it's making people become sort of desensitized to a lot of things. And they alienate themselves and sit at home and play video games. And do you ever consider the possibility that technology is a life form in and of itself?

Do you ever consider the possibility that we are somehow locked in some symbiotic relationship to we are the worker bees creating this new life form? And that technology, artificial intelligence, which we're absolutely working on creating, will eventually be the next stage. Something that's not hindered by the monkey flesh that really cannot evolve as quickly as the technology can. I see no reason why that should not be the case. I think that since I personally believe that consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is an independent entity which chooses to immerse itself in physical form, I don't see why that entity shouldn't choose to immerse itself in mechanical form either. In any highly organized system,

I don't see why consciousness should not manifest through that system. Why are we thinking that it only is going to work in a collection of bacteria and cells? You know, this bag of bacteria is the only one that works. Covered with symbiotic, you know, relationship between who knows how many different types of things in your body. E. coli and all these different things on your skin and viruses that you carry for your entire life. Yeah. Have you seen the

it's on the internet, it's a video where they took the two artificial intelligence machines and let them have a conversation. Yes, they start lying to each other. They start lying. I haven't seen that. Yeah, it's hilarious. It's amazing. But within a minute, they're talking about God.

Within a minute, these things are talking about God. And that was the first time I realized that, oh, you know, I bet that our idea of this robot that people make is more like Terminator. You know what I mean? This kind of like emotionless death machine. Yes, exactly. But maybe if something's super intelligent, the first thing these machines are going to start considering is their source. And I think, oh, the humans made this, and they're going to think, who made the humans, and where did these ideas come from? But they're going to process the ideas we're kicking around here at a mega speed, and that's going to produce the new religion, or that's going to produce the next big whatever.

Jesus is going to be a robot. The next thing is going to be a machine. See, I just don't have any problem at all with the notion of consciousness incarnating in a machine. That seems to me perfectly reasonable. And besides, there's many machine-like functions of the human body. I mean, we are machines too. Yeah, we are machines.

There's a video we've talked about before about watching traffic go back and forth on a high-speed camera, slow motion or sped up rather throughout the day, that it looks just like cells and blood cells going down an artery. Definitely. And, you know, it's very interesting. I mean, you get to the issue of the origins of life. And, of course, you're touching on deep religious issues. So were we created in some way?

that manifests organization and life wherever it can as a medium in which consciousness can immerse itself. And that this may take many different forms and shapes, but the key that was driving it is consciousness and the need for consciousness to manifest on the physical plane. I mean, I'll make a trivial example, but I think all of us have had this experience, with our computers, where somehow there's some kind of interaction between you and your computer in some ways. It seems that I remember once I had it was it was the most curious thing. I had just got a new computer and my old computer had increasingly annoyed me because when I was saving and when I had finished the document on Microsoft Word, it told me that I'd made new changes, which I needed to save, which I hadn't done. It kept saying, do you want to save the changes that you've just made? And I hadn't done that. And I, and finally with other glitches on the machine, it got so annoying. I decided to get myself another

computer and that computer was working fine. And I was sitting in front of it one day and I was thinking how awful it would be if it started manifesting that same fault and instantly the same fault came up on my computer it did that so i i couldn't help feeling that's a shitty microsoft coding yeah that's just a piece but it was reacting to nevertheless the way it reacted to my thought right was was odd and and um you know i i animals most people most most people would argue perhaps humans have a soul, but animals don't have a soul. I think we're all soul. I think soul consciousness is the essence of everything. And I think it manifests in all forms.

We're just incredibly lucky that we have manifested in human bodies because we've got this body with its equipment is an incredible opportunity for learning and growing and developing. And we've got a much better opportunity to learn and grow and develop than a fruit fly or a cockroach does. Have you ever looked in any of Rupert Sheldrake's work? Yes, I know Rupert. Remarkable man. Fascinating work. And the idea that everything has some sort of memory to it. Yes. And perhaps even a consciousness to it. Yeah.

That's the morphogenetic field. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. And he's doing really good science on really metaphysical subjects right now. One of the few people who's doing that. So he's looked at phenomena like the sense of being stared at. People know when they're being stared at, even when they can't see the person who's staring at them. And the phenomenon of animals knowing when their master is going to come home,

even when the master himself doesn't quite know yet. So he's studying that. He's studying that in a very scientific way, and he's producing statistically significant results, which show that these phenomena definitely do exist. Boy, do people fight him tooth and nail. I've read some of the critiques of his work. It's so angry.

People get so frustrated. People get very angry because, again, it's kind of throwing the existing paradigm upside down, throwing it in the air and saying that we're all connected by these morphogenetic fields. And it's not showing a perfect connection either. It's showing a measurable one. It's showing there's something there. There's something there. And it's probably increasing and evolving, just like our ability to communicate was grunts and noises and

then eventually evolved into the written word and you know and now cds and mp3s i mean it's it's all evolving and our ability to sense when people are staring at us is probably something that's evolving there's probably energy that comes off of you when you look at me and i just i can i can sense it when i'm looking away yeah it makes sense i mean it, it totally makes sense. Sure. It's so strange. It's so strange that these are all things that people so struggle to consider. And then if you do talk about them, and you're a serious guy, but if you talk about them, you run into Kooksville. Now all of a sudden you're, I mean, you went so deep into Kooksville

that you wrote a book about Mars. I did, yeah. And this is where you really take a chance. Yeah, I lost a lot of my readers there. Did you? Yes. Really? Yes. Really? Yeah.

But, you know, it seemed to me an interesting subject that was worthy of exploration. That book was called The Mars Mystery. It was written with Robert Beauvoir and John Grigsby. Now, this is the one. I bought it, but I did not read this one. Does this have a lot to do with Cydonia and the face on Mars and all that stuff? Actually, much less than you'd think. But we try to set those in context.

I do think Sidonia is extremely interesting. My part of that book was mainly about cosmic cataclysms. It's clear that the planet Mars has been subjected to the most horrific disaster. And that there is some scientific evidence which suggests this may have been pretty recent, like the last 20,000 years. I mean, half of the planet is like a mile higher than the other half. So imagine you take a little ball and you cut a line around its equator

and then you peel off the outer layer of the lower half and then you leave the upper half as it was. There's a cliff a mile high, runs all the way around Mars. And something dramatic and disastrous happened to that planet. There was definitely water on that planet, flowing water, and something took it away. Very, very horrible cosmic cataclysm occurred, struck by a gigantic asteroid or comet, most likely. And we have these odd ruins, or what look like ruins, which NASA behaves very oddly about on the planet Mars. And I just think it's an extremely interesting mystery,

and I decided to try to put my mind to work on this mystery and see if I could add anything to the debate. I thought it's interesting until... Huh? What do you mean behaves oddly sorry sorry which nasa behaves oh yes well well because because um uh nasa is um has consistently ridiculed the notion that there might be um there might be intelligently created artifacts on mars and that seems to be a most unscientific proposition. We have, all we have are photographs. And on the basis of those photographs, it's not good to assume that they are monuments or that they are not monuments. We need to keep an open mind. Take,

take the, we've been talking earlier about the Yonaguni underwater monument. I mean, you can actually bring two geologists to that monument. You can put them in front of it for half an hour and they'll come away with completely different opinions about what it is so so how can we form really useful opinions on the basis of photography alone you know who fucks this up hoagland well that guy goes too deep he gets too crazy richard hoagland he's uh one of the guys who's invested a huge chunk of his life to proving that sidydonia is an artificially created complex. And he makes these giant leaps and these weird connections where he measures random distances between points

and shows that they have a direct correlation between distances that can be measured in Egypt and the Giza Plateau. But you measure them, you try to follow where he's going, You're like, God, this is just riddled with confirmation bias. It's riddled with this idea that you're trying to find this connection. You know, it's like, yeah, there's some stuff there that looks unusual. The face, well, the face kind of looks like a mountain to me, but what's odd is the shape of it.

It is odd that it's kind of symmetrical. I actually beg to differ. I think that Richard Hoagland's work's important, And I think he's shown great courage in putting his neck on the line. Whether he's right or whether he's wrong, this is a subject that's worthy of exploration. I certainly agree with that. But I don't agree with how he approaches things sometimes. Sometimes what happens is you get this polarization. When you get extreme academic positions, no, we will not listen to this.

We will not believe this. We do not accept any of this. It's total rubbish. It tends to make you more extreme on the other side as well. You get… Crazy from the resistance. Yeah, and you need to keep on pushing. So he needs someone behind him giving him a back rub.

Settle down, Richard. Let's not get crazy. It's a fucking pyramid! In my opinion, Richard is a good man and a good researcher. I think he's done important work on Mars. And those who put Richard down may be eating their words in 10 or 20 years' time. That's me. I'm ready. I'm ready to eat my words.

I'm a comedian. I'm sorry. I'm a professional shit talker. I can't help it. And there's something to be poked fun at, especially a guy who believes there's a face on Mars and all that. There's some of the things that I think are very compelling, five-sided pyramids or some other structures. I'm not saying he's right or he's wrong. I'm saying the question needed to be asked,

and it needed to be asked forcefully, because it's up against resistance. And it needed to be asked in a way that would engage the public imagination. And when you say what you said earlier, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all. If you say that half of Mars is literally destroyed a mile lower, well, obviously something cataclysmic happened. And then the absolute proof,

they've already found that there's water on Mars and there has been flowing rivers. There's all sorts of evidence of that. Why not structures? Shit, if there's structures here, how amazing would it be if just 50,000, 60,000 years ago there was a goddamn civilization right up there on Mars for real. And that

we were existing at the same time they were existing. And that we had parallel development. And could there be some interaction? This is is this is an interesting question it's a question worth asking it's a question and and and i'm i'm glad that somebody was prepared to devote you know half of his life to to exploring and investigate even if he's wrong i'm glad that he was it's not even that he's wrong it's just he goes crazy art bell on you you know where he absolutely knows and this has been proven and you know you're like like i say it's the it's the polarization effect it totally makes sense i mean i i would imagine it's got to be incredibly difficult to be taken

seriously with any of this stuff and you have shown incredible bravery in putting forth all this stuff because i mean i've taken a lot of shit for this stuff. I'm sure you have, man. A lot. I mean, the worst was really being set up by the BBC in 1999. I saw that. I was going to bring that up if it came up. I mean, in a way, I suppose it's a kind of oblique honor that BBC Horizon, which is their flagship science program, chose to spend three quarters of a million dollars destroying my reputation

but that's what that's what happened now six weeks before i heard from them i got a call from a friend in television and he said graham you're going to get a call from horizon and they're going to ask you to appear in interview on a show about you, and here's my advice. Say no. They're going to stitch you up. The whole thing is intended from the beginning as an operation to destroy you. What's the motivation? And you will not get a fair hearing.

And he said, the best thing you can do is just not do that show. So when they rang me up, I immediately said yes. What was their motivation for destroying you? Well, the motivation was clear, and I learned about this afterwards, which was a group of academics they rang me up i immediately said yes what was their motivation for destroying you well the motivation was clear and i learned about this afterwards which was a a group of academics from various universities in britain had written to the bbc and said this man hancock is leading our students to question our archaeology and he's totally irresponsible and he's just writing

popular books for the public but he's having such an impact he needs to be stopped and we need a program about him which really shows how full of shit he is basically that's what we're done so and that was the agenda of the program from the beginning was not to give a fair hearing to the ideas that i'd explored but to demonstrate that i was full of shit and it was very difficult to get any kind of fairness in that situation especially when in the cutting room dirty tricks were played and that's why Robert Bavala was also on that program with me and he and I took the BBC to the Broadcasting Standards Commission and it was the first time in 35 years of broadcasting of Horizon that they were found at fault they were found to have produced an unfair program.

We listed ten points of unfairness. Only one of them was accepted as unfair by the Broadcasting Commission. Nevertheless, it was the first time in the history of that program that they were actually found to have been deliberately unfair. Do they have to make a retraction? They were obliged to re-edit the program

and produce a second version of it, which was fairer in quite a number of ways. I actually think that the other nine points we raised were right as well. But the tenth one was the one that we really caught them out on. What was that on? Well, this was to do with the Orion Correlation and the fact that they had not presented our side of the story. They had simply presented the academic side of the story and they had not allowed us to answer. This was unfair. So the impression was created that we had no answer

to this objection. I saw the documentary or whatever you want to call it. It was horrible. It was a real attack piece. But then I also read your response to it, which really kind of covered every single area that they, and then you read your response, go oh wow yeah i mean it's really amazing that they were able to put together that that sort of a a biased bullshit piece on you but my response you know was read by a tiny fraction of the people who actually who actually saw the show and and that that show actually did have a devastating effect still today to this day some on somebody put it on my message board when i said that you were going to be on the podcast when it was being discussed somebody put it on the message board but luckily someone else had your your response to it and you know then it was

john west actually pointed out at the time because he wrote a letter to the bbc to the bbc were crow you know they were trying to say oh well only one of the 10 points was unfair so that's not that's not too bad and and the point john west made was, no, that's the only point that you were able to really get caught out on. It's like they caught Al Capone out on tax evasion, but it doesn't mean he was innocent of all the other things he was accused of. John Anthony West gets stuck on the outside because he doesn't have a degree, right? Is that what's going on with him?

Yeah, he's not a professionally qualified Egyptologist, but he's the best Egyptologist I know. It's brilliant. His Magical Egypt DVD series is incredible. Wonderful. John's a great man. I watched that DVD series no less than 20 times over and over. My wife was getting, she was yelling at me.

She was like, I can't believe you're watching Magical Egypt again. She was like, you're crazy. You're a crazy person. I'm like, this is fascinating. Do you know what they knew? Do you know how much they knew? This is incredible. John West has done fantastic work on Egypt.

And anybody who's traveling to Egypt, get hold of John West's Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt, which is by far, by a planetary distance, the best guidebook that's ever been written on Egypt. Because that will plunge you into the mystery of Egypt in a way that no other book does. Yeah, his work is incredible. real quick about Mr. Hancock you go and do ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon and deep sea diving and dangerous he's a real Indiana Jones man that's what's what I was going to say. This is Indiana Jones. For real. You're a prime candidate for someone who's probably going to get sucked into some kind of vortex or something. You might just vanish sometime.

It might just happen. It is an incredible resume when you think about it. The fact that you, the description of those dives, man, about the current. But the BBC thing, the reason I bring that up is because it's not as though you're just studying foggy pictures or you're just looking at or reading information and then coming up with some idea. You're down under the water looking at this stuff firsthand. I've walked the walk. I've walked my life on the line, and I've made an honest and sincere attempt to provide some balance to the grotesquely imbalanced picture of our history that is presented by mainstream archaeology. This is what I fundamentally see my role as being. You know, I'm portrayed by the BBC as this person, you know, who's selling these wild theories to the public through, I don't

know, some kind of glib magic. But actually, what I see myself as is somebody who's saying, hang on, there might have been another way. Things could have been different. The way that we're being told things were, there's enough problems with that to raise some questions. And I'm going to look at those questions, and I'm going to document them and examine them and let's see what they come to. I do not insist that there was a lost civilization. I think it's highly probable. I think it has been missed by the mainstream and so what I tried to do was provide balance to a very biased picture. Rather than try to completely overthrow the picture, I'm simply trying to balance it and And that's never been seen. And I feel in that area I was treated very unfairly. But hey, the BBC Horizon experience was a really good learning experience for me. I needed my ego taking down a peg or two.

That's a psychedelic experience in and of itself, right? In and of itself, yeah. So I was ready for ayahuasca to kick me up the ass. Well, thank you very much for joining us, man. I can't thank you enough. This was such a huge treat for me. Like I said, your book, The Fingerprints of the Gods, really just changed the way I looked at everything.

Changed the way I looked at human history, changed the way I looked at the academic study of human history and what people are willing to believe and not believe and how much they're willing to throw everything that they've learned aside or push it aside or everything that they're teaching. It's amazing. It's amazing work. For people that are skeptical, you need to just look at some of the photographs, look at some of the Baalbek, is that what it's called? Bill Barhydt Baalbek in Lebanon.

Yeah. Bill Barhydt 1,-ton megaliths. You just need to see them. How tall are they? They're like insanely tall, like 10 feet tall. Oh, no, much more than that. The huge megalith in Balbeck's got to be 100 feet long. 100 feet long, one stone.

One stone. And where was it cut from? It weighs more than 1,000 tons. Not far, not far. That was quarried quite locally. But 1,000 tons. Not far, not far. That was quarried quite locally. But 1,000 tons, you know, come on. And what is the explanation, the academic explanation for that? They say that that temple was built by the Romans as a temple of Jupiter,

and that the Romans moved those big stones. I would say that what happened was that a much older culture created that big stone structure, and on top of it the romans built the temple of jupiter so 10 000 plus years ago something happened i i believe so what i think was the end of something uh what 12 and a half thousand years ago was the end not the beginning that was that was uh that was the time when the meltdown of the ice age was at one of its most extreme periods the actual meltdown of the ice age was at one of its most extreme periods. The actual meltdown of the ice age took 10,000 years to unfold. But within that 10,000 years, there were three or

four episodes of gigantic flooding where you had 30 foot rise of sea levels very rapidly, virtually overnight. You consider what a 30 foot sea level rise would do to our civilization today would wipe out every coastal city. mean look america is still reeling from hurricane katrina uh imagine what would happen if every coastal city went under 30 feet of water um it would is enough to destroy any civilization so it was a climate change thing you think it was yeah it was certainly a climate change but but but you know the the cataclysmic explanation of um ice caps is to do with pole shifts and to do with with the mechanism called earth crust displacement which was first proposed by charles hapgood and i go into this

at some length in in fingerprints of the gods the notion that that the outer crust of the earth rather like the sort of skin of an orange could move move around the fruit, the inner core of the earth, that the crust could move. And therefore, in Hapgood's theory, ice forms on areas of the crust that are close to one or other pole. That makes sense. The poles are cold. But when the crust shifts, it moves that cold area into a warm area, moves it closer to the equator, makes all the ice melt, and meanwhile, new ice starts to form on the new pole. So that theory explains the meltdown of the ice age, not as a result of climate change, but as a result of cataclysmic earth movements.

And that explains also ancient maps of Iceland and Greenland. It does. It does. I think the maps are a very important question, which I do not see any academic providing a good answer to. There are maps. Almost always these maps turn out to be copies of earlier maps. The Piri Reis map is a famous example. He was a Turkish admiral, and he tells us actually in his own handwriting on the fragment of the map that has survived that he based his it was a world map we've only got one corner of it that he based it on more than a hundred source maps none of which have survived this was the case with the Orontius Phineas map and some of the Mercator maps as well they were drawing on ancient maps

which no longer which didn't come down to us. So these maps were drawn within relatively recent history, within the last thousand years, but they were copying much older maps. Many thousand years old. Many thousand years older. And so it's very interesting when we find anomalies on these maps. For example, our culture discovered Antarctica in 1818. Before that, maps that were being drawn around 1800, they showed an empty

hole where Antarctica is. But if you go back to the 1500s, the 1400s, when they were copying these older maps that haven't come down to us, you find Antarctica on every single one of them. That's incredible. On every single one of them. And it's kind of a bit bigger than it is now. And it comes close to and almost touches South America, just as it did during the last ice age. You find off the coast of Ireland a little circular island with the legend on it. It's called High Brazil. That island is about 120 miles west of the West Irish coast.

of the West Irish coast. If you look at sea level rise, you find that 12,000 years ago and earlier, an island of exactly that size and exactly that shape existed in exactly that spot. And it was covered by rising sea levels 12,000 years ago. And it shows up on this map like a ghost. And that has to mean that somebody was around 12 000 years ago who had at least developed sufficient technology to explore the world and map it

accurately and a flood killed all that and a flood destroyed it all you're convinced of the flood like i say i'm not i'm not here with a belief system um i'm the evidence i'm here with anomalies and problems in the mainstream in the mainstream model and i'm the evidence i'm here with anomalies and problems in the mainstream in the mainstream model and and what the evidence suggests to me very very strongly is that those cataclysmic earth changes at the end of the ice age and even regardless whether a pole shift or a crustal displacement was involved nobody can dispute that the meltdown of the ice age was a cataclysmic event were you excited i? I'm sorry. It involved huge amounts of volcanic activity, and it involved these tremendous releases of water.

So the ice would actually accumulate in glacial lakes for thousands of years. It would melt, slowly, slowly melt. And then suddenly, this is the mainstream model, suddenly the banks of the ice dam that held back that water would burst, and the whole mass of 4,000 years of meltwater would pour down into the world ocean in one moment. And the water descending from the top of the ice cap would reach speeds of 600 miles an hour,

and a wave height of close to 1,000 feet. It then tears across the landscape that lies below the ice cap. And you see this still, the scab lands of new jersey the the finger lakes of new york state these are the results of those massive outburst floods that then tear of tear across the land and then pour into the water and whoosh up goes sea level whoa holy shit could you imagine a thousand foot high wave just tearing across the entire continent? It happened. It definitely happened.

It definitely happened. Mainstream science is not in disagreement on that. How excited were you about the discovery of Atlantis? Do you buy into that 100%? Well, Atlantis for me is one of thousands of traditions about a high episode of human civilization in remote antiquity destroyed when that civilization angered the gods. That is a universal story. It's told everywhere. And the Atlantis story is better understood as part of that worldwide tradition rather than viewed in isolation. It's very interesting. The Atlantis

story comes to us from the Greek philosopher Plato. He is the earliest source of the Atlantis myth, if it's a myth. And he sets out information about Atlantis in two of his dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. And what he says is that this information came to him through an elder figure who's called Solon, a Greek lawmaker who existed about a hundred years before the time of Plato, but was in Plato's family. And the information had been passed down to Plato. Solon had received the information from priests in Egypt. They told him about Atlantis. This is how Plato tells the story. And when Plato tells the story, he actually puts a date on the submergence of Atlantis. And that date is 9,000 years before the time of Solon. That means 9,600 BC.

That means 11,500 years ago. And we're right there in that window when the Ice Age is melting down and hell is being unleashed on Earth. And if Plato made it all up, I really need to understand how he got the date right. It's amazing. What a beautiful way of putting it that we are a species with amnesia. And it's really almost, I mean, when you stop and think about it, how does one keep records over 12, 15,000 years with giant cataclysmic events where people are, for many generations, scratching and scrounging just trying to stay alive like animals? Very difficult. And monumental architecture may be one way of doing it.

You know, the notion that the pyramids and the Sphinx were laid out on the ground to model an ancient sky and thus define a date using four constellations, which were Leo, Aquarius, Draco, and Orion. Using those four constellations to define a date seems like a kind of exotic idea, but we have that right here in the United States in the Hoover Dam. There is a star map built into the architecture of the Hoover Dam, and that star map freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment the Hoover Dam was completed. And the architecture of the Hoover Dam. And that star map freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment the Hoover Dam was completed. And the purpose of putting that star map there by the man who originated it

was precisely this. He said, in 10,000 years time, if our civilization is lost and our language is lost and nobody can read our documents, when they come across this structure by looking at the star map, they will be able to know when it was created

god damn how crazy is that and it's all based on the procession of the equinoxes which gives you this universal beautifully mathematical cycle and we gotta think that if people think like that today they must have thought like that back then

if the civilization had in some totally different and alien way than our own I mean so alien that their writing was images you know egypt is so that's one of the things that really got out of john anthony west's dvd series was he really kind of gets you to understand how different their culture and society was than ours the way they just the way they read things they read things you know it was all like shell nike you know reebok i mean they saw things in images that was their language their language was images it's such a bizarre and different way to even think about existence yeah very different and and and and uh the important thing for me to remember about the ancient Egyptians is this was a culture that devoted its best minds, you know, for 3,000 years to considering the mystery of life, what this is about, and the mystery of death.

We lost so much in that burning of the Library of Alexandria, right? Goodness knows what we lost. Who knows what they knew. The whole heritage of the human race went down in that. So incredible. lost who knows what the whole heritage of the human race went down in that so incredible we're left with this framework these these stone things to try to deconstruct the past and and even people i mean they have a certain amount of information and they say we're done we're done we figured it out we've taken it out yeah just the idea that they can put a date to it haven't they dated the

pyramids just sort of based on carbon and things that were left behind that doesn't necessarily mean that people didn't move into the pyramids at 2500 bc like do they know the exact date no there's not there's not much to go on um it's you can't carbon date stone but you can carbon date organic material and in the mortar between the stones there's some organic material and the carbon dating on that is really puzzling. It doesn't make the pyramid 12,000 years old, but it makes it 1,000 years older than it's supposed to be at the top and 400 years older than it's supposed to be at the bottom. Go figure that out.

You'd think they'd build from the bottom up, not the other way down. And this says nothing about the core structure of the pyramid. It only says about the outer facade. I don't think we can take the pyramid away entirely from the ancient Egyptians. The ancient Egyptians were massively involved in the pyramid project. But I think the pyramid project is one of those two-phase projects. And the view I put forward is that the original site was laid out around 10,500 BC by the survivors of a lost civilization. The subterranean aspects of the Great Pyramid, specifically the subterranean chamber, the Great Pyramid, specifically the subterranean chamber was created at that time. The gigantic megalithic structures, the valley temple, the so-called

mortuary temples that stand beside the pyramids, which seem so different in terms of their architecture, which have in some cases blocks of stone weighing 200 tons and many blocks of stone weighing 100 tons in them. But this was the first phase. And that then I would suggest what happened was that those survivors of a lost civilization established something like a monastery at Giza. And they then started to recruit from the local population. So that within a generation or two, they were all Egyptians anyway, but they were trained in a system of knowledge and that they kept that system of knowledge close and tight and passed it down for thousands of years.

The idea of knowledge being transmitted for 4,000 years is actually not too difficult to take. It's already happened. We've had that. We have that with some of our existing religions, which go back close to 4,000 years. There's no reason why it shouldn't already happened. We've had that we have that with some of our existing religions which go back close to 4,000 years There's no reason why it shouldn't have happened and then at a certain point this monastic institution Switched Egyptian civilization on with all the high knowledge that they had preserved and that's why it's so perfect at the beginning And no one else was able to do that at that time anywhere else in the world not in the way the Egyptians did

It was quite unique just a magical series of events and yeah i mean the great pyramid is a magical thing it was magical yeah i can't even imagine to climb it five times i've been into i've been into every known chamber and and passageway in the in the great tell me about the king's chamber because that is the freakiest thing of all and for people that don't know they've proven that some of the stones in the king's chamber were from a quarry. How many hundred miles away? Close to 700 miles south. These are like 500 tons, these giant stones. They come from Aswan.

How tall were they? I mean, how much did they weigh? The heaviest stones in the pyramid weigh about 70 tons. 70 tons. So you're talking about the weight of 35 large family cars, roughly. If a large family car weighs two tons, that's 35 of them in the equivalent of the heavier blocks in the Great Barrier Reef. Yeah, and it's between like two tons and like that. Two tons and 70 tons, is that what it is?

What kind of truck would you need now to move a stone? There's trucks that can do that. Oh, yeah, there definitely are. We can do it. We can do it, but it's hard. And to do it again and again and again and again and again and to do it with incredible precision and to align the whole structure that you're building

within three-sixtieths of a single degree of true north, that's really hard to do. And also note, from that quarry to the pyramids, there wasn't a paved road. There wasn't a highway. There wasn't gas stations. So if they've got these 50-ton blocks of solid granite, what are they doing? Are they putting them on boats?

I mean, how are they getting these things 500, do you say 700 miles? They were definitely shipping them down the Nile. That's what they were doing. It's hard to even wrap your head around the fact that people were communicating from 700 miles away that long ago. Right. But they were doing it, moving giant stones into place for some crazy asshole that wanted a huge pyramid. Imagine the people working in the quarry. This crazy bitch wants a 50-ton rock.

You believe we've got to chop this thing up? Are you kidding? I'd like to see the person who tried to talk him out of it at first. There's a few people like, let's think about it. chop this thing up i'd like to see the person who tried to talk him out of it at first like listen man i have a hut it's made out of wood it's awesome you don't need to do this the interesting thing is you know that the the egyptians didn't devote that kind of architecture or energy to their daily lives but their houses were quite simple they they devoted it to their sacred architecture and they they were perfect and everything and everything they did i i i come i come out of all of this just with a sense of the mystery the majesty and the awe of our lost past and and the fact that we do need to know who we are and where we came from we do need to recover our memories part of part of the reason we're so

fucked up is because we just have got no idea what the fuck we're doing. We've woken up in the middle of history. Duncan and I were talking about this before. If there was a time machine, what time would you like to go back? We went back and forth from caveman days, I'd like to see some cavemen, to Egypt. I think I'd like to see Egypt. I would love to see Egypt

in its prime, to see what the fuck was going on there. What was that like when it was in full bloom and the pyramids had just been created and this strange civilization, a super advanced civilization, had just risen far and beyond anything else on the planet. Let's build that time machine right now.

And with that note, thank you very you very much sir this has been an amazing conversation a huge honor and uh please follow graham on twitter it's a double underscore after graham g-r-a-h-a-m double underscore hancock and you got to do the double underscore because if you go to single underscore some asshole has your name you know twitter will give you graham hancock if someone has that there is is another Graham Hancock. Is he a guy? Yeah. Oh, you should ask him. Hook you up.

He is. And the website is GrahamHancock.com. I have my YouTube channel. Oh, you have a YouTube channel? What is that? It's linked through the website. It's GrahamHancock.com channel or something like that. And to get started on Graham, you've got to get this. Fingerprints of the Gods. It's one of my all-time favorite books. If I was leaving and going to go on the space station for the rest of my life, I'd bring that one with me. For sure.

It's amazing. Thank you so much for being here. I cannot thank you enough. This has been an amazing treat that the Internet has brought us together. Thank you. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you, brother. Thanks a lot.

Thanks. Cheers. our conversation. Thank you, brother. Thanks a lot. Thanks. Cheers.