The Joe Rogan Experience - #360 - Graham Hancock

Episode Date: May 23, 2013

Graham Hancock is an English author and journalist, well known for books such as "Fingerprints Of The Gods" and "Entangled"

the Joe Rogan experience powerful Graham Hancock how are you sir I'm good just just fine you've um you've kicked the green bitch yes yes after a 24 year intense relationship intense relationship with the green goddess or the green bitch, depending on what mood she's in, I had to stop. And I've come in for some criticism for this. And I feel it's important to say that I hugely value and love cannabis. I think it's a wonderful herbal ally. And I don't think that I would ever have written my books of historical mystery if I had not encountered cannabis. Rather late in life, I did not smoke any dope until I was 37 years old, and I'm now 62.

Wow. And roughly around about the age of 38, that's when I started getting into historical mysteries. Before that, it was all— Of course, it's total stoner stuff. Absolutely. Before that, it was all current affairs, you know? Right. But suddenly something opened up for me, and I'm very grateful to the herb for that.

And initially, again, I need to emphasize this. I think the problem I eventually ended up having with cannabis, it's not the fault of cannabis. It's the fault of Graham Hancock. I think my relationship became abusive with the herb. It was not initially. Initially, it was something I would do evenings and weekends. I would not try to write while I was actually stoned. I would do my day's work and then chill out in the evening with a pipe or a joint. That was how it was for me for quite a while. And I went through my first big historical mystery book, The Sign and the Seal, which was published in 1992, with that pattern. In other words, I would be smoking only after I downed tools at the end of the evening and I was ready to chill. And that worked fine. But then when I started writing

Fingerprints of the Gods, which was the biggest book I've ever done, a five million copy bestseller all around the world, when I started writing that, I thought I'll experiment. Let's see if I can be stoned and write. And I discovered that I could. I could be stoned and write. And I liked being stoned so much that in a way, it urged me to just write all the time, because then I had this incredibly good reason to be stoned all the time. And it took away all the physical boredom of sitting there in my chair in front of my computer screen. Just everything went away, and I drifted into this space where I could explore ideas and manifest those ideas down on the page. And I literally – that's when I began what was to become ultimately an abusive relationship with cannabis, which is that I would fire up in those days my joint or my pipe at 9 or 10 in the morning.

And I would – I'm a hard worker. I work 16 hours a day very often when I'm writing. So come 2 o'clock the next morning, I'd still be there smoking away. And as the years went by, this became a permanent daily pattern for me, whether I was writing or not. I would be stoned from the moment I got up until the moment I went to bed. And most people who came by my house or talked to me on the phone, they would have had absolutely no idea because I was completely in control. I didn't seem high. I could hold a rational conversation. I was just fine.

And I just felt really good. And this is how it went on for many years. And later on, around about 2005, actually, I think, perhaps a little earlier, one of my kids told me that this stuff, this smoke, is you don't need to have combustion products. Why don't you use a vaporizer? So I bought myself a volcano on the internet. And then I heard that the British government was going to ban the use of, ban all peripherals. So I bought myself two more volcanoes. Volcanoes are quite

expensive, but that shows how dedicated I was. You had to make sure that you covered your bases. I had to make sure that I covered my bases. I had to make sure that I covered my bases. And then I would be vaporizing from 9 in the morning until 2 o'clock the next morning, seven days a week, and increasingly strong strains. And this is one thing that I would say. If we lived in a regime, an irrational regime, where there was no attempt by the government

to police our states of consciousness, we could have much more choice in the kind of cannabis we get hold of. For example, I would have liked to have cannabis with much more choice in the kind of cannabis we get hold of. For example, I would have liked to have cannabis with much more CBD and maybe less THC. But the varieties I was smoking were very, very THC loaded. What's the difference in effect? Well, okay.

I mean, it depends how much you buy into the research on this, but a lot of good science has been done. And the suggestion is that THC can promote or reveal. I don't want to blame the herb for anything. It can reveal certain psychotic tendencies in oneself. And this is the well-known paranoia, which many people associate with smoking cannabis. The CBD is an antipsychotic agent. So the natural herb is balanced with CBD and THC, and it looks after you very well. But where we go into intensive breeding of the herb, focusing on the element that makes you really high, which is the THC, then we get a herb that is somewhat unbalanced as

a result of the interference of humanity. But you get more bang for your buck, you know. That's a very strong herb. And I began to like a particular variety called cheese. I think it's called cheese because it smells like, you know, old socks or Stilton, you know, like a blue cheese. And I found a grower who lived local to me who just had amazing green fingers, and I would buy from him.

And I would sometimes have five or six ounces of the herb in my house because I was blazing through this stuff at a tremendous rate. That's enough where you could get in trouble for dealing. So that's where the paranoia starts to become legitimate, you know, because actually they can break down your door and they can confiscate your home and take away your liberty and fuck you up forever. You know, they can do that. And so every time I heard a ring at the door or, you know, a car came up the street, I would, you know, get paranoid.

And you were high. so that didn't help. And I was high, yeah, and I was high. Did you get paranoid when you were high? Well, this is one of the reasons why. Look, what happened to me was that around about 2003, I started, for reasons of research initially, working with ayahuasca, the vine of souls. This is the powerful psychedelic brew which has been consumed by shamanistic cultures

in the Amazon for thousands and thousands of years. And it's not called the vine of souls for nothing. It's an extraordinary portal into other realms. And in some ways those realms are associated with death and perhaps what waits for us after death. Nobody knows the answer to that, but in ayahuasca you have certain experiences relating to that. And right from the beginning when I started to drink ayahuasca, I mean this sounds nuts to anybody who hasn't done DMT or who hasn't drunk ayahuasca,

but you do meet intelligent entities. And more and more around the world, people drinking ayahuasca are meeting this goddess figure. She might appear as a serpent. She might appear as a woman. She might appear as some kind of panther or jaguar, a very powerful, tough love kind of lady who reveals to you the truth about yourself and just says, you know, you fucking deal with it because that's how you are. And what the truth that was revealed to me from quite early on was my relationship with cannabis had got out of balance and I needed to get it back into balance. And of course, I ignored those messages completely because I was so much in love with

my cannabis relationship. In fact, my wife said that really it was like I had a mistress, you know, who I spent all my time with was the cannabis rather than her. And this went on for many, many years. Now, the paranoia aspect, okay, I'm going to bare my heart here. And, you know, I believe in being honest. The paranoia aspect began to affect my relationship with my beloved partner, Santa, who I just love from the bottom of my heart. And she is the best, the most pure-hearted, generous-spirited, loving lady it's possible to imagine.

I started to develop all kinds of suspicions about her, which were completely groundless. I started to imagine all sorts of stuff were going on. And then I started to act towards her as though those suspicions were real. And all of this was also related to my consumption of cannabis. It was not caused by my consumption of cannabis. I think this is a latent aspect of my own personality. It was being revealed by this over abuse of the cannabis herb. And therefore, I was making my beautiful partner's life a misery sometimes, not every day, but sometimes. And she was patiently putting up with this, but she was suffering.

And we went down to Brazil in October 2011. And if I had been told when we got on that plane and went down to Brazil, that when I came back two weeks later, I would probably never smoke cannabis again. I would have laughed in the face of the person who told me that. But the encounters that I had with the spirit of ayahuasca, whatever that is, I'm willing to accept that there is no spirit of ayahuasca, that it's all something we generate out of our brains. But for me, she manifests like a goddess. And the encounters I had with that – and I do think she's real.

That's just my personal belief system. And those encounters that I had were incredibly powerful and she took me to a place that was something like hell. And she took me to a place that was something like the judgment scene in the ancient Egyptian religion. Now, the judgment scene is a place where your heart is weighed in the scales against the feather of truth and harmony and cosmic justice. And you do not want your heart to be heavy in those scales. You want to be able to look back on your life and say, I did good. I did not add to the misery in the world. I did something worthwhile with this incredible gift of life that the universe gave me.

And everything you've done, every second, every minute of your life is completely transparent. Every thought, every action, everything you did from the moment you became conscious until the moment of your death is laid out before you and there's no hiding from it. Like we're great at creating illusions about our own behavior and persuading ourselves that we're behaving just fine. In the Judgment Hall of Osiris, which is also called the Hall of Mart, where the scene takes place, all of that's stripped away and you confront the truth. And I was put there and I confronted the truth about myself and I saw the way that I was behaving towards my partner and I was shown that this had to stop.

Otherwise I was going to pay a huge price for it. And I had a series of terrifying, terrifying experiences, which my partner Sansa shared with me because we were drinking ayahuasca together. And at a certain point, entities came to her and she had the experience of her heart being pulled out of her chest. And the entity said to her, and she thought she was going to die. And the entity said to her, we're going to do this to you to teach Graham a lesson. And Santa communicated that to me. And I would rank that as probably the single most terrifying night of my entire life. And I've had some terrifying nights. That was just absolutely scared rigid. And I came out of that with a feeling, a very clear feeling. In ayahuasca, we have sharings.

The next day after you've drunk the brew, you share with the rest of the group who you've drunk with the experiences you had the night before as much as you want to share. And what I shared, because I still didn't believe that I could stop smoking cannabis, what I shared was that I was going to change my relationship with cannabis and to get to a place where cannabis was serving me again rather than me serving her. And that's what I believed. But when I got back to England, long flight, what's the first thing I do? I get out my vaporizer, get out my stash, I get out my vaporizer, get out my stash, fire up the vaporizer, and fill a nice bag of vapor. You say it so nostalgically.

Well, I miss it. I miss it. You know, cannabis is such a beautiful, sensual ally if she's used right. So do you think it's just an imbalance issue with the CBD-THC ratio? Well, let me just finish with what happened to me. So I fill up the bag and I'm down there in my basement and I take the first draw and I'm suddenly filled with the most intense feelings of

horror and loathing and it is exactly like I'm back in that space that ayahuasca took me to. And I try a second puff and I can't do it. I physically could not continue. I knew that I just could not continue. I knew that I just could not continue. I expressed the vapor out of the bag. I crumpled up the bag.

I put it away. And the next day, I got rid of several ounces of cannabis. Son! I know. I know. It's terrible. It's a terrible thing to do. But for me, it was the right thing to do.

24 years, nonstop relationship with cannabis, definitely abusing the herb. I had got to the point where the only rational course of action was what I was shown in ayahuasca, which was to stop. And I don't know whether it was because there was way too much THC and not enough CBD or whether it was just me not being responsible for my own behavior. I go around saying that I believe in adult responsibility, and I do. But I don't think I was being responsible for my own behavior. I go around saying that I believe in adult responsibility, and I do, but I don't think I was being responsible. I don't think I was using the herb in a responsible way. I don't think I was using it in a respectful way, and I paid a price for that.

Well, that's very honest and forthcoming of you to talk about it, and it's very uncomfortable for people to discuss mistakes they've made or paths they've gone down that they didn't, for whatever reason, they got caught up in the momentum. They didn't see where it was headed until they hit the wall. It sounds like you have a legitimate chemical reaction to it. It doesn't just sound like an abusive relationship because the effect that it was having, the extreme paranoia effect and the unease.

Do you take care of your body? Do you work out? Do you do any exercise? Not enough. Not enough. I do some calisthenics. I don't do a whole lot of exercise. You should do yoga.

How do you not do yoga? You should do yoga, man. Graham Hancock, yoga has your name on it. Oddly enough, somebody's come up to me recently And suggested I join a yoga class Listen man you have to Join it yesterday For a guy like you

Because it's a way to get high Without doing any drugs There's only one time in my whole life I did it But I got so high after a yoga session That it was like i just smoked weed like i felt exactly like like i just smoked a lot of weed i was sitting there in a hotel room i was like this is incredible like i would swear i'm high as fuck right now right i hadn't smoked in

days okay okay and it gives you um it's a reset it gives you a reset it gives you like to me like it gets rid of the excess and balances things out like you can the reason why people have road rage

and they're reacting so strongly to nothing what a guy got in front of you and it's going to take you three extra seconds to get where you're going you go crazy

fuck you and fucking that is not him and that is not this the guy yes maybe he shouldn't have done that but does it even bother you?

Does it mean anything? Massive overreaction. People make mistakes. The guy got in front of you. What's the big deal? It's built up. It's built up, and there's imbalance. There's energy imbalances in people.

Yes. We're stuck in cubicles or doing jobs that we don't appreciate, and people blow up. The best way to avoid that kind of stuff to me is yoga. Yeah. Well, but what about all the stretching and the joint, like my knees and my hips? I had my hip replaced six weeks ago. Oh, my God. Six weeks ago?

Yeah, six weeks ago. You're walking around like you're fine. Yeah. Six weeks ago, I was in hospital. I got a massive scar down the outside of my right thigh. Wow. They went in there and replaced my hip. But I guess one could start gently

and just sort of build up. Now, you would have to talk to an expert about that because I don't know what physical limitations. Apparently none. The surgery's gone well and I'm all set. So they told you you could go running? I can go running. I can go swimming. I can do anything. Wow, that's incredible.

That's incredible. And it's like, it's a serious operation. It's a serious operation. I know it's a serious operation because I opted to stay awake during it. Well, I'm a writer, you know, I have stuff to write about. Oh, that's hilarious. Did you tell them that? Yeah, I did. So what they do is they give you a spinal.

An epidural. It's a bit like an epidural that women get when they're giving birth. It's slightly different, but that's basically what it is. And that freezes the lower half of your body. You use the use of your legs, you're paralyzed and there's no pain whatsoever. But then because they regard the operation as a, the surgery is a kind of scary procedure. They then give you massive dose of sedatives and you kind of go off into dreamland. So I declined those. They wouldn't actually let me look. They put some kind of curtain device between my face and my hip. I heard the sawing. And then I

heard the hammering. And I felt like a piece of furniture on a carpenter's bench. It was interesting. It was an interesting experience. But then very nice to come out of it, be fully awake afterwards, and gradually the feeling comes back to your legs. And I spent four days in the hospital. Initially, I thought it was going to be very tough, and I thought I'd be on sticks for a long time.

But I did the physio, and I just carried on working at it, and I'm okay. I stayed awake for my first knee surgery. Right. And while the guy was working, it was really weird because I was like half in it and half out of it. Yeah. And he was, you know, he was just a guy that was like tired of being a doctor.

Like really wasn't into people or whatever it was. I mean, he fixed my knee. It still fixes today. It's a patella tendon graft where they take a slice of your patella and they open you up and take a piece of bone out of your shin and a piece of bone in your kneecap. And they use that to replace your anterior cruciate ligament. Right. And he puts it in there and, like, moves my leg around and goes, well, better than it was. That's what he said.

That's what he said. Like, I was awake. Right, right, right. Like, I don't know if he just forgot I was awake or thought I wouldn't remember but I remember him moving around like well better than I was

like that's it not we've got it done yeah beautiful job this young man will be up and walking in no time just better than it was

that's the limit of his ambition his attitude was just like so he didn't give a fuck and I remember visiting him to get it looked at

like after you know he would like want a checkup to see how it was months later. The guy just didn't like people. You could tell. He had this thing. It was just done. Just done. There was no bedside manner. He was courteous.

He wasn't yelling at you or anything, but it was just – You were just another piece of meat on the table. Yeah. It's weird to watch though, isn't it, your body getting operated on? It's a very strange experience to undergo. In my case, as I say, I was not able to watch it because they put up a curtain, but I heard

it. The particular things that I heard were sawing and hammering. I saw it on a screen. I couldn't watch it in front of me, but I saw what was happening on the screen. It was crazy. It was really weird. They opened you up like a fish.

But the hip replacement is a gigantic one. It's a big surgery. How is it six weeks later and you're walking around like you're great? You didn't have a limp at all. No. I guess in some ways I must have been reasonably fit and got on. That's good. Got back.

That's very important. Yeah. Because I know for folks that are overweight or have issues already, and got on, you know. That's good. Got back. That's very important. Yeah. Because I know for folks that are like overweight or, you know, have issues already, they allow a hip injury to let them get overweight. Yeah. That's a big, you know, rehabilitation. It's a big thing.

And it is major surgery. They chop the end of your bone off, right? Yeah. So in a way, our bodies are like machines. And we've got this ball and socket joint in the hip. And so the ball is on the end of the long bone, the femur, I think it is. So they chop that off. That comes off.

And then the socket, in my case, there were cysts in the socket, which were hollow spaces that had come in there because the ball joint was out of kilter and it was rubbing in the wrong way. And this is why it was called. I was in severe pain for a year before this happened. Wow. And so what they do is they put in a titanium unit there where the socket is, and they put a titanium shaft that they hammer down into the bone. But then on the top of the titanium is ceramic.

So the actual bearings, both the titanium socket is lined with ceramic and the bearing that moves around in it that sits on top of the titanium shaft, that's also ceramic. So there's no metal rubbing against metal, which has caused problems in the past. People get fragments of metal into their bloodstream and so on.

Ceramic on ceramic bearings. And it's very good. It works well and I'm not in pain. And that very bad period of not being able to walk more than a quarter of a mile without having to sit down and recover, that's all gone. It's incredible. I mean, how long is it going to be before we have bionic bodies? Well, it's already happening. We are already getting bionic bodies. And this is one of the good things, which medical science has done some terrible things, but one of the good things it's done is,

I mean, if this had happened 50 years ago, I would have been crippled at the age of 62. I couldn't have gone on with my life. That's what eventually did in Hunter Thompson. Right. He was in constant pain. Pain, pain. I believe he had hip replacement too,

but it was like old school. They didn't really. They've got a lot better. A lot better. Yeah, that's the image right there. But we're looking it up on that screen. There we go. Oh, God, Graham Hancock.

That's what happened to me. Jesus Louises. Yeah. Woo. It's a funny thing to look at on the X-ray. It's crazy. It's the idea that you're going to run around on that. That's a fake joint.

And, you know, I asked him, when you hammer that titanium shaft down inside the bone, is there any danger that you could split the bone? And he said, yeah, sure. We sometimes split the bone. But he said, then we just bind it with wire. Oh, my God. You just what? You fucking tie it up with duct tape? Yes, basically.

That's so crazy. They hammer a piece of metal into the center where the marrow is. Where the marrow is, yeah. Motherfucker. Does it endanger the leg? Apparently not. Apparently not. That's incredible.

It's good stuff. And then the body just absorbs the titanium? It becomes part of the body. Bone tissue forms around as well, and you're all set. And mates to it, right? Yeah. Wow. That's incredible.

So I'm pleasantly surprised by the way that this has turned out. I thought I – like I'm here in America now. I thought I would have to take sticks with me on this trip. Wow. But I haven't had to do so. So you planned on taking sticks? I did. Wow.

But in the end, I decided not to. It's incredible. You're just walking around, totally normal. I have screws in both knees. I don't know why I'm so surprised. But I just, for whatever reason, a hip replacement seems like incredible. Yeah, it's kind of intimate as well, you know. It's right in the center of your being there.

It's kind of... It's right next to your junk. That's what you're saying. Right next to your junk, yeah. I mean, it's incredibly intimate. It feels, you know, that's what it is. There's a vulnerability. It's inches away from your penis and they're sawing. Yeah, yeah.

Plus, Jesus. Plus, I mean, well, since we're in the business of revelations here, they have to, the other thing that they have to do when you have the surgery for the 24 hours after the surgery is you have to have a catheter, you know, through the penis and into the bladder. Because for those first 24 hours, you cannot get up out of bed and you can't lift up to use a bedpan. Right. So they stick in a catheter. Wow.

And I felt I wanted that out as soon as possible. I wanted it out as soon as possible. I wanted to return to autonomy over my body as quickly as possible. I did not want it to be subject to the whims or fancies of others. And I made a big fuss about this. I wanted the catheter out the next morning. And I literally was up on a Zimmer frame by midday the next day and hobbling to the toilet. Wow.

So how many days was it before you could walk? So I was walking the very next day. What? On a Zimmer frame, yeah. And they tell you to do this? Yeah, you have to get going. You can't just sit there and do nothing. You've got to get going.

So I walked on a Zimmer frame. Then I walked on two sticks and then one stick. How long to one stick? Oh, I only got rid of the one stick about 10 days ago. Okay, so it was how long in before you could do one stick? Let's say four and a half weeks. Four and a half weeks of just walking around with a cane? Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, yeah. Worth it? Worth it. I'm very happy that I had it done, and I don't have to suffer the pain because I had severe osteoarthritis. I don't know why. I mean, we all think we're young, you know, but I feel young. I'm 62, and I don't know why I was afflicted with this at an age. Most people who go for hip replacement, they're into their 70s, you know. So I don't know why it hit me so hard.

I like the line from Ages of the Lost Ark, you know, where Indiana Jones is all beat up sitting in the ship's cabin, in some cabin, and the lady with him comments on his appearance, you know, and he says, it's not the years, it's the mileage. And I think I put on some mileage over the years. Well, I know a lot of martial artists they get hip replacements mark coleman the former ufc heavyweight champion just uh tweeted that he's going in for a hip replacement even actually he's already done it and i believe

chuck norris has had hip replacements it's very common yeah yeah and i have a buddy my friend shuki who's a muay thai instructor i believe he was in line for a hip replacement the last time I saw him. It's a weird joint. Yeah, it's a weird joint. But the good news is it's doable. And after a few weeks of pain and discomfort, you're back on your feet and fully functional. Unless the surgeon screws up, which they do sometimes. I wonder about guys like Bo Jackson.

He was a football player that was injured really badly, and he had to get a hip replacement, and it basically ended his career. Right. He was playing football and baseball at the same time. He was a super athlete, an incredible athlete. But if they could have fixed him with this back then, it seems like he could have continued playing football. Probably could have carried on.

That's insane. Yeah. Football with an artificial hip. That's insane. Yeah. Football with an artificial hip. But why should I be shocked? I mean, we have metal tubes that fly to other countries. Why should I be shocked that they can fix your hip? Yeah. Yeah.

And what that comes down to is where your quality of life has deteriorated because of pain and immobility, you can recapture that. You can get your quality of life back. And that's what I value about it. That's another place where cannabis is a beautiful drug. When you're injured, it just gives you a sense of ease of your body. It's for

people that are in pain. People have back problems. Cannabis is a wonderful sort of thing. It relaxes things. I have to say that I did wonder and I still do wonder whether the fact that I quit cannabis in October 2011 and started feeling severe hip pain just three months later in the early part of 2012, whether there's some connection or whether the cannabis was either in some way

protecting me from the onset of severe osteoarthritis or whether at least it was reducing my sensitivity to the pain of the osteoarthritis because that's when I started noticing it. So your body was just out of alignment? The hip was out of socket or something? It was wearing in a funny way? Yeah, it was wearing in a funny way. It seemed that that ball socket joint was not quite the right shape.

Oh, it's just a natural? Some kind of natural thing, yeah. When you talked about the ayahuasca experience and you talked about the goddess coming to you and that you choose to believe that it's real, my thoughts on this whole what is real and what is not real thing, what I've been thinking lately is that it doesn't really even matter. Yeah. Because what it is is it's about the experience itself. And the best parts of psychedelic experiences are the learning parts. It sounds like so boring to people because they think like,

oh no, I thought I was going to see amazing things and I was going to watch elephants fly and it was going to be mad hallucinations, which yeah, does occur sometimes, but that's not what it's really about. What it's really about is about a learning experience. It's about massive leaps in development of your personality and your psyche, your worldview,

your personal view. And these massive leaps that happen through psychedelics, they happen exactly the same way if you really do encounter a goddess or if this goddess is just conjured up by your imagination in incredibly vivid detail, either one is the same experience to you personally. I think that's a very important point. It's a very important point because yes, it might be a hallucination, but it is immensely beneficial or it might not be a hallucination and we might not have a full account of what the fuck goes on in the human consciousness, especially during altered states.

And to go one way or the other, I think, is absurd. We don't need to do that. We don't need to. We don't know. Here is an incredibly valuable experience, which is available to us, and which, let's not forget, that humanity has had a long relationship with these plants. This is, I think, one of the problems, again, caused by the war on drugs,

which is that it's sought to intervene in that relationship and demonize and make it dangerous to use them because you might get sent to prison. You can get sent to prison for a very long time. People live in fear. What we need is a nurturing society which makes it possible for people to have these experiences in the safest most loving environment the love is love is key if you're feeling threatened in your

head at a particular time if you're in a if you're in a space that that is is uncomfortable or difficult for you chances are the psychedelic experience will also be uncomfortable and difficult the more that you can control the space, the more that you can be surrounded by others who love you and have your best interests at heart, the more likely you are to have a very beneficial experience from that. And those beneficial experiences can and frequently do include painful moments when you come to realization of actually who you are and what you are. And this is, I mean, it's absolutely fundamental with ayahuasca is what I call the life review where you see the impact of your behavior on others which previously you had insulated

yourself from. And when you see the pain you'd caused, you might have felt perfectly justified at the time. When you see it and you see it with that clarity, it makes you strongly motivated not to do that again. So it's a very important learning experience. They call them plant teachers. They call them teachers in the Amazon. That aspect, that learning from your past mistake aspects exists in a lot of psychedelics. It's a core factor.

I would say it's a core factor of all psychedelics. And I've always felt like it's really ironic that law enforcement works against psychedelics because nothing would benefit law enforcement more than psychedelics. Absolutely. If psychedelics were legal, there'd be so many less crimes. So many less crimes.

First of all, the drug crimes be out the door, and then it would be a matter of how many people around mushrooms are going to rob your house. How about zero? Exactly. I mean they would ask you for food if they were that starving. I just think that we have this incredible ally that our culture, our society, we have this amazing plant thing that we've discovered in several different forms. And we've made all of them outside of our reach

We put all of them outside legal reach which is insane. It's insane. It makes you wonder what's going on Well, why why why is society on this self-destructive trip right there ignorant there? It's essentially with this is I believe and this is it sounds crazy But I believe this I believe that psychedelics are here for human beings to take to move to the next level of consciousness. And they can elevate us away from our war-like ways. I'm with you on that. I think it's the only thing. The only thing.

I don't think ideology, morality shifts with understanding, with the exchange of information. I think morality escalates slowly but surely all throughout culture. And eventually we may get to a term or a time in the future where we're not warlike at all. But the best way to do that is through psychedelics. Psychedelics can help, yeah. And the people who are involved in the running of things most likely are ignorant to the experience. And so what you're dealing with is someone who is 50, 60 years into a lifelong closed off ego trip of death and destruction. And they're the ones that are running the world.

Unfortunately, they're the ones that are running the world. That's why we're so fucked. We're not so fucked because humans are evil. And when you look around at all the nice people that you meet, you get really confused as to how the world can be so fucked up. How can it be so fucked up? Because they – People are basically good. Yeah. Most people are good. But the How can it be so fucked up? People are basically good. Most people are good, but the people that are

running shit, most of them are not good. Yeah, and they get into personality types. If you want to run shit, then right there, you've got a certain kind of personality. Yeah, anybody that wants to be president should not be allowed to be president. Exactly. That should be an instant disqualification.

You should be absolutely not wantingqualification. You should be absolutely not wanting that job. It should be like the lottery. You know, like you should, like the public, like a new president comes in every month, you know, and if you do a good job, you know, you get to keep, people get to vote whether they keep you for a few months. And it's just a person.

You have random qualifications as far as education, as far as your background. Not some power-hungry egomaniac who wants to push you around, which is unfortunately the case. And the old boy network, the thing that comes into place when these guys, they're cronies and they all help each other out and hook each other up and communicate with each other. And then there's lobbyists and special interest groups. And they all want to make sure that this keeps going so they make sure that the laws continue to stay on the books, that allow them to do all the stupidity, especially when Congress can't be guilty of insider trading. Have you seen that? I didn't see that.

Let me Google that because I want to make sure that I'm correct. Congress not guilty of insider trading. I think you can't accuse them of insider trading. Oh, dear. Yeah, oh, dear is the right way to say that. Let me Google that to make sure that that's true. Congress. So basically they get immunity?

Yeah. Hold on. I wrote it the wrong. Can't be, maybe can't be guilty. Immune to insider trading? Hmm, let's try immune. Yeah, there's something. I'm looking at some articles on this here.

Well, politicians are always cutting themselves all the slack there is. Okay, that is exactly what it is. Congress believes they're immune to insider trading laws, and there are legal professors that are debating them. and the legal analysis by law professor Donna Nagley of the Indiana University suggests that members of Congress may not be immune to insider trading laws after all. Apparently there's a 60 Minutes piece where they went on about this. So it's one of those legal things where apparently you probably have to go over it with a fine-tooth comb and then find out what exactly the – how it's written. It's all craziness.

It's a bunch of corrupt bastards. Crazy fucks. That's written. It's all craziness. A bunch of corrupt bastards. Crazy fucks. You know, that's it. They want to do that job because they like controlling other people. But just the fact that they can say that they don't want to be prosecuted for insider trading, it's like, why is that? How much are you doing? How much insider – guess what?

You can come to me all day and you say, hey, Joe, do you think that insider trading should be illegal? And I'll say, yes. And if think that insider trading should be illegal? I'll say yes. And if I do insider trading, prosecute me. But if I'm coming out saying I don't want you to prosecute me for insider trading – You've definitely got something to hide. Yeah, you've got to be like, what the fuck are you doing, man? That's why you want to be a congressman?

So you can just profit off of the stock market? You creep. So I thought – and I've made this proposal several times that what I would like to see is anybody running for high office, first right off they've got to do 10 ayahuasca sessions. That's a great idea. That's it. That's the first hurdle. They've got to do that.

They've got to go through it, and we'll see how they feel afterwards. Could be 10 strong mushroom sessions. That would be just as good. But they've got to be able to do that. You know what's really crazy? The solution exists to a better world. It exists. It exists right here.

It's not like we, well, imagine if some benevolent race from another planet came down here and gifted us with some space fruit. And if we eat the space fruit, we'll see ourselves for who we truly are and we'll recognize our potential. Right there in that concept which many people hold, they're letting go of their responsibility for their own lives. Yes. Yes. But if you told people that you would go, wow, that would be great, but it's science fiction. Yeah. Well, the exact thing exists with ayahuasca, with psychedelic mushrooms.

That's true. It exists. And for whatever reason, you know, discussing it is a very controversial thing. Very controversial. It's very controversial. Like, I've, like, had producers, like, ask me, like, why are you talking about, like, TV shows that I'm working on? Why are you talking about illegal drugs?

I've been asked to stay away from those subjects. Of course. Don't talk. You're going to fuck up this whole thing. This ancient archaeology. I think you're onto something, Graham. I think you've done some good work. But leave the mushrooms now, buddy.

Exactly. Come on. I've had that conversation. Come on, Graham. You don't need the mushrooms. We're making some money over here, Graham. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It exists. And I think that was part of the problem with my TED talk too. Yeah, we could live in a Narnia world. We could live in a world like Avatar. If everybody was doing ayahuasca, we could pull this world together with rapid quickness. If they just broke out ayahuasca ceremonies all over the globe, if it became the next big thing, sort of like cell phones, everybody's got ayahuasca ceremonies on every corner, you could change

the whole world within our lifetime in an astounding, loving way where people would abandon so many of their ideas about business and so many of their ideas about controlling resources and killing people. You know, the amazing thing is that it is actually happening. It is actually happening, admittedly on a small scale. But for me, this is one of the mysteries of ayahuasca at a time when the Amazon jungle is under such terrible threat that out of the jungle emerge these two plants,

one of which is a vine, which then begins to spread her tentacles all around the planet and to call out to people. And people are drawn to ayahuasca. I can't tell you how often I get asked where do I go for a good ayahuasca ceremony where I know I can trust the shaman. It's happening everywhere. It's happening in Japan.

It's happening in America. It's happening in Germany. It's happening all over the world. And so you get a small but growing group of initiates who have had this shared experience. And, you know, we kind of know each other when we meet. And the initiates that have had this experience are talking about it and more are coming. It's building and building. And the ayahuasca tourism in South America is gigantic now. So it's really – It's gigantic.

And again, a number of times I stand up and I'm giving a presentation somewhere and I'm talking about ayahuasca. And then somebody stands up in the audience and says, don't you realize that by promoting ayahuasca, you're leading to the depletion of the rainforest? Quite the opposite is the case. What's happened with ayahuasca is that ayahuasca is being massively planted in the rainforest now because of ayahuasca tourism. Ayahuasca tourism is a really good thing for ayahuasca. It's not causing any depletion. And ayahuasca can be grown in many different parts of the world,

and it is being grown. That's the divine. Really, it's a fascinating subject, the fact that something does exist to give you that experience. I've always said about the DMT experience that if you could just show someone what you see without taking it, if you could just show someone, they would want to do it. They would want to go, wait a minute, and it doesn't hurt you? No, it doesn't hurt you.

You're not going to get hurt. But most people probably shouldn't do it, though. That's what I think also. And I think even if we... We need baby steps. Yeah. If we lived in that ideal world where we as adults had the right to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness, I think most people wouldn't choose to do it.

Yeah, I think you're right. Well, if you look at how it is in Holland where marijuana is essentially legal and nobody... They look down upon people that get high all the time. And they also look down upon hard drugs because of the fact that you can get most things. They understand with great clarity what's dangerous and what's not dangerous. And people are always going to make bad mistakes. That's it. You know, you just have to treat people as adults. Yeah.

And you have to understand that some people will make mistakes and there will be problems. But that should not be an obstacle to what has to be a fundamental freedom. But what about allowing people into your community that sell them, allowing people in your community of friends and neighbors that profit off of the addiction of others? Because there are certain drugs like meth. I agree. I'm not saying that meth should be illegal. like meth. I'm not saying that meth should be illegal. I don't know whether or not there's a way to handle it where you get the maximum benefit. I don't know whether it's making it illegal, decriminalizing it, making it so that people can't get prosecuted for using but they can get prosecuted for selling.

It's a complicated area. Some of these substances are very harmful. Personally, I don't want to smoke meth. But if you were next door to a meth guy, you would not want that guy in your communities profiting off of enslaving people, chemically enslaving people. So this is an area where more work has to be done. But I think if we approach the problem from a spirit of love and from a spirit of respect for the sovereignty of other adults, it will be a whole lot better than the way we're approaching the problem right now.

And as we know, making these toxic substances illegal doesn't prevent their use. It absolutely does not prevent their use. The use has gone up and up and up and up and up over the decades. And it's kind of unique. One of the properties of psychedelics, whether it's, for some folks, Ibogaine has a great result for curing addictions, and Ayahuasca

has a great result. The people that are doing these very things and selling these very drugs, both, participating in both sides, selling and dealing, could both benefit from Ayahuasca. If you're a meth dealer, you're an asshole. What an asshole. You're selling something that fucking kills people,

makes them pull their skin off of their face. What are you doing? One of the first ayahuasca sessions that I went to in Brazil, there was a guy there from L.A. who was a heavy smoker of crystal meth. Oh, Jesus. And he came there in a state he was just so wired who was a heavy smoker of crystal meth. Oh, Jesus. And he came there in a state,

he was just so wired. And it came out, as we were discussing, as we were talking, it came out that he had a rival in love, and he'd gone out and got a gun, and just before he left L.A., the best decision he ever made was to leave L.A. and come down to Brazil and drink ayahuasca. He was getting close to the point of murdering a fellow human being.

Wow. Two weeks in Brazil, five ayahuasca sessions completely turned him around, completely turned him around. And he revolutionized his life. It's incredible. And he became such a loving, positive, warm-spirited person. And all his anger was gone, and he moved on in his life in amazing ways. And I've seen many, many, many, many, many examples of that. I don't want to pretend, however,

that it's all sweetness and light in the garden. There are problems also with ayahuasca and people should be aware of this. There are shamans who are abusing their power. There are... You know, ifusing their power. There are, you know, if you go to a place like Iquitos in Peru, you'll find there's two types of shamans.

One type are the curanderos, they're the healers. The other type are the brujos, they're sorcerers, actually. And they will use ayahuasca to gain power over others. And there have been one or two horrendous cases that occur with this. So I do think the intention of the individuals who are involved

is also an important part of this. And psychedelics, I agree with you that the single one-stop shop to transform our society and make it a better place, a far better place than it can be today, is the correct use of psychedelics. But I would be wrong to say that psychedelics are a magic potion, because they're not. And there have been societies which have misused psychedelics profoundly. I would say that the Aztecs in Mexico were one of those. What did they do? Well, they used psilocybin, but they did not use it for gentle consciousness exploration. The Aztecs used psilocybin preparatory to rituals of human sacrifice.

The Aztecs used psilocybin as a vehicle to communicate with their deities, and those deities included characters like Huitzilopochtli, who was the war god, who spoke to... Montezuma was the last Aztec emperor, and that's 1519 when Cortes appears in Mexico. And Montezuma was in daily communication with the war god by means of psilocybin mushrooms. And what the war god was telling him to do,

you know, there's demons out there as well as angels. What the war god was telling him to do was to kill people and to stretch them over a stone and cut out their hearts. And there was a horrendous situation in Tenochtitlan, which was the capital city, which is now Mexico City, as a matter of fact, when they inaugurated the Great Pyramid, reliable accounts, 80,000 people were sacrificed to the god of war. In four days. In four days. 80,000 people.

Now this is a bloody awful thing that was going on there and psychedelics were involved. I'm not saying that psychedelics caused it. And again we come to this issue, are these entities that we encounter projections of our own minds? Or is there some other realm or level of existence where non-physical entities that communicate with us at the level of consciousness exist? Whichever it is, whether it's a projection of our own minds, as you rightly say, or whether those entities are real, is less important than the effects on our behavior. But if what is being projected from our own mind is very dark and negative and wicked,

or if those entities also include evil angels as well as good guys, then you can get cultures misled down this path. And I do believe that's what happened with the Aztecs. There's also recently, and again, I think truth is really important. Truth is really important. So let's be truthful about this also. There have been some tragic cases with ayahuasca, most recently in Chile, which actually involved a human sacrifice, which actually involved the burning to death of a baby, on the instructions of the so-called guru or shaman.

He formed a kind of death cult, but their sacrament was ayahuasca. This is very rare, but it does happen. And I think people should be aware when they enter ayahuasca space that one of the things ayahuasca does is it makes you more suggestible. It opens your heart. It makes you, if a powerful, strong, negative personality comes along and says to you, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, you might just do it. And that is also there possible. So you have to be strong in yourself.

You have to be clear on your intent. And if you're not going into this with good intent, then bad things also can happen. Well, I also wonder what would it be like to introduce psychedelics into the insane warlike environment of Aztec Mexico in the 1500s. I mean, what would it have been like, this living back then, and what would it take to become a person of royalty, an emperor, a king? In those days, it was insane bloodshed. Insane bloodshed. They were a very dark and demonic culture.

And unfortunately, that demonic aspect of Aztec culture was without any shadow of a doubt mediated by psilocybin mushrooms. And they called them teonanactil, which means the flesh of the gods. And they were used for communication with demonic entities. And we cannot pretend that that was not so. This was the case. And indeed, if the Aztecs had not been those people who murdered their neighbors, who used their neighbors as a sort of farm, I mean, if you imagine a society which was run by serial killers and in the interest of serial killers, that's roughly Aztec society in 1519.

So they would have neighboring tribes who they would prey on. They could easily have completely defeated them, but they preferred not to completely defeat them. They preferred to use them for warfare every year, make war on them, take captives, bring the captives back to Tenochtitlan and cut out their hearts. And this is why there's karma. There's such a thing as karma.

This is why Montezuma was brought down. I mean 490 Spaniards turn up on the coast of Mexico and destroy a standing army of 200,000 men. Why does that happen? It happened because the neighbors of the Aztecs hated the Aztecs. They utterly hated them. And they were looking for liberation from that horror that was being inflicted on them. Isn't that a better...

I shouldn't say a better, but isn't a possibility that what you're dealing with is a bunch of sociopaths and a bunch of crazy people. And if you introduce psilocybin into their system in this insane warlike world, that what you're conjuring up is their imagination.

Yeah. And it is the inner, I mean, the desire to manifest these things that would ask them to do horrible things. Yeah. This is a core behavior pattern in human beings when they get in control of armies. Yes, it is. Absolute, complete, total ruthlessness, barbaric behavior

is not only is it beneficial, but it's necessary. It's applauded. Yeah, it's applauded, it's necessary. And it wins you medals. And if you don't do it, someone around you is going to do it, so you have to do it. Yeah. So there's the interesting question right there.

I mean we have armies now in the world today which are going out doing murderous stuff. Right. And so the question is if we were to be in such a position that we could massively introduce psychedelics into those armies, would it actually make them worse or better? I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm not sure what the answer is. You know, I'm not sure what the answer is. It's very honest of you to not be sure. And that is the, I think, there's no way to be sure. We know that the Vikings, they berserkered on mushrooms.

Was it Amanita muscaria they took? Amanita muscaria, yeah. Yeah. I never had much luck with that. Me neither. Yeah, that's what I hear from a lot of people. Me neither. It felt weird. You want to have luck with it. Me neither. Yeah. That's what I hear from a lot of people. Me neither. It felt weird.

If you want to have luck with it, you've got to pass it through... Urine. Urine. You've got to pass it through a reindeer or through the bladder of a shaman. Yeah. Then it'll work. Oh, how convenient. You have to drink shaman piss.

Yes. Yeah. That's the thing that they always say. You have to recycle your urine. It's as though the body functions as a filter. Yeah, that's the thing that they always say. You have to recycle your urine. It's as though the body functions as a filter. Yeah. And it removes certain impurities which then allow the good stuff to remain and that comes through in urine. And apparently you can pass it through seven human bodies.

It doesn't lose its purpose. Hey, easy. I know a buddy who did it. He was on mushrooms and they told him to drink his urine. He's like, I am so high right now. I do not need to drink my urine. They're like, trust me, drink your urine. And he said he drank his urine.

It was like just getting shot through a cyclone. Boom! He said the whole thing just took some incredible path from drinking his own urine. Yeah, I must say that's not an experience I've had or would welcome, but that's what the research shows. I have drunk my own urine on several occasions. Have you? Yeah, just to see, because I read about urine therapy, so I wanted to find out what it was about. It's a big thing in India.

Does it really make you feel better when you're sick? And it did work, but it totally might have been placebo. I don't know. But there was one time when I was sick and I took it. I called my friend Jan up and I'm like, dude, I drank my own piss and it worked. It was crazy because he was like big on it, you know, he was big on urine therapy and alternative stuff. Does it taste okay?

It doesn't taste nearly as bad as you would think it tastes. The idea is a lot worse than the actual reality of the urine. Right. The idea is hard to grasp. Yeah, but it's just like warm water. It's not horrific tasting. You gag a little when you smell it. You're like, I can't believe I'm going to drink this. But once you're actually drinking it, it's really not that big a deal. I haven't done it in a long time. I want to say, like,

Leota Machida, who's a famous UFC fighter, he drinks his own urine every morning. There's another guy, Juan Manuel Marquez, a famous boxer from Mexico. Same thing. Was drinking his own. I think he quit. He gave up on your vaccine. You might as well have some Amanita Muscaria in there. Yeah, you might as well.

And even then, yeah. I wonder if when a person goes completely psycho, when you're living in war, and one of the things about the Mexicans, the Aztecs, rather, is I don't even think they had horses yet. No, they didn't. This is one of the reasons, again, why a relatively small force of Spaniards were able to defeat them. Yeah.

Was because the horse had been extinct in the Americas for 12,000 years. Wow. From the end of the last ice age. And so when the Spanish turned up with actually only 16 horses, 16 heavy hunters that were trained for warfare. European armies have had thousands of years to develop strategies to deal with men on horseback. And there were definite specific tactics and responses that you used when you were charged. But the Maya and the Aztecs, they had no idea what they were looking at. They actually, if you look at their accounts, which I've done, you'll find that they no idea what they were looking at. They actually, if you look at their accounts, which I've done,

you'll find that they initially thought that they were dealing with supernatural beings, which were part deer, actually, because that was the nearest animal that they could relate to a horse, part deer and part human. And they didn't know how to handle these things. And they're coming down at you at 25 or 30 miles an hour. They're covered in armor, the horse and the man. And it's a pretty terrifying prospect. And they broke armies of tens of thousands of men

who just fled in terror at the sight of these entities charging down on them. Eventually they learned. And there's a famous case that one of the tribes in Mexico that fought most vigorously against Montezuma were people called the Tlaxcalans. He used them for human sacrifice. They're very independent, spirited people, great warriors. And you would have thought when the Spanish came into Mexico that the first people who would become their allies would be the Tlaxcalans. But in fact, the Tlaxcalans had a heroic character called Xicotenca, who was their battle king,

and he saw the future, and he saw what Spain would eventually do to Mexico. And so initially, and very hard, he fought the Spanish tooth and nail for over a long campaign that lasted about six weeks. And during that campaign, on one occasion, one of his warriors actually took the head off a horse with a single blow of their weapon which was a bit like a sword it was made of wood was called a Mac whittle and it had flakes of obsidian lined along the edges of the blade and that horse was not wearing armor that day and a horse was beheaded shocked the Spanish it was the first time suddenly there was proof for the people in front of them that these animals were not supernatural, that they could be killed.

But eventually, you know, Cortes was a terrorist. He went around massacring whole villages. He burned people at the stake. He fed people to dogs. And eventually the Tlaxcalans did the calculation, and they said, we better join this guy rather than carry on with this. And so eventually they did join forces with him. And suddenly he had 100,000 auxiliaries who were ready to take Moctezuma on. Jesus Christ.

Can you imagine living back then? Extraordinary times. Strange times. And I have to say, although I really detest a lot of the things that the Spanish did, I have to say those 490 men, they had balls of steel. They had balls of steel. I mean to turn up on this distant coast with no resources, no reserves, nothing to fall back on, and to know that you're confronting an enemy that is a militaristic power that has hundreds of thousands of men under arms that sacrifices you if it catches you and still to go for it, that takes tremendous courage. Cortes actually scuttled all his ships so that his men could not flee. The ships were scuttled.

What does that mean, scuttled? Sunk. He sunk them. Put holes in them. Yeah. He put holes in them and sunk them. Oh, gangster. And then he said, this is it.

There is no going back. Jesus Christ. We conquer. We conquer. Or we die. What a fucking psycho. Yeah, so total psycho. So it's been interesting for me because my latest writing effort has been a novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

These days I do novels as well as nonfiction. of Mexico. These days I do novels as well as non-fiction. It's been interesting for me to get inside the head of a man like Cortez, to get inside the head of a man like Moctezuma, and to figure out what drove them and what made these characters what they were.

I have a witch in the story, a young Aztec witch, and I have a famous woman called Malinal, who became Cortez's lover, who had a grudge against Montezuma. History doesn't tell us why, but I give her a motive in the story because he tried to sacrifice her.

That's kind of cool that you can do that with history. You can do that with history, and you can do that with fiction. And so she's a key player, not just in my story, but in the story of history because she became Cortez's interpreter. She was very clever. She learned Spanish very, very fast.

And she would be... So in the paintings from those days, you always see her standing beside Cortes and coming out of her mouth is the glyph that means speech. And she gave the whole story away to Cortes. She told Cortes how to defeat Montezuma and that was to play on the myth of Quetzalcoatl, of the feathered serpent who would return and bring in a new age and overthrow a wicked king. And she had Cortes fill the boots of Quetzalcoatl. Wow. How did you get so involved in the Aztec culture?

It's so fascinating. It's almost impossible to avoid once it starts. This is the book, by the way. War God. War God, yeah. This is it. This is the book, by the way. War God. War God, yeah.

This is it. When I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods back in the early 90s, I traveled extensively and widely in Mexico as part of my research because Mexico is a fascinating place from the point of view of a lost civilization. We have the Olmec culture. We have those gigantic stone heads from a site that's thought to be 3,500 years old. I think it's probably much older than that on the Gulf of Mexico. Heads in the form of African heads, which is very puzzling and weird,

but also images of people with very strongly Caucasian features, with massive beards and definitely not American Indian faces. And there they are. So I was wondering, are these the remnants of some lost civilization? Because history does not explain how individuals with that appearance ever turned up in Mexico. And I inadvertently, as I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods in Mexico, I inadvertently traveled the route of Cortes. And I found myself again and again crossing the path that Cortes had

taken from the Gulf of Mexico up to what is now Mexico City. And I began to realize there was a fascinating story to tell here and a story that had never been properly told and I used the accounts of some of the conquistadors, men like Bernal Diaz, who give us eyewitness accounts of Aztec society. This helped me to... Because the Aztecs were latecomers in the civilization of Mexico but they'd only existed as an empire for 200 years before Cortes came.

But they revered earlier cultures, and particularly the amazing pyramid site of Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City, which means the place where men became gods. So I was investigating the possibility of a lost civilization, but I was kind of imbibing the story of Cortes and of the Aztecs at the same time. And I felt this kind of pall of sadness that hangs over Mexico, this feeling that something terrible happened there. And what's at the heart of my story, without giving too much of it away, is this notion of demonic influence that Montezuma,

and I accept it could be projection of the individual's mind because he's just a particularly wicked evil individual, or it could be that there are real demons out there. So Montezuma is communicated with and advised by Witzel or Poshley, the war god, and Cortes is well known, had believed he had a special relationship with St. Peter. And he, in dreams, encountered St. Peter, and St. Peter advised him to carry out some of the most horrific acts of genocide that have been ever recorded in the history of the Americas. How convenient. Yeah, the speculation of the novel is that both the entity that appeared to Montezuma as the war god

and the entity that appeared to Cortes as St. Peter were actually one and the same demonic entity seeking to multiply human misery because that's what demons do. And if we think it was bad under the Aztecs, let's be honest and accept that it was a thousand times worse after the Spanish took over. The population of Mexico is calculated to be 30 million in 1519. Within 40 years, it was 1 million. 29 million people died. Gigantic, horrendous

genocide. And the Spanish were monsters. They would use people to test the edge of their weapons. Let's just see if we can chop off somebody's arm here. Let's see what this axe will do. Oh, the dogs are hungry. Let's just throw a bunch of people to the dogs. That's where the phrase throwing them to the dogs comes from as a matter of fact. So they were awful people. And it's been a dark story to write, but I've also found that in this world, in this realm at that time,

there was the capacity for love. There were decent people who did their best. My dad is a pretty sensible guy. He's never for weirdness or spiritual shit. He's just not that kind of guy. But he was telling me about going to Gettysburg. Yeah, that was a horrendous battle. He said he could feel sadness in the air.

He said it was inescapable. It was overwhelming. Yeah. And he said, I just didn't expect that. He said, you know, I didn't – I mean, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it – maybe it's the knowledge of what happened there. He goes, but I don't think so. Just like – he goes, it was like it was in the air.

Permeates the atmosphere. And you felt that. I felt that very strongly, that there was this terrible, terrible sadness hanging over Mexico. I was always high. It could have been that, right? Were you high in Mexico, you fucking gangster?

Yeah, I got high in Mexico. God damn, that's dangerous. I wanted to ask you about this because there's a guy on my message board, his name is Frodo Swaggins, and he sent me a cool link to this new thing that's been found under Teotihuacan. They found a jade mask from an earlier era and some building, some work underneath there that they're investigating now that they believe was Olmec.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't surprise me at all. that they believe was Olmec. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't surprise me at all. I think we're going to find that Teotihuacan actually goes way back, not just to the beginnings of the historical epoch, but far deep into prehistory.

And the Olmec, the so-called Olmecs of Central America may go back 10,000, 12,000 years. They may not be, I don't think we should just limit them to the last 3,500 years. So this is the case with many of these sites. It's the same, by the way, if you go to Chichen Itza. If you can get inside the pyramid of Kukulkan, Chichen Itza and Kukulkan is just another name for Quetzalcoatl,

you'll find that it's built on top of another pyramid, which is inside it, an older pyramid, and preserved completely inside it. And you can even get inside that older pyramid. And I think it's the case all over the world that sites have been built on top of older sites, reincarnated in a way. So there was an ancient sacred place

and later cultures came along and honored it and built new monuments on top of it. But the mistake the archaeologists make is that the origins of the site are the later culture and they don't take account of the earlier culture. Well, that was one of the things that John Anthony West was suggesting about Egypt when you show the very different construction methods that coincidentally are below the ground.

Like you have to dig out the sand to pull these things up and oh, lo and behold, they look different. Yeah. And that's like the Osirion in Abydos in Upper Egypt, which is 50 or 60 feet lower than the Temple of Seti I and was actually covered with 50 feet of sedimentation until archaeologists dug it out, but they still insist on giving it to Seti I. It's a fascinating thing, the denialism that's involved in Egyptology.

It is. That Zawi Hawass dude is a trip just to watch him talk about things. You're like, how are you in control of how this thing gets labeled or discovered or research? It's an extraordinary things are his rise to power and then his subsequent fall. Is he in trouble now? Is he in jail? He's in deep shit.

Is he going to jail? Yeah. What did he do? Corruption? So well, no, his main his main thing was that he was closely associated with the Mubarak family, particularly with Susan Mubarak, the wife of the deposed associated with the Mubarak family, particularly with Susan Mubarak, the wife of the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak. And they protected him so he could do whatever he liked while Mubarak was running Egypt. And therefore, he was one of

the closest to Mubarak in the Egyptian regime. So when Mubarak fell and a whole new system came into play in Egypt, Zahi was one of the first to go. Barak fell and a whole new system came into play in Egypt. Zahi was one of the first to go. It was shocking. The John Anthony West series, Magical Egypt, is one of my favorite DVD series ever. John is such a brilliant human being. He's awesome.

He devoted his life to exploring the mystery of Egypt and the magic of Egypt. This is what archaeologists never do. And if he's listening, I owe you an email, dude. I swear to God I'm going to email you back quick. I've just been crazy busy. I had an email exchange with John today. I've been so swamped with this new TV show that I'm doing that I'm behind on everything, text messages and emails and all that.

But I'm a big fan of that guy's work. And that Magical Egypt thing is just one of the most stunning documentary series I've ever watched. It's like 10 DVDs or something like that. It's an immense amount of work. That's right. And incorporating John's just vast encyclopedic knowledge of the mysteries of Egypt. It's all expressed in there.

Incredible. So John is about to be vindicated, I would say. He and Robert Shock from Boston University. This was John's work initially, and Robert Shock became involved in it, which was the, you'll remember, the argument about the Sphinx. Yes. The Sphinx bears very characteristic erosion marks,

both on its body and on the trench dug around it, and that those are the marks of precipitation-induced weathering, of exposure to thousands of years of heavy rainfall. Cut a long story short, no such rainfall in Egypt in the last 5,000 years. You have to go back 10,000, 12,000 years, the end of the last ice age, to get that kind of climate. And then you have to have thousands of years of those conditions to create that kind of erosion.

To get that weathering. So when John Anthony West and Robert Shock dropped this bombshell on Egyptology in roughly 1992, that the Sphinx actually might be thousands of years older than the Egyptologists imagine, there was a huge outcry. And Egyptologists became very, very angry about it because they were threatened in the core of their being. And one of the arguments they made, which they thought was the killer argument, was, look, you're saying this monument is 12,000 years old, but there are no other large monuments anywhere in the world

which are 12,000 years old. Well, unfortunately for the Egyptologists, that's no longer true, because just the most amazing site has been discovered in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe. Yeah, we talked about that the last time you were on. Amazing. Incredible site.

And it was deliberately buried by the people who made it. 14,000 years ago. Well, no, it looks like it was made 12,000 years ago. 12, people who made it. 14,000 years ago. Well, no. It looks like it was made 12,000 years ago. 12,000. And deliberately buried 10,000 years ago. And that means that no later culture has tramped over it to confuse the dating record. And therefore, we have a pristine site.

And when a site is pristine and it's approached by a mainstream archaeologist such as Klaus Schmidt from the German Archaeological Institute who's the excavator, he has to honestly put his hand on his heart and say this site is 12,000 years old. And if Gobekli Tepe is 12,000 years old, then there's no reason on earth why the Sphinx shouldn't be 12,000 years old. And if the Sphinx and Gobekli Tepe are 12,000 years old, then I'm sorry, we have to rewrite the history books. There was a real weird moment, whatever documentary it was that showed Robert Shock presenting his findings because he's an academic. He is. He's the only one that they would allow to present. Professor of geology at Boston University.

And John Anthony West is not an academic. He's an Egypt expert. He's a guy who's immersed himself in Egypt his whole life. But I don't know what his formal education is. But the fact that that guy hasn't been given some sort of – at least someone test him and give the guy a fucking degree. Because who the hell knows more about ancient Egypt than John Anthony West? Nobody knows more about ancient Egypt. And it should – obviously his credentials should be examined.

I mean his words should be checked. Yeah. But I'm sure that he's on. He's totally on. He's on. I've never heard a single thing about any of his translations, about any of his – that seemed to me anything less than cunty, if they were negative. It didn't make any sense at all.

I think he's a pretty astounding person when it comes to his knowledge of Egypt. I think John is an astounding person, and I think that he's brought a unique insight to ancient Egypt, and he's done far more for the exploration of the past than any credentialed Egyptologist has ever done. So now that Gobekli Tepe has been clearly established at least 10,000 years old, that's when it was buried. 12,000 years old because the best stuff is the oldest. Right.

10,000 years ago, like a time capsule, they bury it. And by the way, it's only 5% of it has been excavated. A huge, vast area remaining to be excavated. So there's who knows what the hell they're going to find under there, whether they're going to find artifacts or what have you that explain things a little bit better. But we know people were capable of

doing that then. That's 100%. And therefore, if they're capable, because some of those megaliths weigh, one of them weighs 50 tons, you know. Gobekli Tepe is a stone circle. There's a circle of series of stone circles. And therefore we're looking at a culture that 12,000 years

ago was already capable of doing that. In other words we can't say that they just made that up overnight. There has to be a long background to that that got them to the point where they could do that. And that is why Gobekli Tepe is the single most important archaeological site in the world because it could not have appeared by magic.

It had to be the result of a culture which had figured out how to work with large and heavy blocks of stone and to quarry them and carve them and move them around. And our ancestors are supposed to have been hunter-gatherers, you know, living in small groups without any large-scale organization. And Gobekli Tepe gives the lie to that. And there's a very sophisticated carving method employed on these beams, a three-dimensional carving method, where instead of carving the image into the stone itself,

which is the easy way to draw something, they actually left the piece of stone. Like if they drew a lizard, they would cut away everything else and leave the lizard to stand out. Exactly. That's very difficult to do. Carving in high relief. It's extremely difficult to do, and again, it takes practice. It takes a culture that's worked on that.

So we have to say there's a background to this which goes thousands of years earlier than the site that we found. And as more excavation is done, I believe more and more of that is going to come out. One of my favorite quotes of yours is that we're a civilization with amnesia. A species with amnesia. A species with amnesia. It's such a great way of putting it because when you keep digging holes and finding things that are, like, old as fuck.

Like, Gobekli Tepe was found by a farmer, right? He was just putzing around and was like, what the hell is this? He kicks it. He moves it around. He's like, this is weird. He starts digging and boom. It's one of the most important archaeological findings ever. Absolutely.

But none of this existed while you guys were dealing with Zali Huas. No. No. I was watching that and the other thing was the other academic who he was communicating with, whatever that guy's name is, no need to even say it, such a cunty human being. The way he was laughing. Like, what culture are we talking about that existed 10,000 years ago?

Why is that funny to you? Let him remain nameless. I know who you mean. And yeah, they pour scorn on these ideas. Intellectual scorn. They're so fucking arrogant. Not all of them, right? Not all of them. I mean, most of them are doing amazing things. The reason why you have an incredible hip, right?

Some bad motherfuckers in academia. Absolutely. I'm not insulting science as such. Just humans. Just shitty ego humans. Just some shitty ego-driven humans. And it happens that archaeology is one of those areas of study which is very territorial and where scholars have staked their reputation on a particular view of the past and they get very angry when anybody threatens that. And they're very, very, very obnoxious to one another as well as to outsiders.

And they've told this story and given degrees based on what they've taught for decades. Decades after decades after decades. And to all of a sudden step in and say, we were wrong. There's no way this guy... It's very difficult to do. It's very difficult to do. And in saying these negative things about Egyptology, I also do want to say that they also do great work. There's a fantastic work that's been done by Egyptology, I also do want to say that they also do great work. There's a fantastic work that's been done by Egyptology and I don't think that I could have written any of my books if I hadn't been able to draw on the huge

amount of data that Egyptology has provided. But sometimes I put a different interpretation on it from the one that they put on it. So I don't want to put them down completely. They've done great work, but they're narrowly focused on a particular reference frame, a particular idea of how human history evolved. And they should let the evidence speak for itself rather than impose that. And we should point out that there is a small group of people that, not a small group, I shouldn't even say, I shouldn't quantify them. There's some people believe that the water erosion feature, it was actually wind and sand. I've seen that argument, and I'm not a geologist, obviously,

but when I saw Robert Schock deal with that argument, it doesn't seem to hold water. It doesn't. Schock's got an excellent answer to all of that, and it is not wind weathering. So it was not sand. Anyway, the Sphinx was covered with sand for a very long period of time. The way it comes, like cuts down and in, it looks like water had been pouring down for a long time. Cutting grooves into the rock.

Smooth and groovy. I don't know, though. I'm not qualified to. Well, that's why Shock has made a marvelous contribution to to this whole field because he is a credentialed academic. He is a geologist. And he's been prepared to put his reputation on the line and say, I'm sorry, I think the Sphinx is really, really old. Yeah. What bothers me about the people that debunk it is they claim to be correct. The people that look... It's very obvious you're dealing with some pretty significant erosion. So why is it so different looking than the erosion on the outside of the Sphinx, which looks like wind and sand?

Why are you dealing with in this enclosure where this thing was buried for so long? Why is it different here? Is it the type of stone? Is that what it is? I mean, what is it? Or is it evidence of an older time? Is it possibly something that was built into some malleable stone a long fucking time ago? And then pretending that it's not possible

is kind of silly. It's kind of silly. Because you don't know. We don't have a really accurate map of what happened 10,000 years ago. How do you know that? And the history of science is such, we know again and again that fixed and rigid views about how the world is do get overthrown. They do get changed. But reluctantly in some areas. Reluctantly, with a fight, but eventually the new evidence overwhelms the old.

And I think we're, in the realm of ancient history, we're poised on the verge of that kind of revolution. I think it's going to happen. With Zawahawas out of the picture, is it possible now that they can excavate some sites that they weren't allowed to before? Like I know there was something, when they wanted to do something under the paw of the Sphinx. They had found some chamber.

That's a needed project which needs to be done. I don't know. I don't know whether the new authorities – right now Egypt is just so busy surviving and so busy trying to figure out where it goes next. And they've had a major political change. But many of the old guard are still in place in many, many ways. And there is this popular uprising in Egypt, but it's disorganized and unplanned. So right now, the last thing that most Egyptians are thinking about is ancient history. My take on that part of the world as a comedian

is that if that's the birthplace of civilization, that's the cradle of civilization, that those people right now, that's the townies of the world. That's the people that never left. The people that literally are living with the echoes of the behavior of people that lived 10,000 years ago in that very same spot.

And that's why everything's so... In particular, Egypt's Coptic population, who number out of 60 million, I believe, roughly 6 million are Copts. So they are practicing a particularly ancient form of Christianity. Their language is structurally very closely related to the ancient Egyptian language, and they are the direct inheritors of the ancient Egyptian tradition. So when ancient Egyptians were converted to Christianity

around about 300 or 400 years after Christ, that was the beginning of the Coptic church in ancient Egypt, and the Coptic people are the true inheritors of the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt. And I bet they suck to hang out with. I bet they're really annoying. I bet they've got some crazy rules. They do a lot of weird stuff to their people. What?

Are they involved in genital manipulation? No, not really. Who's doing that? They're a persecuted minority. Oh, okay. Very, very much so. Six million of them. Yeah, but out of 60 million

and in an area which is involved with Islamic fundamentalism, very much it's difficult to be a minority in that situation. So what you're saying is it's better to be a Christian in that area? No. I think that all three of the world's monotheistic faiths, whether it's Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, have been responsible for just a vast amount of misery in the world. And I think we're not going to move on as a human race unless we actually move on from that time where we don't accept that something is true just because our parents or some guy with a beard tells us that it's true.

Where we look for direct experience of the spirit and the divine. This is the problem with all of those big religions. I don't care whether they call themselves Christians, Muslims, or Jews, you know, is that they're hierarchies, they're bureaucracies, they're power structures, and they do not offer a direct experience. That's why all of them persecute the use of psychedelics. They don't want people to have direct contact with the divine. Are you hopeful about things when you see like Arab Spring, people are rising up and trying to remove dictators and what happened in Egypt, getting rid of Mubarak? I am hopeful. And I think it's, I think it is happening all over the world. And I think the internet has

played a part with it. And it's happening in America. You know, I come here as a foreigner, I'm British, I come to I come to America often. I have family here in America. I feel very closely connected with America. And America is a paradox. It's a huge paradox because on the world stage, America is a very dark and malignant force which does tremendous harm consistently and has done for a long time. But at the individual level, there's a tremendous spirit of awakening in America. Look just what's happening with cannabis laws in America in the last 10 years. That's unimaginable in Britain. We can't make changes like that. Why is that? Because we don't have this spirit of independence.

We don't have the structure where individual states can make decisions on key issues like that. And, of course, in America, there's a conflict between state law and federal law. You know, the federal government is not always respecting state lawsriminalized or even legalized cannabis is a sign of a sea change that is underway at the moment. And what it reflects is an awakening of the American people. So even though, you know, huge negative forces are still at work and are still sitting in the seat of power, I think there's a tremendous hope for the future in America, and that comes from the awakening to consciousness of the American people. And maybe it's small right now, but it's growing. And in that sense, far more than any other, I believe America is leading the world,

that there is this possibility for awakening here. And maybe it goes back to the founding fathers and the frontier days and just the sense that people should be able to make decisions about their own lives without government telling them what to do. That's the step we all need to take. We need to move ahead. We need to set aside our commitment to these large monolithic religions. We need to set aside our commitment to large monolithic states.

We need to run our own lives and make decisions for ourselves. And it just happens that that is very close to the heart of what America is all about. What it should be all about instead of what it's all about is we're living inside of the balls of the dick that's fucking the world. That's really what it's all about. But living inside the balls, you're in a position to give that dick that's fucking the world a real pain. Well, it would be even better if the dick would just get its shit together. Yeah. It's not impossible.

It's only going to be done by the American people. By the awakening of the American people, they will say enough is enough and we will not accept this crap anymore. And slowly but surely the old guard dies off. And then there's a huge industry of brainwashing which goes on, makes it difficult for people to think for themselves. Brainwashing like how? Well, through the media, I mean, just through the control. So there's this whole ethic that our lives are supposed to be about production

and consumption and nothing else, that we define ourselves in terms of what we own. We're prepared to go into huge debt to own a shiny car or a better house, and that's supposed to be right and proper. And then we define ourselves in terms of our consumption, and we must work hard, we must go to the office every day. All of these things are brainwashing. And then there's the TV.

We can have a little relaxation. We can enjoy some fantasy. Maybe we'll win the lottery one day. All of these are mechanisms of control which keep people quiet in society. And distractions, distractions from the great beyond. There's too much out there to really stop and think about, about the fact that your body's going to slowly expire, even the sun that heats the world itself is going to die out.

And I think the possibilities, when we really consider them all, are pretty terrifying. So we watch storage wars. Do you have storage wars? No. One of the best shows ever. Not really.

It's terrible. But I mean, it's hilarious. They go to storage units that people haven't paid for. Right. And they open up the door and they find things in there. Like, whoa, what is this? And they bid on the door.

Like, there's like 10 people sitting around, and they all bid on the contents. And if you get lucky, who knows? There might be gold bullion in there that someone saved. Right. Or not. Right. And so these idiots go and open up these boxes and then pull shit out. And then it turns out that it's not even really what the contents were. They added

fake contents to these storage places. But people watch it and they just get distracted. It's a distraction. So if we're going to wake up, we have to overthrow these systems of mental control which are in place.

Or take responsibility for your own time because those distractions are just, they're money extractors. That's what they are. They're all money extractors. They're selling Tide or Toyota trucks or whatever the hell they're selling. And they're just putting on this thing because it's a machine that they can press

and it's like an automatic program that runs and extracts money. It's not really necessarily a work of art. It's just you've made a hack. But you don't have to do hack. Terrifying prospect, really. But you don't have to do it. You know, I think what people really need is, you know, it sounds crazy,

but what people really need is guys like you to talk about things, guys like you to put ideas out there that makes them go, yeah, what am I doing? What is this? And start the ball rolling of rethinking their thought process. Rethinking is badly needed. It's everything, right? It's everything. And I do think that something I bang on about a lot is the issue of sovereignty over consciousness. That is, to me, just one of the very, very, very key issues, which a lot of people have been persuaded not ever to think about.

But once you start thinking about it and you realize that this mysterious – we don't even know what consciousness is, you know. I mean, there is no clear science on what it is or to explain it. But we know we've got it. And whatever it is, it's the essence of ourselves. And why can we not make sovereign decisions over the most intimate and personal part of ourselves? It's crazy. And I find when you put that to people,

even to arch Republicans, you know, they get it. They suddenly realize, you know, that actually legalizing psychedelics is a Republican issue. I'll tell you what the problem is, Graham Hancock, is the children. What you're ignoring is you're endorsing drug use to children and i think that's incredibly irresponsible that's exactly what ted said when they banned my talk one of their one of their statements they said that we we can't allow this talk to be on the air because some young man might go off to south america and drink ayahuasca that That's so hilariously dumb. And Ted cannot be seen to be

endorsing the drinking of ayahuasca. Is that the... There was a huge issue with you. And by the way, your issue was after Eddie Wong came in here. Eddie Wong told his gross story that makes you just go, Ew, Ted. Apparently John Anthony West has a Ted story as well.

And I think that there's a lot of beautiful things that come out of ted a lot of incredible talks but it seems like any organization once people get into power and once people have the ability to tell other people what's cool and what's not cool it starts getting weird and you start telling eddie wong that he has to attend all these different things and meet all these donors. Like some kind of freaky cult.

Yeah. Well, that's what he felt like. He felt like it was really strange. Now, your thing got pulled. And what was the scientific explanation for why they got pulled? Well, it was none. You had an exchange with one of the guys on TED. I read the comments and you presented all the things that he had said and said, please show your example of when I said this. I never said this. What were the very, what

was the thing that he accused you of and what was the response? There were two of us who got our talks deleted. Rupert Sheldrake as well. Rupert Sheldrake is the other. His talk was called the science delusion. My talk was called the war on consciousness. He can't be shitting on science like that, called the science delusion, Rupert. How dare you poke the beehive. It was as though Ted felt that these talks must automatically be wrong and that they had some kind of preconception about what we were saying.

So they didn't even bother to sit down and listen to the actual 18-minute talks, not that much to listen to, before deleting it from their YouTube channel. They just said this is pseudoscience. And they listed a series of false statements that we'd supposedly made. But the problem was neither I nor Rupert had made those statements. So they never even bothered to look at it. science. It's full of, and they listed a series of false statements that we'd supposedly made. But the problem was neither I nor Rupert had made those statements. So they never even bothered to look at it. They just read complaints and then responded on those complaints. Responded on the basis of those. So when we challenge them, okay, please go through, in my case, go through my talk and find where I say that ayahuasca allows you to communicate

with an ancient mother culture where do i say that i never said that in my talk i never said any such thing in my talk they actually couldn't do it and is that something you've said before no i've never said that i've never said it right now i heard you well what you're gonna take a little clip of that and what i talked about was the mother goddess right the experience of an encounter with the mother goddess. But I never said it allows you to communicate with an ancient mother culture like a lost civilization. They knew I'd written books about lost civilizations. So they thought I must be bringing my lost civilization beef into my TED Talk, which I didn't. It didn't have anything to do with lost civilization.

It was a talk about consciousness. And the real – the original version was giving Up the Green Bitch, where you were talking It was originally, I originally called the talk Giving Up the Green Bitch. That's when I watched it. Because I was giving my personal story of, you know, why I gave up cannabis. I changed that title because a lot of people pointed out to me that that's deeply disrespectful of cannabis and that for many people, cannabis is a green goddess. And cannabis was a green goddess for me.

And I accepted that well to those people i'd say fucking relax okay because i love cannabis too but it didn't bother me yeah some people got really upset i realized that to be upset i realized that there is in fact a cannabis orthodoxy as well which i which by which by talking about my my my quitting of cannabis i had upset this orthodoxy but when i looked at talk, my talk was much more about the war on consciousness than it was about that. That's what it was really about. So, for example, I made the point that our society doesn't object in principle to altering consciousness. I mean what happens when you put a kid on Ritalin? That's a powerful pharmacological drug which is altering consciousness.

pharmacological drug which is altering consciousness. When you over-prescribe Prozac or Seroxat for conditions of depression, those drugs are altering consciousness. We value alcohol. We invest in the multi-billion dollar alcohol industry. People don't primarily drink alcohol because of the taste. They drink it because it alters their consciousness in a way that they like. And so we don't object to altering consciousness in principle, but we object to altering consciousness in certain kinds of ways which threaten the status quo. And that's what psychedelics do. They alter consciousness in ways that lead people to ask profound questions about the nature of the society they live in.

And that appears to be the line that I crossed. So Ted tried to dress it up as pseudoscience. And when I called them on that, in the end, because they realized, I think, that they'd got themselves into some kind of danger. And it's still there on the web page. Rupert and I call it their naughty corner. They created a naughty corner of the TED website where our talks were put back online. And with all their reasons why they'd taken them off. So first thing they did was they crossed out all their reasons. So you can find that everything they said has actually been crossed out. And then they

published our rebuttals. Deleted, completely deleted? No, we insisted that they accepted that nothing they'd said was true. But we insisted they leave it there on the public record, but put a line through it. Oh, wow. And they did that? They did that. They did that. Oh, my God. They did that. That's kind of a cool victory. I know. I know. And they published that? They did that. They did that. Oh, my God. They did that. That's kind of a cool victory. I know. I know. And they published our rebuttals in full. But it wasn't a complete victory because what they didn't do, which is all we wanted, was for our talks to be reinstated on the TEDx YouTube channel.

Not only that, but you can't put your talk online yourself. Well, no. I have put my talk online myself. You have. And so have about 100 other YouTube channels. Oh, beautiful. And I think Ted took such a massive beating over this because it clearly was an act of censorship. However, they tried to dress it up that they've decided not to go and pull the talks from YouTube, which probably they could do.

So, I mean, my talk had 132,000 views on YouTube, on their channel, when they pulled it. But since then, it's had hundreds of thousands of more views all over the Internet. So, you know, rather than actually suppress the talk, I think it's called the Streisand effect. You know, rather than suppress the talks, they ended up multiplying. Same with Rupert's talk. How is that a Streisand effect? Apparently, I think it was Barbara Streisand tried to stop some public statement that had been made about her and it ended up multiplying the statement.

This is the great thing about the internet. When you try to suppress something, it grows. It doesn't get suppressed. Including dick pictures. It is. Got one of those out there? Coming back around, Graham Hancock. I'm going to find you.

I've never had my dick photographed. Congratulations. How about you? I plead the fifth. So now the page got pulled. Your talk got pulled. It got reinstated. They crossed a line through it.

In the naughty corner, yeah. And put up in the naughty corner. But at least it's on YouTube as well. Yeah, all over YouTube. Is it possible? This is what I Yeah, all over YouTube. Is it possible that, this is what I know, okay, I really love your work. I've been a fan ever since

Fingerprints of the Gods. It was a fascinating book that really changed the way I looked at history. I think you're a brilliant guy. But I take more shit for you from the extreme science dorks. I take more shit about having you well it's graham hancock gonna come on your podcast and and pump out his pseudoscience yes like so many people get

so twatty about you and it's a science thing and it could be mistakes that you've made in the past we all make them that they want to chirp on uh it could be the whole Mars thing, the whole face on Mars thing. You got a little cookie with that. Got a little cookie with that. I still think it's an interesting phenomenon. It is interesting. There's a lot of interesting rocks on Mars. It might have, at one point in time, had a culture on it.

We don't know what they are. No. We need to do more work. But, yeah, I have annoyed scientists. I tell you what, it's not actually – I've certainly made mistakes. Right. What about junk DNA? There was something about the contents of junk DNA.

That's one thing that they keep harping on. They keep talking about that. You had erroneously stated something about the knowledge that we have of junk DNA. Well, yes. I said that 97% of DNA is defined as junk and maybe it isn't and that there may be data stored on DNA. And as a matter of fact, this is now being done. Data is being stored on DNA. So you just were misinformed?

I don't think that I was misinformed. I think that I was exploring an interesting area of inquiry. And it's true since I published on that in 2005 that some new work has been done on so-called junk DNA, and it is found to have an important biophysical function. But what I reported, and this was in my book Supernatural in 2005, was a study published in the magazine Science by Eugene Stanley, which looked at the language-like structure of junk DNA. The junk DNA has a structure very similar to all human languages.

There are certain patterns that repeat in languages that appear also in junk DNA. And I simply wanted to speculate on this. Is it possible that junk DNA is some kind of archive? I was looking – when I wrote Supernatural, I was looking at this connection with entities that people have in altered states of consciousness. And I was saying that the kind of place I would bet on is that in some weird way these entities may be real. That is in itself a very annoying statement to make to any materialist scientist. But then I said, but maybe there's another possibility. Maybe there's an archive of information

stored on all our DNA all around the world and maybe in altered states of consciousness we gain access to the archive and that's maybe why people from all different cultures at different periods of history see the same thing. And I cited the work of Francis Crick who was the discoverer of the double helix form of DNA in a book that he wrote called Life Itself where Crick speculates that DNA did not evolve on this planet. This is the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick. This is not Graham Hancock who evolve on this planet. This is the Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick. This is not Graham Hancock who's making this statement.

Crick suggests a phenomenon called directed panspermia, that the reason that life exploded so rapidly and amazingly on this planet within 100 million years of the planet being cool enough to support life, roughly 4 billion years ago, the reason that it exploded so suddenly was that it came here from elsewhere, and he suggested that there had been some advanced alien culture on the other side of the galaxy that faced annihilation. Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in their vicinity,

and they looked desperately for some way to preserve life, and their first thought was could they get themselves off the planet? And they realized that yes, they could, but that they could not travel through interstellar space for thousands or millions of years to reach other possibly habitable planets. So in the end what they did was they sent bacteria out into the universe on spaceships and they genetically engineered those bacteria to make them incredibly hardy. This was Crick's suggestion, not mine. And the

only thing... You got to really say that. The only thing I added to it was if his theory were right, and that life spiraled up on this planet because one of those spaceships hit the ancient earth and spilled out its cargo of genetically engineered bacteria, well, maybe they wrote a message on the DNA of those bacteria. And maybe that message has been preserved, highly preserved, and there are certain strands of DNA that are preserved for hundreds of millions or billions of years and passed down into modern human beings. And maybe it's a message for us about that lost ancestor culture that made the DNA, or rather didn't make it, but engineered the DNA and the bacteria

that started life on Earth and that eventually evolved into us. It was just an interesting inquiry as an – By the way, this lends credence to the idea that Francis Crick did a lot of acid. Well, which he certainly did. Francis Crick was – Some deny this. Michio Kaku wouldn't agree with me on this. Francis Crick was a big user of acid and so were many –

Supposedly, allegedly. So were many intellectuals in that period. This is essentially the Prometheus story in a lot of ways. I guess it is. So I thought it was an interesting area to inquire into. For me, I feel my role is to inquire into interesting things

that are forbidden territory for scientists. And when I inquire into them, it doesn't mean that I'm insisting this is a fact. What I'm saying is this is something that we need an alternative point of view on, and let's look at and consider what this might mean. And I may be completely wrong, but I think the exploration is worthwhile. That's the position that I take.

It does annoy scientists. I think the other reason it annoys scientists is because I don't mean to pat myself on the back, but I'm not particularly lunatic on a day-to-day basis. I'm not particularly kooky. I'm moderately rational. I can make an argument. I can express things. And I think if I was an obvious nutcase, they wouldn't need to get so angry with me. obvious nutcase, they wouldn't need to get so angry with me. But because I'm fairly reasonable and open to discussion and persuasion, I think it makes me a little bit more dangerous to them.

And it's the same with John Anthony West. John is a very reasonable man. He's coming up with extraordinary ideas about the past, but he's arguing them very, very well and very coherently and based on evidence. Intellectual ideas also are the battlefield of scientists and science thinkers and science dorks. I mean, proving someone incorrect is a huge feather in your cap. Being able to point out inconsistencies, correcting mistakes. And that's how science works. That's what's good about science.

On the one hand, it's what's good about science, which is what you would call destructive criticism. Here is a new idea. Let's figure out any way we can to destroy it. If anything is left after we've exposed it to that fire for a decade, that thing that's left is probably worthwhile. And that is the scientific method. I think there's room for another method.

Here's this extraordinary idea that somebody put over. Let's look for what's good in that idea. Let's see if we can find something good in that idea. If there's something possible. Yeah, see if there's something possible there. Same approach, just in a positive way. Just in a positive way rather than a negative way. So I think that both are possible.

It's the same attitude essentially. You're trying to find truth. You're saying is there a possibility of this? Is there a truth in here? And is there a benefit? That's what a real Egyptologist would do if they examine the Sphinx. They would say this really bears some consideration. This is really unique.

It's unusual. And geologists seem to be pointing to this. Let's discuss this. Let's explore this further rather than just get rid of it right at the beginning and massively destroy it. What culture are we talking about from 10,000 years ago? Exactly. And so with this destructive method, scientists seek to destroy each other's reputations. And so many, many great individuals have suffered most painful experiences as a result of this but have ended up later to be proved to be right. Sometimes.

Sometimes. Sometimes. Not in theory. There's plenty of quacks out there too and they need to be exposed. Sure, there are quacks. One of the things I've – I'm doing this new show on the Sci-Fi channel. It's called Joe Rogan Questions Everything and eventually where I would like to get to the mysteries of ancient civilizations, whether or not there were some sort of Atlantean-type civilizations.

I would love to talk to you about this. But what I'm seeing when I'm doing this show is how important science really is. I'm getting a massive dose of the reality of how many people are really kooky out there and have some really kooky ideas that they cling to like a cat stuck in a tree and they won't let go of these fucking kooky ideas and no matter how many experts you bring in there that are true experts on whatever subject it is at hand if that person has a kooky idea that they've clung to, they are not letting that fucking thing go. No, they'll never let it go.

That's why science is so important. No, science is incredibly important. It's the ego that's a problem, right? I am sitting here in this chair with a pain-free hip as a result of science. Yeah. That is science. Science gave me my legs back. Science gave me my mobility.

Science is how we're doing this podcast. Science is how we're doing this podcast. It's a wonderful thing. It's an incredible instrument. We should how we're doing this podcast. Science is how we're doing this podcast. It's a wonderful thing. It's an incredible instrument. We should not despise it in itself. But we should, I think, be open to the view that there are other modes of inquiry into the nature of reality, which should be also considered. It could even be done scientifically.

For example, psychedelics are a marvelous tool for inquiring into consciousness, this mystery of consciousness. And we could have detailed scientific studies. So here's the hypothesis. With psychedelics, we retune the receiver wavelength of the brain, hypothesis, mind you, and gain access to other levels of reality,

parallel universes, if you like, which are inhabited by intelligent beings. Okay, let's explore that hypothesis scientifically. How are we going to do that? Psychedelics, the very best way, put people into deeply altered states of consciousness on cue, you know, and then get them to compare notes, get them to ask questions of those entities, see if any new information, any novel information comes back that couldn't possibly have been known, you know, that kind of thing. It's being done, interestingly, with near-death research. That's another area where most materialist mainstream scientists will say,

nonsense, there's no possibility of any kind of survival of death. But people report these astonishing near-death experiences, and they report seeing things that they should not have been able to see. So now in operating theaters, in emergency rooms, in a number of hospitals in London, but also I believe in the United States as well, they have created shelves up at a high level where they have placed certain images. And they are recording the data right now when people have a near-death experience and they have had the sense of leaving their bodies and being up around the ceiling, have they seen these images?

If they've seen those images and it can be documented scientifically, then we have to think again about consciousness. So they're putting the images up there specifically to catch people looking? Yeah. So when the guy comes back, when he flatlines and he's considered to be brain dead and they bring him back to life and this is happening more and more with advanced resuscitation techniques many of them report having experiences out of their body well now here's a scientific way to test that is that imagination or is there something real going on and what's the data so far have people seen those images have they had there's some there's some quite compelling there's some

quite compelling data but there's an elusive nature to the phenomenon, which is that very often when somebody has a near-death experience, they've had it in the one theater that didn't have the images on view. So they're looking for a way. How convenient. How convenient. They're looking for a way around this, which might involve using like iPad devices which can be moved around very rapidly and placed in certain spots. Where they resuscitate people. Where they're resuscitating people.

I don't think, see I think this is part of the issue, you know, when we say why doesn't science do this or what if science did that, I really don't think it's science. I think science and the scientific method are awesome and very hugely important. I think it's people. I think the issue is people, it's personalities, it's people's style of communication, it's people's styles of interaction and their

sense of competition they have with exchanging ideas and with exploring ideas. There's a massive amount of competition involved in being intellectually correct. Getting those points, the points for being correct. We're all human, we all want to be right. Yeah. Getting those points. Sure there is. The points for being correct. We're all human.

We all want to be right. It's a competition forum. I mean, I've seen it on my message board. I've seen it on Reddit. When you're writing something, you're not just writing something. You're also sort of expressing yourself in a way that you would like to get brownie points for. Yeah, you're investing yourself, your good name, everything into what you say.

Right. And you would like people. We all want to be liked. So when people go to battle about ideas, the real issue is ego. It's humans. It's not the scientific method, which the scientific method should most certainly be applied to psychedelics. It should most certainly be applied to every aspect of the known world. And in fact, if that was the case, then more people would probably do psychedelics and

we'd have less of an issue in the first place. I would rather think so. So you're not an anti-science guy. You're just an anti-asshole guy. Thank you. That's a really good way to put it. I think – but there's a label that people like to throw on you that you're anti-scientific. I think that's one of the ways that this TED thing built momentum.

And when – They do like to throw that label. As a matter of fact – Pseudoscience. As a matter of fact, it's one of the reasons amongst many why I've started to write fiction as well as nonfiction. as nonfiction. Because if I explore extraordinary ideas in the realm of fiction, I'm not actually then making a claim that this is fact. Nevertheless, the ideas are there to be explored in what I've written. So it becomes possible to enter into an inquiry into the nature of reality without having to create this huge superstructure of defense against attacks by scientists, and I think it's a very useful way

forward as far as far as I'm concerned because I did find that writing writing nonfiction more and more because I've become this target figure for scientists required me to bulletproof my arguments in ways that make them frankly a bit boring to read. And I quite like the liberation of not having to do that. Yeah, I agree. I think your ideas are always very novel and you're a very interesting dude. But I think in a lot of ways you're sort of a bard. You're a great storyteller and you're an exciter of the imagination and an inspirer of questions.

Thank you. I feel that's what I'm supposed to do. That's what you do best, man. That book, Fingerprints of the Gods, got me looking at so many different aspects of our culture and then questioning how we got to this point in the first place, how it is that I get up in the morning, I get in my car, and I drive to work. As I was doing this, after reading your book, I was thinking how strange it is that we live in this society where I was born in 1967.

I was, you know, we've, the cities have been here since I was a baby. Cars have been here. I've assumed that they've always been here. But then when you really stop and think about what a short period of time 2,500 B.C. is or what a short period of time even 30,000 B.C. is, that's nothing, man. In the history of the world, it's all a blink. It's a nothing. And we are in the middle of this.

We wake up. Being born is like waking up in the middle of a trip. Like, where are we? Where are we going? And that's the entire collective culture. And that was really probably the first time I've ever really considered that was in reading your book. And that made me so excited about history. I wasn't excited about history from school. I mean, I took the obligatory classes. I'm really glad to have had that effect. And it makes me feel good. As I'm getting on in life, one of the things that makes me feel good is the feedback that I do get from people who have read my books, which I've sweated blood in order to write. And I've taken a lot of attacks from doing that.

But I find this is a new thing for me. You know, Facebook. I mean, I'm a novice at Facebook, but I've started to interact really quite strongly on my Facebook pages. I enjoy the interaction that I get there. I enjoy the new ideas that are put to me by others. And, yeah, frankly, it's really nice when some kid in his 20s writes to me and says he read Fingerprints of the Gods and it changed the way that he looks at the world.

That makes me feel I've done something right anyway. In all the mistakes I may have made, I've done something right. You've done quite a bit right. But one of the things I think that you haven't done yet that you could totally be amazing at is your own podcast. You're a wind-up guy. I could press you. I could start you up.

What's this ayahuasca stuff? Bang. Press play. I could start you up. What's this ayahuasca stuff? Bang, press play, and you will do the dance and captivate with amazing descriptions and this very entrancing way of communicating. Interesting. I think people like that are really important in culture, and most scientists are boring as fuck.

And even though they're doing amazing work and it's we wouldn't be communicating if it wasn't for some boring scientists the reality is you're not going to excite people yeah with that shitty personality of yours yeah and it's not all of them i mean feinman was legendarily charismatic there's some great as is carl sagan you know neil degrasse tyson is brilliant in that regard he's's a brilliant man, and he's brilliant. He's captivating and entertaining, and he draws you in. And they're very important as well. They're important as well.

There's a lot of… Well, I will look at the… Podcast, my friend. Now that I've kind of initiated myself into the internet world and got talking to people on Facebook and so on, and my website, you know, all of these things are… And the one thing I haven't done, I do have a YouTube channel, but what I don't have is a podcast. And it might be something I – Massively important. It's the best way to communicate with people because even in writing, sometimes things are lost in tone, in the way – you could be sarcastic and just joking around.

You actually have to write it just kidding. You have to actually quantify it. Whereas people know in the inflection of your voice, the look on your face. That's why we like to do this. Even though most of the people listen to this podcast, we like to have an iTunes version so you can see sometimes we're making silly faces. We're joking around. I think for you, it would be an excellent way to explore new ideas, things that come to you, and also respond to people online. Instead of sitting there and writing everything out, pick a few emails every week and respond to them.

Very good thought. It's great. I will take your advice. It's perfect for you. I will take your advice on this. What was the argument against Rupert Sheldrake from what I I read online, was a bit stronger than the argument for you. No, I don't think so. Again, they attributed statements to him that he didn't make.

So it was more the same type of thing. It was the same type of thing. What was his controversy? Well, he's saying that science is locked in what we call a materialist reference frame, which is that it seeks to reduce everything to matter and that there cannot be any. So therefore, the idea of telepathy, for example, is an impossible idea as far as mainstream science is concerned, because if your consciousness is simply something that's generated by your brain, how can you then pick up the thoughts of somebody else across a continent or on the other side of the world? How is

that possible? And so he is questioning the materialist reference frame of mainstream science. And since the most vocal advocates of mainstream science are materialists, they do believe that consciousness is an accidental epiphenomenon of brain activity, that there is nothing else to it than that. He got under a lot of skins. Well, there's also the ones that don't believe that and haven't clearly defined what consciousness is, but say if psychic abilities do exist, show them.

Exhibit them. Well, that's precisely what Rupert has done. Has he? Yes. What has he done clearly that shows, in your opinion? Well, for example, documenting the sense of being stared at. People know when they're being stared at. Right.

And he's done experiments which document this and prove it at a level of statistical significance. A couple percent, right? Yeah, a couple percent. Why does your dog know when you're coming home? Has that been disproven ever? No. No. Even though the owner of the dog varies the route, comes home by a different route in a different way every day. This might be your wife calling. Yeah, that's probably Santa. Hello?

Oh, it's your neighbor. Oh, yeah, she's here. Okay, we'll have someone come out and get her right now. Thank you very much. All right, Jamie, just go out and tell her we'll wrap this up. That's our neighbor. She must have printed knocking on the door. This is the great thing about a live discussion.

Yeah, it's beautiful. When my wonderful Santa turns up at the door and can't get in, she's got a telephone. Well, it's cool because people know that it's not some, you know, it's not edited and polished. It's a real conversation in that way. It's a real conversation.

You know, like, we couldn't have this conversation afterwards and say, you know, the thing about science, maybe I said something. Could we cut that out? Exactly. It's raw. It's real. And it works.

Can I say a couple of things which I would like people to hear? Sure. One is I – this is an odd thing to ask because I've been very successful as a nonfiction author. But I am hoping that people will pay attention to my fiction and that people will listen to my fiction. It's very, very difficult for me to be published as a novelist. The publishing industry want me to stay in my box as a successful non-fiction author,

and they don't want me to explore the fictional side of things. So I've managed to get a British publisher for my novel, which we talked about earlier, War God, about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. But so far, I don't have an American publisher. And I have been helped a lot by my Facebook community, many of whom are Americans, who have gone to Amazon UK and bought the British edition of my book from America. And it will be delivered to them here in America in a few days because the book is published on the 30th of May. And if anybody's interested in that story, I would appreciate if they'd make the effort to go to Amazon UK and pick up the book because what that does then is it gives the book the possibility of some success in Britain. And if it succeeds in Britain, then it will be picked up by an American publisher.

So it's only the resistance is just that it's nonfiction? Yeah, that's right. Publishing industry is an industry that thinks in terms of brands and I am branded as a nonfiction author. This is your second nonfiction book. It's my second. Did your first one sell well? My first novel vanished without a trace because that was called Entangled, because it had absolutely no support from the publishers at all. It sold a few thousand copies, but really it was completely ignored. And the same thing is going to happen with War God as well. And what I've done is I've put free to read chapters online on my website.

And that is GrahamHancock.com? And that's www.GrahamHancock.com. We've got to fix your Twitter, man. This double underscore is confusing a lot of people. Well, I know it is, but I couldn't get that name. I couldn't get at Graham Hancock. Who is Graham Hancock? Who's the at Graham Hancock?

Well, there's another guy with my name. And his name is Graham Hancock? Yeah, his name is Graham Hancock. He got it at Graham Hancock? Well, there's another guy with my name. And his name is Graham Hancock? Yeah, his name is Graham Hancock. He got it first, so nothing can be done about it. Just a double underscore. Couldn't you just do something else, like Graham Hancock in one word? No, that's what he's got. He's got it.

Oh, well, how about, do you have a middle name? Graham Bruce Hancock. Graham B. Hancock? Yeah. How about that? No, that's stupid. Forget B. Hancock? Yeah. How about that? No, that's stupid. Forget it. Forget what I said.

I know, great. You know, my mother, bless her, when she gave me my name, she had in mind – so my initials are G.B. Hancock, okay? Right. When she gave me my name, she was thinking of – yeah, that's what I use on my email address. She was thinking of – Hey, you fucked up. Someone's going to hit you with an email now. They hit me with emails anyway.

It's okay. She was thinking in a rather grandiose way of George Bernard Shaw, you know, G.B. Hancock. So she called me G.B. Hancock, not realizing that G.B.H. also stands for grievous bodily harm, you know. Oh, it does? In British law, yeah, that's a particular crime, you know, that you've committed an act of GBH against somebody. So that's my initials. I don't know what to do about my Twitter name. Maybe we just have to keep it double underscore.

So there's an underscore, Graham underscore? Since this is live, can I introduce my Santa? Sure, if she wants to. Santa, come here. Hi, Santa. Hi. What's up? Come, come. He's all so happy now that he quit here. Hi, Santa. Hi. What's up? Come, come.

He's all so happy now that he quit weed. Look at him. Completely, yes. Are you happier now that he quit weed? Absolutely. Wow. Thank God. That's hilarious.

Yeah. No, simply because he was abusing the substance. Right. You know. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, it was the substance controlling him. Or being in control of him as opposed to him in control of the substance.

Yeah, we went deep into it. It's interesting stuff. Do you have this on Kindle? Yes, but you have to buy it in England and I think there's some things that make it difficult for Americans to buy the Kindle edition. They can only buy the hardback edition.

Oh, that's so stupid. But there's links on my website which go to the right place to buy it, and there's chapters to read so people can make... I'm not asking people to buy it blind. People can make up their own minds, read the chapters if they hate it. Don't buy it. Well, Graham Hancock, one of our sponsors is Audible.com.

Is Audible.com? Yeah, do you have an audio version of it? Okay, now the US edition of my first novel, Entangled, is available on Audible. But right now, I do not have... Did you read it? Huh?

No, I didn't. It was read by somebody else. Do you like the person who read it? Was it good? That's got to be weird. Reading your own... Or hearing someone read your words. It's weird if they don't do it well.

But in this case, it was done well. Wow. Yeah, you don't want to buy Stephen King's when he reads them. That's the only, if I were to give you advice. I'm a huge Stephen King fan. Stephen King is brilliant. He's amazing. And his book on writing is

equally amazing. Stephen King on writing? On writing. Yeah, if you're a writer there's two books you need. The War of Art and Stephen King on Writing. Those are the two. The other one is Stephen Stephen Pressfield's Yeah, and his new one turning pro. It's equally brilliant But don't ever get an audiobook that Stephen King reads He's fucking boring as shit. Okay, he'll put you right to sleep

I mean the guy's the greatest author ever as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I agree He's he is the best he writes just just an amazing narrator, amazing stories. He's got the gift, fantastic gift of writing a story. Yeah, I remember reading some of his stuff when I was a young teenager, thinking like, Jesus, I shouldn't even be reading this. What the fuck?

His descriptions, they bordered on creepy, some of the sexual stuff. He's just a beast. Yeah, yeah. But he's also been given a gift by the universe to write amazing stories that make you want to keep turning the pages. And you're right,

his book on writing, for anybody who aspires to become a writer, that is the first place you go, is read Stephen King on writing. Yeah, it's a brilliant book and he's so forthcoming about all of his trials and struggles and he's amazing. And that's my favorite kind of movie is his books,

like where it's just fantasy. I don't need things to be real in my fiction. I enjoy fiction, but I don't need to see like a really depressing movie where everybody's got cancer and, oh, my God, so brilliantly acted. Stop. Entertain me. Show me an evil car that kills people. Show me the dude next door neighbor is a werewolf.

I think that's the writer's first task. The fiction writer's first task is to entertain. Did you – I mean you said witches in this. Did you throw some supernatural shit in this as well? The war god is full of the supernatural. is full of the supernatural. And I was able to bounce off the facts because the Aztec society has been rightly described as the last magical civilization.

They were involved in magic and witchcraft in a huge way. But they also persecuted witches, just as European society in the Middle Ages persecuted witches. So there are strong supernatural elements in this story. And in a way, I think it's only possible to understand what happened between 1519 and 1521 when you take the beliefs in the supernatural into account. It sounds like they were, I mean, your description of a nation of serial killers is apt. That's what the Aztecs were.

And here's the thing, Yuzi. I mean, my two central female characters meet in what's called a fattening pen. So this is what the Aztecs did. They're human sacrificial victims. First of all, they would fatten them up in prisons. Why would they fatten them? Because they wanted to present them to the god Plump and desirable. So they would fatten them for months on end.

And can you imagine living in that situation? You've been put in the fattening pen. They're feeding you this high-calorie diet, and at a certain date you're going to be marched up the pyramid and have your heart cut out. That takes some courage to resist. That Teotihuacan sacrifice of four days of 80,000 people, I told that to my friend Steve Rinella, and he didn't even believe me.

Yeah, Tenochtitlan, by the way. Tenochtitlan. How do you say it? Tenochtitlan. That was the ancient name of Mexico City. It used to be an island in the middle of a lake approached by causeways. And the temple was called Teotihuacan? Well, no, that's actually 35 miles north of Mexico City. That's a place, that's the pyramid of the sun, the pyramid of the moon, and the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, which the Aztecs revered as the place where men became gods.

That is what – but they didn't know who made Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan was already remotely ancient when the Aztecs came into the Valley of Mexico and encountered it. So the Pyramid of the Sun, the completion of that was when they killed 80,000 people. No. That was the Pyramid of the War God. Oh, the Pyramid of the War God. Oh, the Pyramid of the War God. Which is why my novel is called War God. Oh.

And that stood in the heart of what is now Mexico City. And when the Spanish took that city, the very first thing they did was to take that pyramid apart stone by stone. Did you see what happened in Belize recently? Yeah. So an ancient Mayan pyramid is used as a construction material by some asshole firm who used diggers to just break down the body of the pyramid and use it to make roads. How crazy is that? It kind of sums up everything that's wrong with our culture.

That's not our culture. That's the place where John McAfee was living. You know that whole craziness? Yeah, absolutely. I refer to global culture. Global culture of production and consumption. Yeah, it was astounding that someone would be willing to do that. You're destroying an archaeological site just for its limestone? Like, whoa, that is some short-sighted assholes. It's incredible. But doesn't that short-sightedness, the pursuit of short-term goals, which might be immediately profitable, even though long-term massively damaging, doesn't that actually completely sum up everything that's wrong with global culture today? I mean, if you wanted to take one act which kind of expresses it, that would be it. But, you know, we don't think long-term.

We don't think in terms of the sacred. We don't – the Amazon jungle. in terms of the sacred, the Amazon jungle. Nobody considers when it's being exploited as an economic resource what that means for our planet in the long run if all of those trees come down. Short term, some money might be made out of it. Long term, we're losing the lungs of our planet. Well, the pattern is the real issue with human beings

is our ability to do things in large numbers that would be horrific if we did singularly. The diffusion of responsibility that comes from acting as a corporation or acting as an army or acting where horrific things can be justified because you're only a part of one huge group of people that are doing these things. There's been some, we talked about science, there's been some interesting science done on exactly that point,

which is that they set it up with actors. You put a situation where somebody is on the street and they're in jeopardy. A woman is perhaps being attacked. If there are two or three people walking on the street, they will almost always intervene to prevent the attack. But if there's 1,000 people walking on the street, nobody intervenes. Yeah, well, I think that happens most of the time. It can happen, but I think a lot of people would intervene.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's one of those weird things that is like a psychological principle that gets brought up as a sort of as a matter of fact. I don't necessarily think it's a matter of fact because if I saw someone raping someone, I'd kick their ass. But you might be the... I would try at least.

You might be the extraordinary exception. Eh, I don't think so. I would try at least. You might be the extraordinary exception. I don't think so. I think there's a lot of people who jump in. But you hear stories like that all the time where people save someone from this and did something there. I think it's more likely that cowards would walk away if there's 1,000 people. But there's still out of 1,000 people. There's still somebody with guts who's going to do something about it. Somebody who realizes we're all in this together and wouldn't want to be.

I hope you're right. I share your faith in the human race. I think we have amazing potential, amazing capacity to love, amazing capacity to give, amazing generosity and decency. That's what I encounter day to day. Yeah, for the most part, right? Mostly people are awesome. It's just a few of these monozuma motherfuckers running around killing everybody yeah and throughout history there's been you know giant

groups of people led by serial killers yeah and that's yeah a big part of a big part of reality they're the ones who go for that job yeah i'm a big fan of this podcast called hardcore history that i talk about all the time but But I've been listening to it. Lately it's been talk about the Nazis and World War II. But when you go back and pay attention to some of the things that happened in history and you see the amazing level of ruthlessness that people exhibited against their enemies just throughout the history of humans. There's been groups that flared up, whether it's the Mongols or the Nazis or the Romans. There's been so many groups of ruthless people. It's still happening now, Joe. I mean, when a drone flies over a village in Afghanistan or

Pakistan and 120 people get slaughtered. It's a bit remote. It's a bit distant. We're not getting our hands dirty, but people are still being killed. Well, it's crazy. Children are being deprived of their parents. Children are dying.

Children are getting maimed. And the numbers are so skewed in the favor of people who were casualties that were innocent. There's way more people that are innocent that are getting killed by these drones. Of course. And then they say, well, that's because these terrorists, they do things in highly populated areas. Well, then you can't do that.

You can't just say we're going to kill. That is one of the most un-American things you could ever do. It's a terrible un-American thing. The idea that you could kill all these oppressed, innocent people just to get this one bad guy. It's patently, obviously wrong. And yet at the level of government, nobody seems to have got it yet how wrong it is. It's diffusion of responsibility in a digital, technological form, a warfare form.

Completely – I mean no one's even there. I mean this is what we can do. Instead of doing some horrific war crimes, we send soldiers in there to slaughter all these innocents to get these bad people, instead of doing that, which is totally unacceptable, we'll just do it this way where you're not even really there. Yeah, like some guy sitting in a control tower playing a computer game really. How about the fact they're going to give them medals? That was one of the big things. They're going to give drone pilots medals and people are like, what are you doing? Like this is getting bananas.

No act of courage is involved. Well, apparently there's been a new scandal where four Americans were killed in a recent drone strike, and now Obama is trying to restrict the use of drones and trying to say that they can't be used on Americans. But whatever. We live in strange times. We live in strange times. We live in strange times. Is it because our humanity has not yet caught up to our technological capabilities

that we have evolved technologically so much in the past several hundred years? We've literally changed the world entirely, but yet the tissue, the DNA, the echoes of the past that lie in our language and in our cultures is really not caught up by any stretch of the imagination. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. We've got these incredible toys, but we haven't learned to play with them responsibly yet.

Yeah, we've got this barbaric mindset that's still in place to run shit. If you want to run shit, you've got to be a fucking savage. The mindset hasn't changed that much in the last 1,000 or 500 years. But yet we're hopeful. It's a great gift to be born in a human body. We have this, you know, that's part of it actually is the human predicament is the predicament of making choices between alternatives, between good and evil, between dark and light. And our world we live in today is filled with darkness and with light.

But the one thing that all of us can do as individuals is we can make the right choice rather than the wrong choice. We don't have to add to the misery in the world, not even one tiny fraction. We always got the choices we make. Those are our responsibility alone. And we cannot devolve those on others. We can't say it's the government's fault. The choices we make are our choices. And that is the message of ayahuasca, isn't it?

Yes, that's the message of ayahuasca. That's why everybody needs it. Yeah, because your choices are yours, and your choices will define you. Isn't it funny that that would be one of the single most powerful changing elements in this culture? powerful changing elements in this culture. All of a sudden, ayahuasca centers started opening up, and we started exploring it scientifically. We started figuring out what the contents are. As long as those centers were run by good-hearted people

who had the capacity to love and wanted the betterment of mankind rather than who were seeking personal gain or personal power. The evil ones in Peru and where have you, are they taking it as well? Yeah. So they're taking it and doing evil things once they take it. I'm afraid so, yeah. Wow.

So do you think that they're just psychopaths that got a hold of some ayahuasca and that you can't fix that chronic racing? Finally, yes. If you come to this medicine with wicked intent, then bad things can happen. So you really believe in the idea of entities being evil. You believe in the communication of evil entities. I think it's a very interesting possibility, which explains a lot in human history. Demons. Yeah, demons. I think that's a simple shorthand for it, just as there are also angels.

I think that the reality is much more complicated than we imagine, that there are huge unseen realms which impact upon us in important ways, and we are interacting with them whether we like it or not. And in certain states of consciousness, that interaction can become conscious and we can gain access to those realms.

And furthermore, I would say, I believe ultimately in the unity of all things. But right now in this particular learning experience that we are undergoing in a human incarnation, I think it's really useful that those choices exist. What, after all, if everything was all good and rosy and perfect and were not possible to do wrong, what could we learn from this experience of life? the opportunity to make mistakes, if we don't, if we are not faced with fundamental choices, what would we benefit from in living this life in a human body? Well, you know, that's one of the main arguments for computer simulation theory. Excellent argument, yeah. One of the main arguments is that we've got ourselves to a point where life is fucking boring because we've solved all the problems, we've eliminated all the stress and conflict

and freed each other's minds. That's technically untrue. We haven't solved all the problems. But that this is a computer simulation. The life we are living, that we're in the roaring 20s of the digital era. We're in the simulation where it's indiscernible. Yeah, well, it's quite

possible to imagine virtual reality even in our technology today, getting to the point where you wouldn't know that it was virtual, where you're totally immersed in that reality. And for all we know, Joe, that's exactly what you and I are. That's the argument, yeah. And at the end of our lifespan, our 70 or 80 years or however many years we get, you know, random element in that, we're going to step out and find ourselves in a room where

we've been playing this game all along. And then we'll be scored on what we did. And did we actually fulfill the objectives that we set out at the beginning of the game with? There you get actually with that idea of a computer simulation, you find yourself coming full circle and meeting very ancient spiritual ideas. Like that thing that I call the weighing of the soul in the ancient Egyptian system. That's where you get scored on how you performed in the computer game. And maybe how you performed was not how much money you made or how much power you had. Maybe it was really how much love you gave. That was the thing you most needed to do. Is it possible that the sort of fractal nature of reality manifests itself in the idea of

these demons being that in that you must reinforce good and you must punish bad and the only way these dumb people ever really completely understand is if they feel a physical manifestation of the evil that they've caused. And that's what a demon is. So it's just sort of a guide rail that you bump into, something that's supposed to steer you towards the positive. The very reason why you evolve after like a psychedelic trip, seeing the bad that you're doing, seeing the evil as manifested as an actual being, where it's most terrifying,

your common enemies that you have in real life, whether it's predators or enemies, they're a physical manifestation. Absolutely. So... We don't know the answer to these questions. These are... We're touching here upon a great mystery. People all over the world have these experiences and report remarkably similar encounters with

entities, either demonic or angelic. And this has been going on throughout human culture. And it's a feature of the psychedelic experience as well. And we don't know what those things are. This is just not clear. Do they have an independent existence from us or are they part of a teaching program that we need to encounter, as you're suggesting just now? I think they're very interesting questions to examine, but I don't know the answer to them. I've always had an issue with the possibility of archetypes too that people have already established, that archetypes that people already have in their head so that they, you know,

when you have an abduction experience, what you think is an abduction experience, you sort of fill in the blanks with whatever these entities are. Well, all of a sudden they become these gray guys with big black eyes because that's the cultural archetype that we've sort of subscribed to. And in all these stories, these- Why do we find them painted on cave walls 25,000 years ago then? Good question, that's a good question.

Which ones do we find? Well, particularly on the walls of, in fact, on a little alcove and a ceiling inside Pêche Merle cave in France, there's a fantastically recognizable depiction of what we would call a grey today. Can you pull that up? How do you spell it? I call him the

wounded man sometimes. He's Peshmerl. P-E-C-H M-E-R-L-E. Peshmerl. And he is pierced through the body with a number of spears and he has this kind of high-domed forehead and narrow pointed chin and just a hint of large dark eyes. Do you think that these things are actually physically visiting,

or do you think that there's a chemical doorway that's opened through psychedelics or through some technology and that that's how they're appearing? I think it's a chemical doorway. I think that we have a hidden doorway inside our minds through which we can project our consciousness into other levels of reality. I can't prove that, but that's what I think may be going on. That's what it feels to you when you experience it? That's what it feels to me like, that I'm entering a seamlessly convincing parallel world. And again, I want to stress the point that because you've had this

experience, these true experiences, if they're just a hallucination, a byproduct of the mind, that is impossible to prove, you're still having the exact same experience. Yeah, you're still having the exact same experience. And there you come back to the point we made earlier, that what do you then learn from that experience? And if you grow in some way through that experience it doesn't really matter whether it's freestanding reality or or whether it's uh you know something you projected and as we become more interconnected with our ability to communicate and our our our idea that the human race really is one gigantic super organism yeah as we accept that idea more and more, it opens up a lot of other possibilities.

It opens up a lot of possibilities for just our overall view of things. Yeah, sure. This is the new Copernican revolution that we're poised on the edge of. At one time, it was considered that the sun went around the earth and that all the stars revolved around the earth and the earth was fixed and still in the center.

And then some people started having experiences or, if you like, finding data which contradicted that. And eventually a whole world view was thrown away and I think we're at the edge of moving into a new into a whole new revolution about the nature of reality that it is just much more complicated than we've imagined

and yeah, that's a kind of sketch of the Peschmel figure, that's not the original cave painting and I'm afraid the only UFOs that are actually present are the ones above the individual's head. The other two are not there in the painting. So let's go see if you can find the original one, Jamie, because that one looks like shit. That looks like an animal too.

You know, who knows, but they were really terrible at drawing too. They were amazing at drawing. Some of them were. Some of the cave paintings are absolutely stunning. I wouldn't pay for them. I mean, I would if I knew they were really old. But if some new dude came along and that was his version of a buffalo, I'd't pay for them. I mean, I would if I knew they were really old. But if some new dude just came along and that was his version of a buffalo, I'd be like,

bitch, that doesn't look very buffalo. You haven't seen what is painted inside Chauvet Cave in France. Well, I've watched that documentary, the Werner Herzog documentary. It's amazing. I'm joking around, obviously. But still, I'd rather buy an Alex Gray painting. I think his shit is cooler.

I'd like some Frank Frazetta. That's art to me. There's no Frank Frazetta on cave walls. Okay. They didn't really – you're like, okay. Yeah, you know, I mean the caves, this is one of the great experiences we can have as human beings is to go into those painted caves and go in in silence and in darkness and just get a sense of the atmosphere. They're transformative spaces. They knew something about set and setting in those times.

And, of course, I'm convinced they were using psychedelics. And that was the caves in France were? Caves in France, caves in Spain, yeah. What are the oldest ones? The very oldest is Fumani Cave in Italy, which is 35,000 years old. Chauvet Cave, about 33,000, 32,000 years old. They're pretty fucking ancient. So do you think that those were people that were living in those caves?

People never lived in those caves. Never lived in them? No, no, they didn't. They used them as sacred spaces. They visited them in small numbers, often separated. There might be an interval of 2,000 years between when one group went in and when another group went in. So our idea of cave art as the layperson's idea is these cavemen were inside this cave and at nighttime they would light fires and draw cave art. That's not what was going on.

That's not what happened. They never lived in those spaces. They lived outside. They lived in portable structures like teepees. They were hunter-gatherers. They used the caves as sacred spaces. They communicated their most profound ideas about the spirit. They were a lot more sophisticated than we like to believe. They were just as sophisticated as we are.

Was there ever a time before that that we know of where they weren't? Neanderthals supposedly are being – they did some cave art as well, correct? Yeah. This is the new discovery that some of the very oldest cave art was almost certainly done by Neanderthals. So the Neanderthal image is due for a complete rehabilitation very, very, very soon. The Neanderthals – the image that we have of Neanderthals is completely wrong. But there's a thing I call six million years of boredom,

which is from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee through until well after the emergence of anatomically modern humans, our ancestors were very dull, judging by what they left behind, judging by what they produced. They were not thinking laterally. They were not creating. They did not have spiritual concepts or ideas. And it's rather like a light is switched on in the human brain all around the world somewhere after 100,000 years ago, really 40,000 years ago,

that we get this amazing explosion of symbolic art, and suddenly you recognize that the creatures are just like us and that we are we are dealing with um with people we could communicate with on a on a symbolic level so something happened to our ancestors and i and i made this case extensively in my book supernatural that what happened to our ancestors was encounters with psychedelics. That's what took us out of the dull and boring zone and put us into the realm of imagination and creativity and spirit. Well, it's a fascinating idea and it's a weird one to dismiss because we know that the impact of psychedelics on the mind is so astonishing. It's very poo-pooed and marginalized because it's

thought to be frivolous and silly, but that's only by people who haven't done it. It's one of the weirdest things where it's persecuted by people who really need it more than anybody. Well, exactly. I mean, for those who've never had a psychedelic experience, to put down others who have had it and to tell them that that experience is wrong. I mean, that's like a celibate, you know, telling somebody not to have sex. The celibate has no experience of the thing that they're talking about. How dare they make judgments about that?

Yeah, it's a good point. It's strange. But I think that people like you that are brave enough to speak out about this and, in fact, even write books about it, that's the ripples that sends out this information, and the universe picks it up, and the Internet grabs it and duplicates it and throws it up on Twitter, and then, boom, we're off to the races.

And new ideas are introduced into the minds of the young people, who I think that's what gives me hope. That's what gives me hope. That's what gives me hope too. Young people. There's a fantastic growing community of alert, intelligent, awake, aware young people out there. That grew up with the internet. That grew up with the internet and that are not going to put up with all that shit any longer that comes down from a hierarchical controlling dominator culture.

Boom. Graham Hancock just dropped some science. That was a beautifulical, controlling, dominator culture. Boom. Graham Hancock just dropped some science. That was a beautiful conversation, man. Thank you very much. Thank you, Joe. We've got to do this more often. I agree. When are you back in America again?

Oh, late October. So if people want to buy War God, they can go to Amazon.co.uk. The easiest way to do it is to go to my website. Okay, GrahamHancock.com. GrahamHancock.com. Okay The easiest way to do it is to go to my website. Okay, grahamhancock.com Okay, you already have the Canadian and the UK link up. Because that's the two places it's on sale, Amazon Canada or Amazon UK. And they can buy it there. And hopefully our friends at Audible are listening.

Hook it up, bitch. Get somebody to read it. Come on. I'd love to have that in my car when I'm driving around. But I'll pick it up as well. Support. Fresh. Thank you, sir. And is that the original K-Ward? Yes, it is. There it is. So you can see that high-domed

forehead up there. Could just be shitty art. There you can see the dark eyes. Well, what the fuck is it? You could, but you know what? What's that up in the sky up above it? Let me tell you something. I got a three-year-old and she draws people. They look exactly like that. She's not trying to depict aliens.

She's just shitty at drawing. This is, you know, the problem with this is it's too ambiguous. It's like that's not good art. So I don't know what that is. Is that a spider? Could be a spider. Could be a crab. No, no, no.

It's a man with a human body. The thing in the upper left, I mean. With spears pierced through his body. Okay. What about that thing in the upper left? What the hell is that? That thing there. Nobody knows what it is.

It's a fucking shitty spider. Nobody knows what it is. That guy sucked. I hope that guy was way better at killing buffalo because his drawings are dog shit. No, I think we need to send you into the painted cave. I think you need to – No, I'm joking around completely. I mean this I'm not that impressed with. I would like to look at it.

I think it's fascinating because it's so old. Actually, as a work of art, it's not impressive, but as a subject matter, what is being depicted there is rather interesting. I sort of disagree, and this is why I disagree, because the thing in the upper left that might be a spider

shows me a really rudimentary level of replicating what they're trying to draw. That looks like shit. And so this looks like shit too. I don't know what it is. It might be a bug. It might be an animal. It's like the guy sucks at drawing. He's not that good. So to try to attribute anything to it, I think it'll be a little disingenuous. So those archaeologists that are trying to figure what this thing out is, you're just guessing, man. Same sort of image is found all over the world.

It is. The image of the gray head, right? And also the image of the therianthrope, which is the creature that's part human and part animal in form. That is found all around the world. Often, I've seen virtually identical images in the painted caves in France

and in canyons in Utah, for example. And you feel that that is directly related to psychedelic use, the spirit world. I think this is related to psychedelics as well. I think that's a painting of a vision and the vision might have been not very clear, but that's what's being painted.

I think somebody gave a three-year-old a colored rock and that's what they drew. That's what my three-year-old a colored rock, and that's what they drew. That's what it looks like in my three-year-old drawers. I'm telling you, man. The idea of the morphing of the – If you're looking at Google, call up Chauvet, Chauvet Cave, images from Chauvet Cave. I want Joe to see some beautiful images. Oh, no, I will.

I will be very impressed. I'm just joking around. I'm being completely joking and silly. But you're right. That image is rudimentary. What are the best images, the best images, depictions of aliens to you that you feel? Well, first of all, let me make it clear. I don't think that we're dealing with aliens, quote unquote. Well, I mean that gray, I'm sorry, that gray archetype. I think we're dealing with a mystery. I think we're dealing with a phenomenon.

And I think we as a culture or certain members of our culture are jumping to the conclusion that creatures a bit like us, perhaps looking slightly different in very high-tech craft, are crossing interstellar space. There's a beautiful picture from Chauvet. It's not bad. Are crossing interstellar space and are coming here in technology. But I personally think, again,

I can't prove it, but I think it's more likely we're dealing with interdimensional contacts, that these entities are not high-tech aliens from a planet a bit like ours,

but they're coming to us from literally the other side of reality. Well, my unfortunate labeling aside, calling them aliens, I meant that archetype, that big,

that you say repeats itself over and over again. Yeah. South Africa, for example, in the Drakensberg Mountains, images just like that. What's the best example that we could pull up right now so we just – I don't think you'd be able to pull this up. No? They don't have those images online? No.

This is the internet. You might find it. I'm not sure. Everything is on the internet. I'm not sure. How could they not have that online? I have it in my book, Supernatural. But what is the best one that's online, in your opinion?

I honestly couldn't tell you. Okay. I just wanted to get some. I've seen some really fascinating ones. One crazy shaman where it's a very strange-looking creature. He looks like it could be. Maybe from Shaman Cave in Texas, possibly. Is that what it is?

Maybe. And those are Native American depictions? Yeah, yeah. But then you find similar things from Tassili in Algeria. You know, these kind of glowing figures that seem to... It's very easy to construe them as alien visitors from other planets. Why do so many drugs, like whether it's ayahuasca or there's other ones that have archetypes that are built in like snakes and jaguars,

what do you think that is? Do you think that's the experiences of the people that have taken it before you? Well, first of all, I don't think it's that. We don't know what an archetype is. There's this idea that the human brain has all these patterns and shapes just built into it archetypally.

But I think just as possible is that there are other levels of reality in which entities are able to look like that, shape-shifting entities that can take on many different forms. The experience is very universal. For example, everyone who drinks ayahuasca, pretty much everyone, if they persist with it, will encounter serpents. And those serpents aren't like your everyday serpent. You know, they're 500 feet long with, you know, mouths the size of cars. And richly colored and patterned and intelligent.

You know, now why is it that somebody who drinks ayahuasca in Tokyo and somebody who drinks it in New York and somebody who drinks it in the Amazon, that they all encounter these serpent, intelligent serpent entities? Why do you think it is? Well, I think that there's something out there which chooses to manifest in that form,

and I think that it's being witnessed just as if three different explorers went into the jungle and met the same previously uncontacted tribe and came back and drew us images. And I think that there is some reality to it. But I can't prove that. Right. I just think that that's what's going on. And I've had enough encounters.

So like Rick Strassman's work with DMT, which I know that you're familiar with because you presented the DMT, the Spirit Molecule documentary, that a number of his volunteers encounter entities who say to them, we're so glad you've discovered this technology. Now we can communicate with you more often. Right. Yeah, I always wonder about those trips, whether or not that's just your imagination on hyperdrive, creating these benevolent creatures.

And right and proper that you should wonder about it. But there's also the possibility that, no, you're communicating with something. But either way, again, like we said, it's the same experience. You're a bad motherfucker, Graham Hancock. Thank you. You really are. I take that as a compliment.

You should, sir. You should. I'm glad we're friends. I really, really enjoy our talks. It's one of my favorite podcasts ever. Thank you very much. Thank you, Joe. It's a real pleasure to sit down with you. So War should, sir. You should. I'm glad we're friends. I really, really enjoy our talks. It's one of my favorite podcasts ever. Thank you very much. Thank you, Joe. It's a real pleasure to sit down with you.

So War God, people can get it. Go to GrahamHancock.com. And on Twitter, he's Graham double underscore Hancock. Thank you. And thank you to everybody that tuned into the podcast. Thanks to all our sponsors. Thanks to Hover. Please go to Hover.com forward slash Rogan.

Get yourself 10% off. Thank you to stamps.com. Click on the microphone in the upper right-hand corner and use the code word JRE. And thank you also to onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan and save yourself 10% off any and all supplements. We will be back on Monday with Dave Asprey. A lot of people really enjoyed his first talk and he's got a lot of new information.

I know a lot of folks have questions about the whole Bulletproof Exec. Go to BulletproofExec.com if you want to prepare for this and find out what the fuck Dave Asprey is all about. But he's a brilliant guy, and we look forward to talking to him on Monday. All right. Thank you, everybody. Much love. Big kiss. Mwah.