Nov. 13, 2013 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:43:56
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unidentified
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Hello, freaks. | |
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| Audible.com is the leading audio provider on the internet with over 150,000 titles. | ||
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| Is there any Graham Hancock books on Audible.com? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Entangled. | ||
| My first novel. | ||
| The first novel, and the second one is War God? | ||
| War God, yeah. | ||
| War God. | ||
| And War God, is that on Audible yet? | ||
| It's not on Audible yet, but we're working on it. | ||
| Get on it, Audible. | ||
| Jesus Luizus. | ||
| Get cracking. | ||
| And Entangled is one of the fictional works of Mr. Hancock, and we're going to talk about that. | ||
| We're going to talk about all kinds of shit in a minute. | ||
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| Just for what they do and also for their product itself. | ||
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| That's O-N-N-I-T. If you haven't been to Onnit for a while, we have a lot of new products, including the zombie kettlebells, the primal bells, which are all apes, chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and now a howler monkey, which I guess isn't really an ape. | ||
| It's a monkey. | ||
| Is that an ape? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Is an ape a monkey? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No. | ||
| A monkey's a monkey. | ||
| A monkey's a monkey. | ||
| It's a tail, right? | ||
| The tail's the difference, right? | ||
| I would have been quite clear. | ||
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| Alright, without any further ado, the great Graham Hancock is here. | ||
| And I'm very excited to talk to you, sir. | ||
| So cue the music. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Join my day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| We're live, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Graham Hancock, a whirlwind tour across nations for many months. | ||
| And you're finally here in November 2013. Today's date is the 13th. | ||
| And you've been rocking it hard since September? | ||
| I have been on the road since the second day of September. | ||
| Between and betwixt, I've had maybe like five days at home. | ||
| But the rest of the time I've been traveling, I've been, let's see, I've been in Turkey. | ||
| I've been all over Turkey. | ||
| Amazing country. | ||
| My first ever visit to Turkey. | ||
| Did you go to Gobekli Tepe? | ||
| I went to Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| I spent more than a week at Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| I met Klaus Schmidt, who's the actually rather decent German archaeologist who's Excavating Göbekli Tepe. | ||
| I very rarely get on with archaeologists, but I got on with Klaus Schmidt. | ||
| I don't think he knew who I was, but somehow he was charming, and he gave us a lot of access to the site. | ||
| He let Santa get right in amongst the pillars and photograph them, and we had a good time. | ||
| So we were there, and then took the opportunity of being in Turkey to travel over a lot of the rest of the country. | ||
| There's some cool stuff there. | ||
| There's like what they call underground cities, which go down eight, ten stories under the earth. | ||
| The idea was that people built them to hide from their enemies, but in my opinion, the last thing you'd want to do if you were hiding from your enemies is wall yourself up in some underground place where all they have to do is just put a stone across the door and you're done for. | ||
| I think they had some other function than that. | ||
| And yeah, we drove all over Turkey, saw a lot of amazing stuff, came back to England briefly, then went straight to Peru and Bolivia. | ||
| Up in the high Andes, reached a place in a hired car, 15,000 feet above sea level, just over 15,000 feet. | ||
| That's seriously high, short of breath up there. | ||
| And that was on the way to a site called Chavin de Huantar, where they venerated psychedelics in ancient times. | ||
| And... | ||
| Also visited Tiwanako in the Andes, in Bolivia, where I've been a number of times before. | ||
| Fantastic place. | ||
| I came back from there, went to South Africa, spent five days in South Africa, got on a plane immediately after returning from South Africa and came to the United States, and I've been in the U.S. for the last two, two and a half weeks. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| We've got to get you some vitamins, sir. | ||
| I need vitamins. | ||
| We really need to get you. | ||
| Do you follow a healthy diet? | ||
| Well, in a way. | ||
| I don't eat meat. | ||
| Maybe that's not healthy. | ||
| I don't eat red meat. | ||
| I don't eat chicken. | ||
| I eat, but I pick on shrimps and scallops and things like that. | ||
| Otherwise, I'm a vegetarian. | ||
| So fish and vegetables? | ||
| I don't eat fish. | ||
| No. | ||
| It has a backbone. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I don't eat things with backbones. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What brought this about? | ||
| Was it an ayahuasca trip? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Way back in 1986, when I was 36 years old, I realized that I didn't enjoy meat very much. | ||
| So I thought, why don't I become a vegetarian? | ||
| I became a vegetarian. | ||
| Went on for years and years and years. | ||
| Then I got bored. | ||
| I got seriously bored with vegetarian diet, and I'd always liked shrimps and scallops and shellfish of all kinds, lobster, stuff like that. | ||
| So I went back and started, I lapsed, and I started eating shellfish. | ||
| And that's kind of where I drew the line, that I would eat as far away from myself as possible, but I would definitely have some flesh, and so I pick on these creatures. | ||
| There's no particular moral reason for it, it's just what I like to do. | ||
| It seems a bit moral, though, if you're trying to eat things that are as far away from... | ||
| I suppose so. | ||
| I suppose so. | ||
| But wouldn't it be ironic if I were to discover when I pass through the veil to the next world that the one thing that you're not allowed to eat ever is shrimps. | ||
| Imagine that. | ||
| I highly doubt there's dietary requirements. | ||
| I highly doubt it too. | ||
| I highly doubt it too. | ||
| Everything is temporary. | ||
| Part of, I think, what's great about being a vegetarian or being a vegan is that you don't want to take a life. | ||
| I appreciate that very much. | ||
| That's kind of what it comes down to for me. | ||
| I appreciate that very much. | ||
| However, lives are taken no matter what. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| And you take life when you eat vegetables. | ||
| You just take a different type of life. | ||
| I'm wearing a leather belt right now. | ||
| I'm wearing leather shoes. | ||
| I took life. | ||
| Life eats life. | ||
| It's not just animal life, but plant life and fungal life. | ||
| I see the point. | ||
| I just think it's a little short-sighted and utopian. | ||
| The view is just a little delusional. | ||
| But I appreciate the thought and sentiment behind it. | ||
| To be honest, if I really enjoyed meat, even chicken or red meat, if I really enjoyed it, I would eat it. | ||
| But I don't. | ||
| I never got much out of it. | ||
| I was always a bit squeamish about the blood, and I never really wanted to eat it. | ||
| So I kind of felt it's a waste. | ||
| I get no pleasure from this stuff, so why should I eat it anyway? | ||
| That's why I say it's not entirely a moral thing. | ||
| It's partly just a matter of preference as well. | ||
| But I agree with you. | ||
| I mean, everything in the web of life on this planet lives off everything else. | ||
| I think maybe in our society, in Western technological society, you know, we've got so divorced from the act of actually killing an animal that we forget what we're doing. | ||
| We forget what's involved. | ||
| It's all very packaged and sanitized, and it's easy to forget what's involved in it. | ||
| Some creature is dying, and in our culture, a pretty unpleasant, miserable death. | ||
| I agree, and I think that that separation is very immoral. | ||
| That separation between us and our food, to try to... | ||
| I've reconciled that. | ||
| I've recently taken up hunting. | ||
| I went hunting last year for the first time and got a deer and killed it and gutted it and quartered it and all that jazz. | ||
| And eating it was incredibly satisfying. | ||
| And also knowing that where I went, these animals, they're not going to make it. | ||
| No animal makes it. | ||
| The idea is you just breed as quickly as you can. | ||
| Your children live for a couple years and then they get taken out by mountain lions or coyotes or the winter. | ||
| They either freeze to death or what have you. | ||
| It's a constant cycle, and what I did is just dip into that cycle. | ||
| I think I have no problem with that. | ||
| It's much better actually to go hunt an animal rather than the horrible, cold, industrial slaughterhouses that we have now and the fear and humiliation that animals are put through in that context. | ||
| At least in hunting, it's kind of one-to-one, and you're out there. | ||
| You're actually killing what you eat. | ||
| And the animal lives an entirely wild, natural life until the moment you pull that trigger. | ||
| There's no artificial environment that it lives in. | ||
| There's no hormones that are introduced into its body, no antibiotics. | ||
| There's nothing unnatural about it at all. | ||
| Just the bullet hits it, and that's gone, and it's over. | ||
| And it's over. | ||
| And it's virtually painless because when a bullet hits an animal like that, I mean, it's so fast and so quick. | ||
| They don't even know what happened. | ||
| They try to run and then they're done. | ||
| And they're done, yeah. | ||
| And I think what I'm trying to do, and I'm trying to do it this year, by the end of this year, I want to make my diet when I'm home, when I can control it, Completely wild game. | ||
| That's my goal. | ||
| Wild game which you will hunt? | ||
| Yes, which I will hunt. | ||
| And for me and for my whole family. | ||
| And I have this mapped out. | ||
| This year I want to get deer, I want to get a bison, I want to get an elk, I want to get all these various animals and just do it entirely to procure meat and to bring it back home and deep freeze it and to make sure that I always have wild natural meat available if I want to eat it. | ||
| Before I went hunting I decided that I'm either going to be a vegetarian After this trip, I'm either going to decide that this is really not me, that I don't really like it, or I'm going to become a hunter. | ||
| So I became a hunter. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| I've always liked meat, but I think it's also because I participate so much in really strenuous exercise, jiu-jitsu and martial arts. | ||
| Yeah, which requires you to have some protein in your body. | ||
|
unidentified
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There's no doubt about that. | |
| It makes me crave it. | ||
| I don't know if I need it. | ||
| I know there's many people that work out very hard that go on a completely plant-based diet. | ||
| But for me, I don't know. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I think I need it. | ||
| It varies from person to person. | ||
| But the hunting that you do... | ||
| Or that you did to get this animal? | ||
| I mean, are you out there in nature? | ||
| What's the scene? | ||
| How does it work? | ||
| I went to... | ||
| Well, I'm going next week, actually. | ||
| But the first time I went, I went to Montana. | ||
| The Badlands of Montana. | ||
| Actually, where Lewis and Clark went down the Missouri River. | ||
| It was fascinating, because... | ||
| It's incredibly wild. | ||
| I mean, we saw... | ||
| America is a wild land. | ||
| There's a lot of wild lands in America. | ||
| Especially Montana, because you can't grow out there. | ||
| So homesteaders tried to make these homes out there and live, and we took these photos of them. | ||
| I should have brought some photos back, but... | ||
| We took photos of these old homestead sites from the 1800s, and they're just rotted out. | ||
| Nobody could grow anything out there. | ||
| And then the Indians, the natives wound up killing a lot of people. | ||
| There was a lot of, like, between the Nez Perce and all these people that lived there. | ||
| And the time we were there, we were there for about five days, and maybe we saw five or six other people the entire time, and they were just people going down the river in canoes, doing the same thing, hunting. | ||
| So you're having a wilderness experience. | ||
| Yeah, there's a photo of it up there. | ||
| That's what it looked like. | ||
| It was completely wild. | ||
| No cell phone service, no internet, no nothing. | ||
| Sleeping in a tent for five days. | ||
| Very, very intense. | ||
| Very refreshing, too. | ||
| Like, that was one of the things that I found fascinating about it. | ||
| Going to bed when it got dark, getting up in the morning when it got light. | ||
| No cell phone service, no internet, no dealing with social media, no other nonsense that we're constantly inundated with on a daily basis. | ||
| I enjoyed it very much. | ||
| But you're not hunting an animal that can hunt you back. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But the animals that can hunt you back are not really... | ||
| They're not really edible. | ||
| I mean, you can eat some of them. | ||
| I guess you can eat grizzly bear, like some people in Montana or in Alaska eat grizzly. | ||
| I think they make grizzly jerky out of it in some parts you can eat. | ||
| Mountain lion, you can eat the loin of a mountain lion, apparently. | ||
| Not really delicious. | ||
| It's not the best. | ||
| Game animals are essentially animals that are all running from predators. | ||
| And you just take part in that. | ||
| You just get into the scramble. | ||
| You know, in South Africa, in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia, the Bushmen there, they will run animals down. | ||
| They will run them down. | ||
| They will run them down. | ||
| They will run for like 12 hours. | ||
| Just running, running, running until finally the animal just says, I'm done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've watched that. | ||
| I've watched that on videos online. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Native Americans used to do that as well. | ||
| Human beings are a rare animal, in that we can't outrun animals, we can't outspeed them, but we can keep going. | ||
| We can keep going for a long time, and some animals just overheat. | ||
| They can't sweat. | ||
| And so they're designed for these quick sprints to get away from trouble. | ||
| But if we're just persistent and we keep after them, There's a podcast that I've been listening to that was recommended by one of the nurses at the Reginokine, the laboratory where I'm going to get this blood work done, called Radiolab, and it dealt with this one particular tribe in Kenya that has... | ||
| So many successful runners from this one particular area. | ||
| And they were trying to figure out, they did all these studies to try to figure out what made them so successful. | ||
| And there were several factors. | ||
| One of them was their body shape. | ||
| One of them was the fact that they ran to and from school on a regular basis. | ||
| They were constantly running. | ||
| But the other one was this unbelievably brutal tribal ritual, this coming-of-age ritual that the men and the women went through that involved genital mutilation. | ||
| With the men, it involved circumcision with a sharp stick. | ||
| And they would cover their face with mud while they did this. | ||
| And if they cracked the mud, if they squinted or winced in pain, then they would be labeled a coward. | ||
| And they would not have access to women. | ||
| They would be cut out of the economic situation in the tribe. | ||
| It's the most recent radio lab, folks. | ||
| It was recommended to me. | ||
| This happens to these young men just entering puberty? | ||
| At 13. Between 13 and I think 17, they said. | ||
| They circumcised them with a stick. | ||
| Not only that, they keep the foreskin on, and they tie it in a bow, and they push the head of the penis through this bow, and this whole ritual takes several weeks, in which time they're secluded, and when they leave the hut, they're like secluded in this hut, when they leave the hut to do anything, they're not allowed to walk. | ||
| They must run at full pace. | ||
| It also involves crawling through stinging nettles naked. | ||
| They have to crawl through these stinging nettle bushes. | ||
| The idea is just to completely... | ||
| Control your ability to withstand pain. | ||
| They're going to be tough bastards. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So it's fascinating. | ||
| It's like this perfect storm of they have an innate natural athletic ability based on their frame, and then it's also the running on a regular basis, and then also the intense ability to withstand pain. | ||
| Absolutely fascinating, fascinating stuff. | ||
| Well, again, I mean, this is all stuff in our culture that we've kind of completely got away from, set behind us. | ||
| We don't even interrelate with that at all anymore. | ||
| And it makes you wonder, I mean, if the shit hits the fan and our culture goes down, who can survive, actually? | ||
| I think we're just going to go back to, if the shit does hit the fan, and I know that's a huge topic of your work, and what brought me to you in the first place was your work on... | ||
| The very clear evidence that at certain points in history this shit clearly did hit the fan and people did have to rebuild. | ||
| I watch a lot of shows on subsistence living, mostly in Alaska. | ||
| There's a lot of these shows. | ||
| Life Below Zero is my new favorite one. | ||
| And it's all based on these people living this... | ||
| One of them is this man who lives with this Inuit woman and they just fish and hunt and their family lives off of this. | ||
| And it's absolutely fascinating. | ||
| Every day is spent acquiring food. | ||
| And they're hardly growing anything because it's so cold. | ||
| So everything is just about catching fish, hunting animals, preserving these animals in whatever way, whether they're drying or, you know. | ||
| And it's an amazingly brutal life. | ||
| They seem to be very happy and this is one of the really confusing aspects of this real traditional sort of subsistence living that people seem to feel satisfied by it. | ||
| It's kind of something we were meant to do maybe in a way. | ||
| I don't know if it's meant to, but it seems like we evolved to do it. | ||
| Well, you have to consider that for, you know, anatomically modern humans, as far as we know, have been around for slightly less than 200,000 years. | ||
| And for almost all of that period, that's what we did. | ||
| That's what we did. | ||
| We're really, you know, at least if we go with mainstream history, and certainly it's true for the majority of the human race, whether we go with mainstream history or not. | ||
| It's really only in the last 10, 12,000 years that we've been doing anything else apart from hunting and gathering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a long time, and we've tried to upset that over the last 200 years with machines and electricity and all these different things, but we long for that. | ||
| Created a fundamentally artificial way of life. | ||
| And so quickly. | ||
| Yeah, very rapidly. | ||
| It seems like our genetics just have not been able to catch up with the actual environment. | ||
| But the irony of it is that all this development, all this amazing technology, all these machines, all this gear, all this equipment, somehow the promise was it would make us happier. | ||
| And it didn't. | ||
| It didn't make us happier. | ||
| It made us much less happy. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if that ever was the promise. | ||
| Well, it was the promise. | ||
| I mean, you know, I remember with computers back in the 80s, before computers, early 80s, late 70s, the idea was that, you know, if the computer came in, that we would just have all this endless leisure. | ||
| We would have a life of complete relaxation. | ||
| The problem would be actually filling our leisure. | ||
| But that has not turned out to be the case. | ||
| Everybody's lives are taken up with the computer, The iPhone, the email, you know, all the time. | ||
| You can never get away from it. | ||
| It's constantly demanding your time. | ||
| Emails, hundreds of emails a day sometimes. | ||
| I have this huge burden of guilt about emails that I don't answer. | ||
| We sit there in my email list. | ||
| I cannot answer them all. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| I gave up a few years ago trying to answer them. | ||
| I try to respond to a few tweets a day if possible, but while doing things, especially providing as much content as I do with podcasts and creating comedy and all that, There's no time for that. | ||
| You can't become a full-time letter writer. | ||
| Yeah, that literally would be what you would do. | ||
| You would be dust till dawn doing that, and then sleeping and starting all over again, and you still would never catch up. | ||
| You'd never catch up. | ||
| Especially if you gave it a real, honest reply, like if it was a complex discussion that somebody wanted to have with you, you're not going to get there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I face the same problem probably in a smaller level than you, but, you know, like Facebook and Twitter. | ||
| Facebook, I find, is a very useful thing. | ||
| It's a very positive thing. | ||
| I do like interacting with my Facebook community, but I can't interact that much. | ||
| I try to put up posts. | ||
| I try to put up new material. | ||
| People make interesting comments. | ||
| Sometimes those comments are really valuable to me. | ||
| I get a link to something I didn't know about, and I go look at that. | ||
| But to respond to every comment when you have 300, 500, 1,000, 1,500 comments on a post, it's impossible. | ||
| It's just impossible to do that. | ||
| That is a weird thing about our time. | ||
| I think that's a stage that we're going through. | ||
| I think whatever comes next will probably be even crazier and even more impossible to deal with. | ||
| Halfway to telepathy right now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| I think there'll be some sort of a technologically created symbiotic relationship that allows us to communicate. | ||
| Some symbiotic thing where... | ||
| I think we're already kind of symbiotic with certain aspects of technology. | ||
| Glasses. | ||
| Glasses are essentially a technology that's a part of your life. | ||
| You wear it on your head all day, right? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Cell phone, I mean, it might as well be attached to me because I'm scared if I leave it anywhere. | ||
| If I leave it in my car and I go to the mall, I'm like, oh, it's in the car. | ||
| It's by itself. | ||
| My phone is alone. | ||
| Yeah, these are weird times. | ||
| Weird times when it comes to this stage that we're in. | ||
| We're obviously progressing towards an even greater connectivity with our technology. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| In some ways, it's a very good thing. | ||
| What I find again with Facebook, with the internet, is suddenly the whole world is talking. | ||
| We're talking to each other. | ||
| It doesn't actually matter what national boundaries you have or where you grew up or what your religion is. | ||
| You're in communication with people from all over the world. | ||
| Communities of ideas tend to gravitate together and people share thoughts and ideas. | ||
| This, as far as we know, is a new development for the human race to do this on a global scale. | ||
| Yes, some shit comes out of it, but also I think a lot of good stuff is coming out of it. | ||
| And it is challenging the status quo in the world today. | ||
| It is very threatening to the powers that be, that people can communicate directly with one another. | ||
| I remember a time as an author when I depended heavily on the big media to be heard about, to be known at all. | ||
| If I'd written a new book, How could anybody know I'd written it unless one of the big newspapers or a big TV station or somebody covered it? | ||
| I don't give a shit about that now. | ||
| I don't need those people anymore. | ||
| I can communicate directly with people who are interested in my work. | ||
| And the big media companies or whoever influenced them could remove a book from the market and then that subject is gone. | ||
| John Marco Allegro's book was a perfect example. | ||
| The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. | ||
| Fantastic book. | ||
| Yeah, and if you've never read it, John Marco Allegro was a biblical scholar and a linguist who also happened to be an ordained minister. | ||
| He was one of the guys who was assigned to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, did it for 14 years, and wrote this amazing book which basically said that the entire religion of Christianity originally was about consuming psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Fascinating stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And they removed it. | ||
| I mean, that book was gone. | ||
| They didn't like the message at all. | ||
| Yeah, Jan Erwin has worked to republish it, and it's available again now. | ||
| But for the longest time, that book was gone. | ||
| You had to find... | ||
| I own two copies of it that I bought used, and they were very expensive. | ||
| You had to buy them from some strange book company that found them. | ||
| So this is something the big media can't do anymore. | ||
| Can't do it anymore. | ||
| And the interest they serve. | ||
| They cannot do it anymore. | ||
| You could find something, tweet it, take a picture of it. | ||
| Say if you were in Turkey and you found something unique, you could take a picture of that, tweet it, and link an article to your website. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Put whatever you found on your website, and then within moments, Thousands of people would be downloading it and trading it and it would just, in a frenzy, spread across the world. | ||
| I've been doing that. | ||
| I've been making a point on my travels of putting up a picture and putting up my immediate reaction to something that I've seen. | ||
| And it produces a lot of A lot of reaction. | ||
| And again, it goes two ways, because when people communicate with me, I learn from them. | ||
| It's not just that I'm giving people stuff. | ||
| I'm getting stuff back all the time, and I appreciate that. | ||
| I have these conversations with people that I meet at shows all the time, where they'll say, oh, the podcast changed my life, and thank you so much. | ||
| It changed my life, too. | ||
| And my interaction with these people has changed my life as much as it's changed their life. | ||
| The information that I get on a daily basis from people on Twitter informs me in a way that I've never been informed before. | ||
| Constant, all day long. | ||
| I mean, every day I'm getting all these new stories that are tweeted to me, and I retweet the fascinating ones as much as I can, but it's a never-ending stream. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| And it's amazing. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I'm so... | ||
| I'm so indebted. | ||
| I'm so happy. | ||
| I feel so obligated. | ||
| The whole connection is a very rewarding connection for me as well. | ||
| Well, as a matter of fact, you are doing something quite special. | ||
| I mean, I've been on the road, and it's amazing the people that I meet, whether it's in South Africa, whether it's in some Midland city in Britain, whether it's in upstate New York, you know, who listened to Joe Rogan. | ||
| You're reaching a lot of people that way, and this is special. | ||
| And it's eye-opening, actually. | ||
| Well, it's an amazing connection that we have. | ||
| It's amazing to be able to do what we're doing. | ||
| And it's a new thing. | ||
| I mean, it never happened before. | ||
| It wasn't around. | ||
| It's possible to change the world. | ||
| Everybody says, no, the world is too big, the power structure is too great, nothing can be changed, nothing can be altered. | ||
| But I don't think so. | ||
| I'm really optimistic. | ||
| I think good things are coming. | ||
| There's an awakening going on. | ||
| I am as well. | ||
| I'm very optimistic just based on the people that I've met that have told me they've changed their life. | ||
| I've met no bullshit, at least... | ||
| 30 or 40 people that told me they lost 100 pounds after they listened to this podcast. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Just people that just changed their diet, started exercising, and started getting their blood pumping and feeling better, and started thinking positively, surrounding themselves with positive people. | ||
| And if that could be done on that scale, that can spread virally. | ||
| It totally can, and that's a real measurable change in somebody's life. | ||
| That's setting aside ill health and discomfort and Moving on to something better and more positive. | ||
| And I've talked to maybe 50 or so people that have started their own podcast because of this podcast. | ||
| And I'm hugely encouraging of that because I think there's no difference. | ||
| I mean, if you're a curious person, you speak a language that other people understand, and you find information online, you want to discuss it, start a fucking podcast. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I mean, if it catches on, it catches on. | ||
| And if it doesn't catch on, keep going until it does catch on. | ||
| The way I see it, though, it's really interesting looking at your story. | ||
| You've got this fighter background, MMA. I don't know a lot about it, but it stands for mixed martial arts, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And UFC? Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does that sound like? | |
| Ultimate Fighting Championship. | ||
| Ultimate Fighting Championship. | ||
| And that goes back into your youth a long way. | ||
| I saw a little clip of you. | ||
| Just kicking somebody, I don't know, so fast. | ||
| It was incredible to see that. | ||
| So you've got all of that. | ||
| And I meet a lot of people who are interested in that. | ||
| My son-in-law, for example, is a mixed martial arts fighter and a really hugely important part of his life. | ||
| But at the same time, you're combining it with this extraordinary interest in psychedelics and social change and all of these radical ideas. | ||
| And intuitively, one would not immediately think that somebody who's into mixed martial arts fighting would be also into radical philosophical ideas. | ||
| But it's precisely the combination. | ||
| Of those two things that is really attractive, I think. | ||
| Well, I think that the intuition or intuitively that it wouldn't be is just because people don't understand what martial arts really are. | ||
| What a martial art really is, is the path that you go through in becoming excellent at a martial art is just developing your human potential. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| In seeking the truth about yourself and your own character, like as we were talking about those Kenyan men who endure extreme pain and they become stronger because of that. | ||
| They become something special because of that. | ||
| That seeking truth through martial arts is along the same lines. | ||
| It's doing something incredibly difficult, and in doing that, you grow as a person. | ||
| And then in seeking that truth about your character, seeking that truth about your determination, your willpower, your focus, your discipline, you also start to seek truth in everything else around you, in your government, in your relationships, in your... | ||
| All various aspects of your life, your diet, you see the relationship between your diet and your health, and all these different things, they do fall into each other. | ||
| They do. | ||
| Psychedelics, all of them. | ||
| Psychedelics, absolutely, because in many ways there is no more challenging adventure or experience that one can have. | ||
| I mean, yeah, there's all kinds of wilderness experiences one can have, but a deep journey with a powerful psychedelic is going to challenge you. | ||
| In every possible level as a human being. | ||
| And it requires incredible will and strength to deal with it. | ||
| This is what a lot of people who don't work with psychedelics, who are just brainwashed by the whole war on drugs thing, don't understand. | ||
| This is a deep personal journey which requires strength of character to fulfill. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| I've done some terrifying things in my life, but the moment before you light the lighter that fires up the DMT is one of the most terrifying moments of all time. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| Especially if you've been there and you know what's coming. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're like, whoa, here we go! | |
| Fifteen minutes in a rocket to the center of the universe. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Swarming with colors and geometric patterns and truth and fear. | ||
| And entities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I share that. | ||
| I mean, the last time I smoked DMT was in the end of September 2011. I haven't smoked it since. | ||
| And I will, but I had such a... | ||
| Well, the word terrifying doesn't do it justice to what happened to me. | ||
| It was just the single hugest ordeal that I have ever confronted in my life. | ||
| And after you've been through an ordeal like that, you kind of think twice about just leaping back into it again. | ||
| But I learned a lot from it. | ||
| It was hugely beneficial. | ||
| And to survive that and to come back from it... | ||
| You know, you gather your strength from experiences like that. | ||
| And that's why I think our society is foolish to try to just sanitize everything and not allow people to undergo these profound and important experiences. | ||
| Rather, we should be creating structures where it is possible for people to have those experiences and where they don't need to feel afraid of the law about it. | ||
| Where they can challenge themselves in that way with good advice and with wise and loving care surrounding that situation. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think that's one of the things that's beautiful about today's internet and these exchanges like we're having right now is it lets people know what these experiences really are about and what the potential these experiences actually do hold. | ||
| Because we're the victim of massive propaganda that has been going on for decades and decades. | ||
| Maybe even for thousands of years. | ||
| It's confused some really intelligent people. | ||
| I've had some really disappointing conversations with guys like Michio Kaku, you know, talking about mushrooms giving you brain damage. | ||
| Such shit. | ||
| It's just so silly. | ||
| Such complete shit. | ||
| And such a brilliant man otherwise. | ||
| But the brainwashing goes very deep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's as though it presses a button in certain people that rational faculties shut down and they cannot react to the subject in an intelligent way anymore. | ||
| I do find this again and again. | ||
| It is a huge problem. | ||
| It's a self-preservation issue as well for people that are professionals, because if you're a professional in anything where you're being judged or you're being looked at as possibly, oh, we're looking at you for possible promotion, but what are you doing? | ||
| Mushrooms in the desert? | ||
| What the fuck, Bob? | ||
| You're ruining the whole career, pal. | ||
| You're on the fast track. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| People are in danger of destroying their careers if that comes out. | ||
| I mean, that's where I guess you and I have some advantage because we have careers that cannot get ruined by doing that. | ||
| It can only help. | ||
| Yeah, if I get caught with a bag of mushrooms at the airport, I get a bump. | ||
| Everything is great. | ||
| People get excited. | ||
| My Twitter explodes. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm not flying with mushrooms, but my point being that, yeah. | ||
| And if you're honest about it, look, if you're doing something you shouldn't be doing because it's harming someone, and people find out about it, the repercussions are real, and they should be. | ||
| But if you're doing something like psychedelics that harm no one, and then you can have a rational discussion about the benefits that you've had from them, that helps people. | ||
|
unidentified
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It really does. | |
| It totally helps people. | ||
| I find this again and again, and that's the crucial distinction, is... | ||
| Are you doing something which is harmful to others, which impinges upon the sovereignty of others, which makes the life of another person Less rather than more. | ||
| And the answer is, with taking psychedelics, no, you're not. | ||
| You're not doing that. | ||
| That's an inner experience. | ||
| That's your own experience. | ||
| And as I've said many times, I mean, we have plenty of laws that deal with doing negative stuff to other people. | ||
| We do not need laws that seek to govern, control, manage, limit our consciousness. | ||
| This is the heart of the matter. | ||
| We're starting to see, in our lifetime, these centers in Mexico. | ||
| My friend Ed Clay runs one in Mexico, and I know there's some in Canada as well, where they have these Ibogaine centers, where people are going and completely curing themselves from opiates. | ||
| Opiate addictions, for folks who don't know, are a huge problem in this country. | ||
| I have lost a couple of friendships. | ||
| One that went Horribly wrong, because I know the guy was on a bunch of different pills from a bunch of different doctors, and I just couldn't deal with him anymore. | ||
| I had to get him out of my life. | ||
| Blaming other people for all of his failures, constantly woe is me, and just on pills all the time. | ||
| And these are prescribed pills. | ||
| These are legal pills. | ||
| He had a back injury and he went to one doctor in one state and then moved to California and started going to another doctor and then having both guys send him prescriptions and taking both two times the amount of pills. | ||
| If you take a prescribed dose of opiate pills, you're very likely to get addictive. | ||
| Even with a prescribed dose, it's a really difficult time to get off of them. | ||
| Especially if you're facing some significant pain. | ||
| You just had a hip replacement. | ||
| Did they prescribe you any? | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| I was given, but nothing extremely strong, but codeine, which is an opiate. | ||
| NyQuil. | ||
| That's what NyQuil used to have in it, right? | ||
| Does it? | ||
| It used to. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| I believe NyQuil had codeine. | ||
| I mean, codeine is actually a highly addictive drug. | ||
| There's no doubt it is addictive. | ||
| In Britain, they often mix it with paracetamol, which is a less strong painkiller. | ||
| And if you take those two pills in combination, you could get addicted to it within a week or ten days. | ||
| And it's the codeine that you're getting addicted to, but it's the paracetamol that's really going to... | ||
| Totally screw up your liver, you know, in the long run. | ||
| And it's stunning, actually, that the big pharmaceutical companies are allowed to do this. | ||
| They're allowed to deliberately addict people, to hook people on very powerful drugs that really have very little benefit. | ||
| I mean, to be honest, if I had some terrible cancer, some terrible pain, some terrible suffering, I would be very interested in exploring opium or even heroin, as a matter of fact. | ||
| I think that nature has been kind to us. | ||
| It's provided us with certain plants that can help us with pain. | ||
| And it may reach a stage in life where you're terminal. | ||
| Why suffer that terrible agony? | ||
| It would be interesting perhaps to sort of bliss out a bit on that. | ||
| But to take it regularly daily for small and minor pain, this is a huge mistake. | ||
| It's not what it's for. | ||
| There's a new snail toxin that they've discovered that is 100 times more effective than opiates and is non-addictive. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And they're trying to figure out a way. | ||
| This new drug is from the cone snail venom. | ||
| And it's 100 times more potent than any existing pain medication and completely non-addictive. | ||
| And they're coming up with this snail venom in a pill form that would just completely eliminate pain. | ||
| I can see the big drug companies not wanting to do that. | ||
| They'll probably run out with a hammer and smash every snail that exists. | ||
| Smash every snail! | ||
| Get in cahoots with some company to spray some shit all over the areas where these snails live and just whack them out all in one big... | ||
| They want to keep us addicted. | ||
| Well, the amount of money. | ||
| People would say that that's a ridiculous thing. | ||
| No, that's not what people do. | ||
| But the amount of money you're talking about is absolutely staggering. | ||
| Vast and enormous. | ||
| Billions upon billions every month. | ||
| And you were talking about opiate addictions, of which the vast majority are addictions to prescribed pills. | ||
| But then there's also heroin addiction. | ||
| And again, Ibogaine and, in fact, ayahuasca, astonishingly successful in getting people off these addictions. | ||
| In a very weird way. | ||
| In a very weird way. | ||
| I'm not sure the exact mechanism of Ibogaine, but the people that have taken it have told me that it's both... | ||
| It physically removes the addiction and, more importantly, psychologically alerts you to all the factors that have contributed to your shitty decision-making in the first place. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it, exactly. | ||
| All the errors in your thinking, all the errors in your personality that have led you to this path that you're just trying to numb life with these pills. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a teaching. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That you get. | ||
| And that's the mystery of these plants, actually, the teacher plants, particularly the two plants that go into the ayahuasca brew and then iboga. | ||
| They're probably the most powerful in this respect, is that there's a sense of an encounter with an intelligence which communicates with you and which gets right to the root of your personal issue and shows it to you and says, well... | ||
| I mean, I've had some experience with this myself and shows it to you and says, this is actually how you are. | ||
| And you think, fuck, I never realized that really. | ||
| I hid that from myself for so long. | ||
| The ego. | ||
| The ego. | ||
| And that revelation is extremely helpful in handling an addiction. | ||
| And no one's protecting you by making Ibogaine illegal. | ||
| No one's protecting you from anything other than you getting cured from these illnesses and realizing the issues that you have in your life and in your personality. | ||
| It's yet another example of the fact that we live in a society that is completely insane. | ||
| Our society is actually crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's run by crazy people. | ||
| In pursuit of crazy motives, and it is designed to diminish human potential. | ||
| I don't think it's an accident. | ||
| I think it's actually deliberately designed to minimize human potential. | ||
| By who? | ||
| Well, I mean, this is where I have to get into something like Gnosticism, which has been a long-term interest of mine, and the idea that there is a... | ||
| I don't want to use the word divine in terms of God, because I don't go with God particularly, I do go with mystery, but that there's a divine spark in human beings and that there has been a project for thousands of years to deny us the opportunity to realize that part of ourselves, the spiritual essence of ourselves, and to keep us chained in matter and locked in the material realm. | ||
| And what we see in modern society is two things going on side by side. | ||
| One is so-called materialist science, which tells us that there is nothing else to reality except the stuff that you can weigh and measure and count. | ||
| And any thought that there might be spirit, that consciousness, for example, might not be generated by the brain, might not be local to the brain. | ||
| Any such thought is supposed to be, according to materialist science, complete nonsense. | ||
| And then there's the actual materialism Which tries to persuade us through all manner of media and the way our society is run that our sole purpose as creatures is to produce and consume and that we have no other function here on this planet and that we are to define ourselves and measure ourselves in terms of our Is that really what we're being taught or is that just something that people find easy? | ||
| That producing and consuming is just easy. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| Get a new car, it's exciting. | ||
| Get a new TV, that's exciting. | ||
| Work and you can wear clothes that this guy can't wear. | ||
| Ooh, exciting. | ||
| I think there's something to that that is just a natural aspect of being a human being and constantly having this desire for improvement and progress. | ||
| And we measure that improvement and progress erroneously with objects. | ||
| I mean, there was a culture of Native American Indians, I forget the name of the tribe, who had this ceremony called the Potlatch, which happened like once a year, and what they had to do was the more things you could burn, that showed that you were a really big guy, you know? | ||
| You just complete the ultimate conspicuous consumption as you take all these possessions and burn them. | ||
| Not because you're despising them, but because you're rich enough to just burn all this stuff. | ||
| Oh, that's so stupid. | ||
| I thought it was to free yourself from those objects. | ||
| No, unfortunately not. | ||
| Unfortunately not. | ||
| Yeah, the consciousness not being projected from the human mind is a very confusing one to me. | ||
| Because I see their point and I see your point. | ||
| I see... | ||
| What I see is... | ||
| I don't think that we know enough about consciousness itself to define what's going on. | ||
| We can't be sure. | ||
| I think it is possible that the mind could be some form of antenna. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| I think it's pretty clear that if you injure certain parts of the mind, it affects certain aspects of cognitive function. | ||
| I think that's pretty clear. | ||
| It's pretty clear, yeah. | ||
| And that's true of an antenna, too. | ||
| If you damage an antenna, the picture on the TV screen is affected. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Fuck up a radio, the insides of a radio. | ||
| It doesn't mean that the signal's not still out there. | ||
| It's just not getting in right. | ||
| There's that, and there was a fascinating debate recently between Richard Dawkins and Deepak Chopra, which... | ||
| It was quite hilarious, because Richard Dawkins is a very brilliant guy, but he's also kind of cunty. | ||
| He gets a little cunty. | ||
| He does. | ||
| Rightly so. | ||
| I mean, he's had to deal with so much quackery and fuckery his whole life, and he's been a rabid atheist for the longest time. | ||
| But he's made a career out of that. | ||
| Yes, he has. | ||
| He's made a big career out of that. | ||
| But one of the things that Deepak said that was really fascinating, because they were talking about consciousness, and consciousness being in atoms, and consciousness being in And Dawkins was insisting that these things did not have consciousness, which to me is, oh, I go, how can you insist? | ||
| It seems to me, yeah, it seems to me that whether you, clearly, he's a brilliant man with a massive amount of scientific data at his disposal for things that he can prove, for sure. | ||
| But to say that you know that atoms don't have consciousness is kind of silly, because we don't. | ||
| The other thing that Deepak said that I thought was really fascinating was that he believes that what you're seeing in human beings, with human beings being recycled stardust, we literally are made of stardust. | ||
| A star had to explode to create the very molecules that are inside of our body. | ||
| And what you're seeing in a human being is the universe actually becoming aware of itself in a way that it can communicate. | ||
| I think it's a beautiful idea. | ||
| It's a beautiful idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think both guys are so rigid on what their side is, you know, especially in a debate form. | ||
| And Dawkins, absolutely sure he's correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Confusing the fuck out of everybody with word salad of quantum and this and that. | ||
| He just throws quantum out there like you throw salt on french fries. | ||
| I don't even know if it's the right way to use it, but he just throws it out there and confuses the shit out of you sometimes. | ||
| Very poor method of communication he incorporates because It's not clear what he's saying. | ||
| Even though I know what quantum means, I know what he's talking about, when he's talking about consciousness being non-local, I understand all those things, but he says it in such a word-salad way that it's like, I don't know what you're getting at, man. | ||
| Seems to me like you're trying to confuse the shit out of people with a real elaborate sentence. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| And then win this debate or make a point that's hard to argue. | ||
| Well, it's a tough call to win a debate with Richard Dawkins. | ||
| Richard Dawkins is a very clever guy. | ||
| I've met him and he's a formidable arguer. | ||
| It's not easy at all, but he is a religious fanatic in his own way. | ||
| His non-belief in meaning or purpose in the universe is a religious idea of a kind. | ||
| It's not based on facts. | ||
| It's not based on evidence. | ||
| It's based on his His opinion, as a matter of fact. | ||
| Nothing more. | ||
| It's also based on a lack of information. | ||
| And when I say that lack of information, I mean one thing and one thing only. | ||
| Psychedelic experiences. | ||
| He has not had them. | ||
| He needs to have them. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| He's so brilliant. | ||
| I would like Dawkins to smoke DMT. Yes. | ||
| That's the one psychedelic with which there is just no negotiation. | ||
| You just don't get a discussion with DMT. It just does for you. | ||
| And other ones, even the DMT in Ayahuasca, Dawkins could resist that. | ||
| But the smoked DMT, once you hit the right dose, once you pass that fourth big draw on the pipe, then there's no negotiation. | ||
| It is going to take you there, and it's going to deal with you. | ||
| And I would like to see Dawkins argue with DMT. You can't. | ||
| He would probably argue with what the effects actually are and that it's some sort of an assault on the visual cortex by various chemicals that distort perception and reality. | ||
| That's what he'd do, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what it is, though, is data. | ||
| And what it is, is an experience. | ||
| And it's both things he's lacking in. | ||
| He's lacking in that data and that experience. | ||
| It's data that he needs to have as a scientist. | ||
| He's one of the people I would really like to see having that data. | ||
| I agree with you that he would probably find a way to rationalize it and set it aside. | ||
| But still, it would be incredibly useful for him to have that experience because he's been so influential in persuading so many people that there is nothing beyond this material realm. | ||
| And DMT is a place beyond this material realm. | ||
| I am prepared to admit it could be something that we're projecting out of our own minds. | ||
| There may not be any reality, but it feels like a real place. | ||
| I appreciate you admitting that, and I say that often as well. | ||
| I think that it feels like a different dimension that's inhabited with intelligent something, whatever it is. | ||
| Intelligent something. | ||
| The way I describe it is geometric patterns that are made out of love and understanding. | ||
| That's what it feels like to me. | ||
| I have never had a bad DMT trip in a sense where it turned evil. | ||
| But I've heard people discuss really horrific evil entities that they've run into. | ||
| And I often wonder, by virtue of that, whether or not what they're talking about is something that's in their psyche, something that's in their subconscious. | ||
| Something they're bringing to the party. | ||
| My last DMT trip, which I mentioned a little while ago, which was extremely powerful and scary, This happened just in the two weeks before I gave up my 24-year cannabis habit. | ||
| I think I had some shit to go through. | ||
| I then followed that with five ayahuasca sessions. | ||
| I think the DMT was really helpful. | ||
| I may have mentioned this to you the last time we talked. | ||
| But what happened as I went under, I had that fourth deep inhalation of the pipe and lay back. | ||
| And I don't normally hear voices in DMT, but a voice spoke to me. | ||
| And the voice said to me, you're ours now. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| You're ours now. | ||
| And my last conscious thought was, shit yes, but only for 12 minutes, you know? | ||
| And then I felt myself being ripped apart. | ||
| There were these things, these small things. | ||
| I was on some kind of table, and they were running around me, and they were tearing me apart. | ||
| My body was torn to pieces. | ||
| Bits were cast off. | ||
| It was like a cocoon was being ripped away. | ||
| And then the voice comes again. | ||
| There's like a trumpet call and the voice comes again and now the great transformation shall begin. | ||
| And it was the weirdest and strangest experience and I was in this flickering huge space and these little beings were running around me and I was completely helpless and at their mercy. | ||
| And that That was scary. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| But it was not demonic. | ||
| It was like, this is stuff you need to go through. | ||
| You need to do this. | ||
| It's going to be very, very frightening, but it's something you need to do. | ||
| And I did need to do it, and it was helpful to me. | ||
| Was that the first time you had heard voices? | ||
| Yeah, I did not hear voices speaking to me in DMT ever before. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| My experiences have been filled with voices. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Saying what? | ||
| Well, one of the big ones is it's a really childish thing that they would say. | ||
| And this is like when I was about to leave, when I was starting to sober up. | ||
| They would say, I love you 600 million, 500,000 times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Like a child would say. | ||
| Oh, I want to hear that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to hear that more than I want to hear you're ours now. | ||
| Well, I think I came into it in a good place. | ||
| I was in a happy place in my life, and I wasn't scared. | ||
| I wasn't fighting it. | ||
| But that I love you thing was really weird. | ||
| The other thing that it said was the words of McKenna. | ||
| And I think when I've tried to analyze this, I think that what it was was that I had listened to so much McKenna before I'd gone into it that I had sort of stained my brain with this idea. | ||
| And either my subconsciousness was saying this, or they were... | ||
| Whatever they are, whether they're a part of my thought process, we're projecting this thing, this reminder, do not give in to astonishment. | ||
| Because it was so mind-blowing. | ||
| I was flying down this bumblebee-covered... | ||
| This pathway, this spinning, when I say bumblebee, not covered, rather by colored, there was very clear black and yellow stripes of all this thing, like very bright, intense black, and very bright, intense yellow, and it was moving, and I was shooting down this thing, and then it was saying, do not give in to astonishment. | ||
| And it was, the words of McKenna, but not in... | ||
| I don't think it was his voice. | ||
| I think it was like no voice. | ||
| I think it was just the words. | ||
| But that thought. | ||
| Well, that's the weird thing about the telepathic thing that you get from the DMT experience. | ||
| You understand the words. | ||
| It's speaking to you in English, but it's not really speaking to you. | ||
| It's just those things are getting into your brain very clearly, but I'm not really sure you hear them. | ||
| I mean, here is an experience which, what a pity to go through life and not have that experience ever. | ||
| Yeah, I've said to many people, you're screwing yourself, man. | ||
| It's scary as shit, but boy do you get a lot out of it. | ||
| And I mean, in my case, most of the previous DMT journeys I'd had had not been terrifying. | ||
| They had been gentle and healing and nice. | ||
| I think that I was at a juncture in my life where I needed to make a change. | ||
| And I think that that particular DMT experience, followed by the five ayahuasca journeys, helped me to make that change. | ||
| And I'm eternally grateful for that. | ||
| It was a really positive and beneficial thing for me. | ||
| Yeah, it was very positive and beneficial for me as well. | ||
| I was... | ||
| I think I've always wanted a change. | ||
| I want a change now. | ||
| I always want more enlightenment, more peace, more serenity, whatever it is. | ||
| At that time, I think I was just trying to figure out what are the possibilities and what else is out there. | ||
| It was just this one big rush of impossible possibilities. | ||
| That redefined my view of reality itself. | ||
| It was really scary, though. | ||
| The last one was really slippery. | ||
| Because after it was over, it was so intense and powerful that regular reality didn't seem real to me. | ||
| And I went through a period where I feel like my ego was trying to trick me by being scared of everything. | ||
| I was scared of car accidents and trees falling in front of my car. | ||
| Buildings collapsing and earthquakes. | ||
| There's all these thoughts that came into my mind that I felt. | ||
| This went on for days after the journey? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not intensely strong. | ||
| It wasn't like paranoia or anxiety. | ||
| It was like this flittering thing that I'd go, no, stop it, stop it. | ||
| But I'd be on the highway and I'd be like, what if this guy just flips the fucking road and comes right towards you and smashes his head onto your car? | ||
| You're dead! | ||
| It was all this nonsense that was just entering into my mind. | ||
| Not just being aware of traffic and being smart, but possibilities. | ||
| And you hadn't been doing that before? | ||
| Never. | ||
| Never. | ||
| I think what it was was my ego trying to regain some sort of control. | ||
| Is that my ego, by protecting me or by keeping me paranoid and keeping me very base and primal and animalistic, worried about safety and shelter and disasters and things like that, it was trying to regain some strength. | ||
| Because I was so humbled by the experience. | ||
| It is a humbling experience. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's one of the most, I mean, perhaps the most humbling experience that it's possible to have. | ||
| And again, that's why it's valuable. | ||
| And who says we shouldn't have experiences because they're scary, you know? | ||
| These are amongst the most important experiences it's possible to have. | ||
| I hear you use flotation tanks. | ||
| Yeah, I have one in my basement. | ||
| Do you use it regularly? | ||
| Oh yeah, I've been using them for... | ||
| I bought my house in 2003, so for more than 10 years I've had this in my basement. | ||
| Please describe the thing to me. | ||
| You get into this... | ||
| You've never done it? | ||
| I've never done it. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| I want to do it. | ||
| Where are you staying while you're out here? | ||
| I'm staying in Malibu with friends. | ||
| Oh, perfect! | ||
| I'll get you in if you want to go tomorrow. | ||
| There's a place in Venice called the Float Lab. | ||
| It's the best place in the country. | ||
| And you just go in there and float? | ||
| Yes, it's amazing. | ||
| You don't need anything. | ||
| I'd like to do two hours, if I have two hours. | ||
| But if I only have an hour, I'll set a timer. | ||
| And I'll put a timer outside of the box so I can hear it when it goes off. | ||
| But that's my old one. | ||
| You see it up there. | ||
| That's a Samadhi tank that I had. | ||
| The one that I have now, though, is built by the Float Lab, which is far more complicated. | ||
| It's a really immense, huge, seven feet tall, nine feet wide, or nine foot long, six foot wide. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| It looks like a walk-in freezer. | ||
| And it has oxygen pumped into it. | ||
| When you're in it, you're in water, right? | ||
| And it's salt water that keeps you suspended. | ||
| I can't believe you haven't done this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I haven't done it. | |
| We're going to change your life tomorrow. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's like a psychedelic experience, except completely natural, completely safe, and you can end it anytime you want. | ||
| That's my new tank. | ||
| When you climb into that thing, the water is set to the same temperature as the surface of your skin. | ||
| And there's a thousand pounds of salt in that water. | ||
| It used to be 800 in my smaller tank. | ||
| This one's a thousand. | ||
| So you can't sink. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's about 11 inches deep, so even if you did sink and you can't drown, you're fine. | ||
| And you're floating like half of your body is above the water. | ||
| And as you lie there, you're in total silence, total darkness. | ||
| Your ears are actually underwater. | ||
| You close the lid on this thing and you don't hear a thing, you don't see a thing. | ||
| You have no input. | ||
| And you don't feel the water because the water is the same temperature as your skin. | ||
| So you're floating completely weightless. | ||
| It's really great for your body. | ||
| It feels great because you alleviate all the pressures of gravity and stress. | ||
| You feel your muscles relaxing and unwinding. | ||
| And for me, the way I describe it is the first 20 minutes or so, it seems like a seminar on my life. | ||
| It gets me to start examining various aspects of my life. | ||
| You start to go through like a life review? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| In the absence of sensory input, even while we're having this conversation, it's very quiet in here, but we're having to deal with the fact that there's computers, there's screens, there's a ceiling, your butt is feeling the chair. | ||
| All those things are gone in that tank. | ||
| In the tank, it's just your mind. | ||
| It's the only place ever, the only environment on Earth where your mind is untethered from your body. | ||
| It's an amazing, amazing experience. | ||
| Completely safe, completely natural, completely beneficial, completely refreshing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Even if you're not into the psychedelic aspect of it, you just want to relax, it's incredible. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It should be something that everyone has in their home. | ||
| It would benefit so many people in so many ways. | ||
| Do you get into visionary space? | ||
| You do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Especially when you get a little smoky, smoky. | ||
| Well, that's what I was going to say. | ||
| So you can enhance the experience with certain allies. | ||
| Mushrooms enhance it. | ||
| Although mushrooms are scary in there. | ||
| I like cannabis. | ||
| Eating cannabis is my favorite. | ||
| I like to eat enough cannabis that I feel like I fucked up and ate too much and then get in there. | ||
| And those are intensely psychedelic and very visionary. | ||
| But what I like about it is you can end it pretty much at any moment. | ||
| When you open the door, The cannabis will still affect you. | ||
| You'll still have the weirdness of that, but all the nutty hallucinations and visuals will all go away. | ||
| You just step out. | ||
| Yeah, you just step out. | ||
| And you can get to that place without the cannabis as well. | ||
| I know a lot of people that have really intense psychedelic visions while they're in the isolation tank. | ||
| How interesting. | ||
| Well, this is an experience I have to have. | ||
| You're going to have it. | ||
| You're going to have it tomorrow. | ||
| Do you have a day off? | ||
| Are you free? | ||
| I don't have a total day off, but I can get two hours. | ||
| Okay, we'll work it in. | ||
| We'll make it happen. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Crash, who's the guy who runs the Float Lab in Venice, is a great friend and a great guy. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| He's a genius. | ||
| He's the wizard behind the curtain that creates the greatest tanks on Earth. | ||
| He's just a nutty, nutty dude. | ||
| He's just worked incredibly hard to figure out a way to make... | ||
| There's tanks, there's the Samadhi tank, which is a very good tank, very functional, you can use it. | ||
| There's a bunch of different companies that have tanks. | ||
| And then there's his tank. | ||
| And the difference is like, A modern BMW compared to a Model T Ford. | ||
| Like, literally. | ||
| It's that good. | ||
| Oh, it's amazing. | ||
| He's just a genius. | ||
| He figured out a way to pump oxygen into them. | ||
| He also figured out a way to flush all the water through ozone. | ||
| It kills all the bacteria. | ||
| He has incredibly intense filtration systems, four- and five-step processes of filtering the water. | ||
| All of his equipment that he has attached to all this stuff, nobody's rocking it like that. | ||
| He takes it to literally... | ||
| The next level is not even a mile from him. | ||
| He's gone. | ||
| He's in a place all by his own with what he's creating. | ||
| And you're in total silence. | ||
| Total silence. | ||
| And total darkness. | ||
| Total darkness. | ||
| And you don't feel a thing. | ||
| You feel like you're flying through space. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Because your body is completely weightless. | ||
| It's the weirdest feeling ever. | ||
| But it's amazing. | ||
| You've convinced me. | ||
| I can't believe you haven't done it. | ||
| But you're such a psychedelic adventurer. | ||
| I would have thought that would have been a part of your daily life. | ||
| It hasn't been. | ||
| We've got to set you up with one in England, man. | ||
| We've got to send one over there. | ||
| Send a crash over. | ||
| Have them set you up in your basement or something. | ||
| I wouldn't live in a house if I didn't have space for one. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Is that important to you? | ||
| To me, it's massive. | ||
| Anytime I've got something I'm thinking about or trying to work on or new material, ideas, I go through jujitsu moves in there. | ||
| I go through scenarios. | ||
| I'll visually spar. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| You don't get an opportunity to have the mind at its full resource capacity, other than in that tank. | ||
| In this world, constantly bombarded by a sensation of all kinds, we're torn apart. | ||
| I can't wait to talk to you after you get out. | ||
| Have you seen this new skull that they found, the 1.8 million year old human skull? | ||
| Hmm, no. | ||
| Yeah, this is an amazing discovery that they found. | ||
| This first completely preserved adult hominid from the early Pleistocene. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| See if you can pull that up, Jamie. | ||
| It's a 1.8 million year old skull. | ||
| But it's a really amazing find. | ||
| And they found it in Georgia, in Eastern Europe. | ||
| And it's the fifth such skull from this region. | ||
| But it's 1.8 million years old. | ||
| That's really old. | ||
| That is... | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Let's see if they have any still images of it. | ||
| But these, they're completely, it's thrown a gigantic monkey wrench into our timeline of human evolution. | ||
| They found stone tools and cut marks on animal bones, which indicates that the hominids were actively involved in meat processing. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| But is it a recognizable species of early man? | ||
| It has quite prominent brow ridges. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, it's some sort of early man. | ||
| What they're calling it. | ||
| It hasn't received a name yet. | ||
| Have they indicated any idea about the size of the brain? | ||
| Um, that's a good question. | ||
| They're calling it Skull 5. It says here, Skull 5 is different, different even than the four other skulls found in, uh, Dumanese is the name, the area. | ||
| It was found in 2005 and completely, and ultimately matched a jaw found in 2000 to make a complete skull. | ||
| After eight years of study, scientists on Thursday published a paper in the Journal of Science revealing that Skull 5 is simply not that different from others. | ||
| The five Demanisi individuals are no more different from each other than any five modern humans or chimpanzees, said neurobiologists, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So the brain case itself is very small, around the third of the size of modern humans. | ||
| And at the same time, the face is quite large. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I need to read it. | ||
| I'm not sure how much that changes history. | ||
| I mean, we know that there were human species around one point. | ||
| Our ancestors were making tools two and a half million years ago. | ||
| So this is well within that time frame. | ||
| I think maybe what it's showing us is that there have been many lines of human down through the ages. | ||
| And like this one that they call the Hobbit, you know, Florian, this tiny little creature which lived until 18 or 16,000 years ago in Floris in Indonesia. | ||
| That was completely unpredicted as well. | ||
| Maybe there have been many human types and we don't know where we actually come from in this whole picture. | ||
| Yeah, these lost hominids that they keep discovering, like Homo floriensis, and like that Russian one that they found that was basically 40,000 years old, a completely different species of human. | ||
| Completely different, Denisovans. | ||
| Fascinating, fascinating stuff. | ||
| And 40,000 years ago, a blink of an eye. | ||
| A blink of an eye. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Just a completely different type of human. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So again, what it adds up to is the realization that we know nothing, actually. | ||
| We know very little. | ||
| We come out of mystery. | ||
| We live in mystery and we end in mystery. | ||
| Have you heard of the Orang Pendek? | ||
| Yes, this is cryptozoology. | ||
| That's Malaysia. | ||
| That's where my wife comes from, Malaysia. | ||
| And it's a kind of Yeti, Malaysian Yeti or Malaysian Bigfoot. | ||
| Well, it's tiny. | ||
| But it's a wild creature, a man-like creature that lives in the woods. | ||
| Well, very similar to Homo floreensis. | ||
| And so the suggestion is Orang Pendek is Homo floresiensis, or whatever it's called, still alive. | ||
| Yeah, that's the idea. | ||
| Hanging out in the world somewhere. | ||
| It would sound ridiculous, but this Homo, let's call him Hobbit Man. | ||
| This Hobbit Man was only 13,000, 14,000 years ago. | ||
| Yeah, very recently. | ||
| Within the span almost of human history. | ||
| I mean, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, where I've just been, is 12,000 plus years old. | ||
| They're making these massive, great, megalithic pillars there. | ||
| So this creature on Flores is just that period, just the same age as that. | ||
| So the world was filled with all kinds of different creatures. | ||
| By the way, talking about Indonesia, I'm going to Indonesia on the 3rd of December. | ||
| Because there's been a new site, or rather an old site, which has been radically redated in Indonesia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Which is called Gunung Padang, not that far from Flores, as a matter of fact. | ||
| It's a megalithic site with gigantic basalt columns. | ||
| And this place has been known since the early 20th century, thought to be about 3,000 or 4,000 years old. | ||
| But there's an Australian geologist called Danny Hillman, Who's been working for the Indonesian government on a site survey for the last five years, and he's just in the last month or two come out with this explosive finding that he thinks this site is possibly as much as 20,000 years old, which a megalithic site, 20,000 years old, that completely rewrites history. | ||
| Gobekli Tepe already pretty much rewrites history, but this place in Indonesia totally does it. | ||
| And when you take the two together, so I'm going to go out and take a look at that site and meet Danny Hillman. | ||
| What is the name of it again? | ||
| Can you spell it? | ||
| Gunung Padang. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Gunung Padang. | ||
| I may be able to show you a picture of it. | ||
| Yeah, Jamie put it up. | ||
| That is Gunung Padang, yeah. | ||
| That is totally Gunung Padang. | ||
| I use that picture. | ||
| So all these stones, and what made them date this to 20,000 years? | ||
| What was the change? | ||
| Okay, so the previous dating has just been based on the surface layers, and Danny Hillman and his team have been down deep into this man-made hill on top of which the surface layers stand, and they've gone all the way down and they're finding big megaliths right down at the bottom. | ||
| And they're finding associated carbon that allows them to date it to up to 20,000 years old. | ||
| So this is a real huge game changer that's taking place there. | ||
| So when they date it, when they carbon date it down to 20,000 years old, is it based on organic material that's near the rock? | ||
| It has to be, yeah. | ||
| You can't date stone, but what you do is you get into undisturbed layers. | ||
| Deep down in that man-made hill that we're looking at on the screen right now, you get down into undisturbed layers where you're finding megaliths at the bottom, covered by Earth, being covered by Earth for 20,000 years, and amongst that Earth is organic material, fragments of bone, fragments of charcoal that you can date with carbon dating. | ||
| So you can then say that those megaliths are at least that old. | ||
| At least. | ||
|
unidentified
|
At least. | |
| Most likely much older than that. | ||
| They may be much older than that, but they're at least that old. | ||
| And the weird thing that this place has in common with Gobekli Tepe Is that both of them are man-made hills which appear to have had some kind of deliberate burial of the earlier lairs, like a time capsule. | ||
| So I get this feeling that, you know, stuff is coming out. | ||
| Stuff is coming out into the open that's been... | ||
| Well, Gobekli Tepe was a real game changer because that was the first time that they had found anything that you had to date back to at least 12,000 years. | ||
| Gobekli Tepe is really important and that's why I was glad to be able to go there. | ||
| In September and spend a lot of time just gently getting to know this site. | ||
| The reason it's important is because it was deliberately buried. | ||
| And what it raises is... | ||
| I just want to show you this cover from New Scientist magazine. | ||
| Can we show this? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| The True Dawn. | ||
| How do we get that up there? | ||
| We'll pull it up. | ||
| We'll have Jamie pull it up. | ||
| Civilization is older and more mysterious than we thought. | ||
| Wow, New Scientist magazine. | ||
| This is New Scientist magazine in the beginning of October 2013. Now, New Scientist was one of the magazines. | ||
| That attacked me massively back in 1995 when I published Fingerprints of the Gods. | ||
| And what did I say in Fingerprints of the Gods? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought. | |
| And now they come out with this cover, you know. | ||
| So I've got to feel a certain feeling of, I don't know, almost smugness. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Listen, you can hear your voice. | ||
| You just get all giddy. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| I mean, it's fun to see them doing that. | ||
| And the reason they're saying that is it's got a lot to do with Quebec Zetepi. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because Gobekli Tepe is something completely unpredicted that what are supposed to be hunter-gatherers at the end of the Upper Paleolithic who are not supposed to have the kind of organizational skills, the architectural skills to put together gigantic megalithic circles. | ||
| There's one of the pillars that I went and took a look at, which they never removed it from the quarry because they found a fault in it. | ||
| It wasn't that they couldn't remove it, they found a fault in it. | ||
| And that one weighs more than 50 tons. | ||
| It's just a gigantic piece of stone. | ||
| And the other intriguing thing about Gobekli Tepe, which I learned from Klaus Schmidt when I was talking to him, is they've done ground-penetrating radars. | ||
| So right now when you go to the site, you see four substantial stone circles on the scale of Stonehenge above ground. | ||
| Could you put the microphone closer to your face? | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| Sorry, I just don't want anybody to do it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| When you go to Gobekli Tepe now, you see a group of stone circles, four of them above ground. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| There it is there. | ||
| And what they've done is they've done ground-penetrating radar over the site, and they found that at least 20 times as many stone circles are still underground and possibly as many as 50 times as many. | ||
| So it's just a gigantic site and why it's important is that whoever made it 12,000 years ago deliberately buried it 2,000 years later, 10,000 years ago. | ||
| So that meant that the carbon dating record has not been contaminated by later cultures. | ||
| It's a perfect pristine time capsule and lo and behold The date that it prints out is 12,000 years old. | ||
| Now, that then raises questions over lots of other megalithic sites all over the world, which have been contaminated by later cultures. | ||
| The megalithic sites of Malta, for example, look very like Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| They look very like Gobekli Tepe, but they're only supposed to be 5,000 years old. | ||
| I would now say we need to reconsider that evidence because those sites Were contaminated by later culture. | ||
| Maybe the carbon on which they were dated was introduced by a later culture. | ||
| Maybe it doesn't belong to the period of the construction of the megaliths. | ||
| Well, this alone, this one discovery alone, really is a huge game changer. | ||
| Because now we know that people were capable of doing something like that 12,000 years ago. | ||
| And not a task to be underestimated because you're in an area where there isn't a lot of water available. | ||
| So you're bringing in hundreds of people. | ||
| You're organizing them into teams to construct these gigantic megalithic circles. | ||
| You're feeding them. | ||
| You're watering them. | ||
| You have site planning and arrangement. | ||
| All of this is the kind of stuff that you expect much later in human history. | ||
| You don't expect it 12,000 years ago. | ||
| And it raises that big question, you know, could there have been a lost civilization? | ||
| Could we be looking at the work perhaps of the survivors of a lost civilization? | ||
| How do we know that they covered it intentionally? | ||
| There's a deliberate infill, the nature of the earth that's been put into it. | ||
| You can pretty much say here were people with spades pouring this earth in, all in one go, filling it in. | ||
| And amongst the earth there are bits, there are fragments of bone, there are fragments of carbon, and that's how they've dated it. | ||
| It's not a natural sedimentation that built up over a long period of time. | ||
| It's something that was done all at once in a planned and organized way. | ||
| So for some reason, and Claire Schmidt, the German archaeologist who's running the site, is not clear what this reason was. | ||
| For some reason, whoever created this place decommissioned it at a certain point about 10,000 years ago. | ||
| They closed it down. | ||
| And then, and this is eerie, for the next 10,000 years it remained untouched and nobody went there and nobody Nobody saw it. | ||
| Back in the 50s, some American archaeologists were attracted to the site. | ||
| They saw bits of cut stone lying on the surface, and the cut stone was so good that they concluded it was recent. | ||
| They thought it must be from the Ottoman period, you know, 15, 1600, something like that. | ||
| And they ignored it. | ||
| And it was really a lucky turn of the spade by Klaus Schmidt, this German archaeologist, that revealed that that's not the case at all and that these are 12,000-year-old megalithic pillars. | ||
| And not only that, so we have this incredible innovation in architecture taking place. | ||
| Stone circles on the scale of Stonehenge, but 7,000 years earlier than Stonehenge. | ||
| Being created at Gobekli Tepe, but at the same time, mysteriously, agriculture starts to appear in that area. | ||
| There hasn't been agriculture there before, or anywhere so far as we know, and suddenly it starts to appear. | ||
| They're domesticating cattle, they're domesticating wheat, and it's the beginning of the agricultural revolution, so it's like a center of innovation. | ||
| We're doing something unique as far as we know in human history in terms of architecture. | ||
| We're doing something unique in terms of economics, producing the first agriculture. | ||
| And I can't help feeling that This thing happened so suddenly and in such an extraordinary way that maybe this is the missing link, that we're looking at the fingerprints of a lost civilization, the survivors of a lost civilization who settled there with all these skills already in place and introduced them into the local culture because this period 12,000 years ago plus is the period when the Earth went through gigantic cataclysmic events because | ||
| it was struck by a comet. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the other piece of the puzzle, the nuclear glass that they've found. | ||
| How do you say this stuff? | ||
| Trinitite? | ||
| Trinitite. | ||
| And that they have found this stuff all over Europe and all over Asia, all over the world, at that precise moment, 12,000 years ago. | ||
| The layer of platinum in the Greenland ice cores, all of this says Earth was hit by a comet at that time. | ||
| Is that the Holocene? | ||
| Well, that's the beginning of the Holocene. | ||
| The Holocene is our period. | ||
| It's the period we still live in now. | ||
| But in archaeological terms, it's the juncture between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic. | ||
| That's what we're talking about here. | ||
| And you have this episode that geologists call the Younger Dryas, which is an episode of sudden deep freeze strikes the Earth. | ||
| The Earth has been emerging from the Ice Age until 12,980 years ago. | ||
| And amazingly, you can date it that precisely. | ||
| Give or take five years, this happened 12,980 years ago. | ||
| And then suddenly the Earth flips into this thousand-year deep freeze that nobody's ever been able to explain before, that they called the Younger Dryas. | ||
| And now we can say for sure that the Younger Dryas was caused by huge amounts of dust being projected into the upper atmosphere of the Earth by this comet impact, and that that dust enshrouded the whole Earth and set in motion a kind of what we would call a nuclear winter today. | ||
| Where the sun's rays could no longer reach the earth, and the earth went back into a deep freeze. | ||
| And for me, this is the smoking gun that lost us a whole civilization. | ||
| And I was just, yesterday, I've come here from North Carolina, and I sat down with Randall Carlson, who has been... | ||
| Yes, I met him. | ||
| You met Randall. | ||
| He's a very, very fascinating man. | ||
| And he's been working away quietly on this subject for years and years and years, long before the evidence Was in for a comet. | ||
| He was predicting that this is what caused it, that there was a comet impact. | ||
| And he's got this very, very fascinating theory. | ||
| And he's going to take me next year on a field trip into the Pacific Northwest and into Canada to look at areas where there were these massive outflows of floods from the ice cap. | ||
| And what Randall is suggesting is that at least some large fragments of the comet that hit the Earth 12,980 years ago actually hit the ice cap. | ||
| They landed on the ice cap, which was still then a mile deep, and they pulverized it. | ||
| They turned it into water immediately, and that's why you have these gigantic outburst floods which carry down huge boulders and strew them all over the landscapes. | ||
| A very exciting theory, and it's great to see Randall's work being vindicated because he's been ignored for far too long, and I'm looking forward to doing a fascinating field trip with him next year. | ||
| Yeah, I met him in Georgia many years ago at the Punchline Comedy Club. | ||
| I had a long and really interesting conversation about him. | ||
| With him, rather, about the Holocene Comet. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that's exactly what he's talking about. | ||
| You see, he's one of these guys who is just so far ahead of his time that nobody saw it. | ||
| Nobody realized what he was onto. | ||
| Now, everybody understands that the Earth was hit by a comet and there's been a big scientific argument about this over the last Five or six years, but it's really settled now. | ||
| The evidence that all over the world is clear that this happened. | ||
| But Randall was on to this years before anybody else. | ||
| And what he's also doing is just taking it that bit further. | ||
| Because we have these mysterious floods that occurred in precisely that period, which have traditionally been called outburst floods. | ||
| The idea was that the ice caps gradually melting down filled up these huge glacial lakes. | ||
| And that eventually the ice dam enclosing the Glacial Lake would break. | ||
| But now it looks like we're looking at ice dams a thousand feet high in order to account for the massive flow of water. | ||
| And what Randall's suggesting is that that theory is actually wrong. | ||
| It wasn't the outburst floods from Glacial Lakes. | ||
| It was the comet hitting the ice cap that turned all that ice to water and produced a gigantic, gigantic outflows, carrying down boulders, you know, the size of houses and dumping them over the landscapes. | ||
| And then you have to consider anything that lay in the way of those floods, anything that lay in the path of floods on that scale is gone. | ||
| Gone completely. | ||
| Wiped out from human memory. | ||
| And you also have to consider the fact that we absolutely know that these events have taken place in a much greater scale over the course of the Earth. | ||
| There's been mass extinction events, so this is not preposterous. | ||
| It's not preposterous. | ||
| It's completely logical, and it's time that historians and archaeologists... | ||
| We've abandoned the model that everything just proceeds smoothly and gently in the way that we've seen it doing for the last few hundred years, which is called uniformitarianism, and embraced the thought that cataclysmic events are a key part of the history of the Earth. | ||
| And we should know this already. | ||
| There's massive amount of evidence for it. | ||
| It's not something we even need to argue about. | ||
| But history proceeds on the basis that there is no such thing as a cataclysm. | ||
| In fact, it's cataclysms that have written the story of human history. | ||
| Well, not only that, when you stop and look at all the ancient stories, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Flood of the Ark. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's so many stories that involve cataclysmic events. | ||
| They're all about floods and cataclysms. | ||
| The idea that those are just fiction is kind of silly. | ||
| It's totally, totally crazy. | ||
| And they all say that there was a golden age, that there was a former civilization, that mankind had attained to a very high level. | ||
| And then we angered the gods. | ||
| It's often put that way. | ||
| We angered the gods. | ||
| We fell out of harmony with the universe. | ||
| There was something went wrong. | ||
| There was some kind of moral decline. | ||
| Like now! | ||
| Like now! | ||
| This is what I often say, that if I were to look at our civilization in mythical terms, There's never been a civilization that looked more like the next lost civilization than ours. | ||
| I don't want to spread gloom and doom. | ||
| I don't believe in spreading gloom and doom. | ||
| I think we should think positive. | ||
| And I've said earlier, and I maintain this, I'm very optimistic about the future of the human race. | ||
| But let's not pretend that it's all roses in the garden. | ||
| The terrible things are happening in the world today. | ||
| We have an unbelievable arrogance, an unbelievable Pride, cruelty, an economic model that makes countless millions incredibly poor and allows tiny, tiny numbers to be incredibly obscenely rich. | ||
| And the whole system is skewed in the interests of that tiny, tiny fraction of 1% of the wealthy. | ||
| And unfortunately, it's really as bad as it's possible to get in America. | ||
| It's bad in many other countries, too, but it's really bad in America, the skewing of wealth and the brainwashing of the population to keep people quiet, to stop people thinking the mind control operates in our society. | ||
| It's like a pressure cooker. | ||
| Something's got to give, and ours is a culture which is literally destroying the earth. | ||
| The Amazon jungle, this amazing sacred realm, this incredible home of biodiversity, Beautiful, beautiful place. | ||
| The destruction that's taking place now. | ||
| Only a society that is truly insane could allow that to happen. | ||
| And that's unfortunately our society today. | ||
| So we need to wake up. | ||
| And you want to talk about the writing on the wall as far as a powerful advanced civilization being completely wiped off the earth. | ||
| How about our writing is all going to the cloud? | ||
| We have this crazy trend where everything is going into these databases and hard drives. | ||
| When those are destroyed, there will be nothing to hold onto. | ||
| Nothing to read. | ||
| All of our knowledge will be memory. | ||
| I mean, it's almost ensuring that there will be nothing remaining. | ||
| Total wipeout. | ||
| So this idea that I've talked about many times over the years that we are a species with amnesia, we are going to be a species with amnesia. | ||
| Again. | ||
| Again. | ||
| And our culture has not at all looked at oral traditions. | ||
| We've destroyed the oral tradition. | ||
| You know, we put everything into the written form, now beamed it up into the cloud, and one disaster, it's all gone. | ||
| And at least in a written form, you have books. | ||
| I mean, we don't even have books anymore. | ||
| We have auto-updates. | ||
| It's so crazy to think that all it takes is one asteroidal impact that wipes out the grid, and all that stuff's gone. | ||
| All that stuff's gone. | ||
| You can't access it anymore. | ||
| You have to rebuild the entire power grid. | ||
| If the future... | ||
| I mean, if we lose one or two generations, if we had a Holocene-type incident again or a big comet hit and wiped out 50% of the population and we had to sort of re-figure out databases and re-figure out hard drives, we're not going to. | ||
| We're going to gather food and we're going to figure out agriculture. | ||
| We're going to figure out some real primitive ways to live life. | ||
| But most of that stuff, three, four generations later, is gone. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| Completely, completely gone. | ||
| And... | ||
| I mean, we have these gigantic populations now based in cities where actually the food supply is incredibly fragile. | ||
| It's like two or three days of food is available in any city at any time. | ||
| Consider the implications of that if that supply chain breaks down. | ||
| And it's very clear, we're on record now. | ||
| Look what's just happened in the Philippines. | ||
| Look at Hurricane Katrina. | ||
| We cannot deal with natural disasters. | ||
| Yeah, that was a big one too, man. | ||
| That was a really, really scary one. | ||
| The Philippines Superstorm, a storm the size of Germany. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Thousands, 10,000 more people killed and very slow reactions to do anything about it. | ||
| We are very bad. | ||
| The human race, we got all this tech, we got all this wealth. | ||
| We got all this complacency, but actually, when the universe strikes us, we are unable to do anything about it. | ||
| And that was true in the most wealthy country in the world, in America, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina. | ||
| And this is three times bigger than Katrina. | ||
| Three times bigger than Katrina. | ||
| They showed a city that was 200,000 people, and there's not a single structure left standing. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And that, by the way, there have been bigger ones. | ||
| There have been bigger storms throughout history than that. | ||
| There's been bigger impacts than the Holocene one. | ||
| And the other thing about the universe is that our orbit, like where we are, is stable. | ||
| And we have the moon, which helps our orbit be stable. | ||
| But there's hundreds of thousands of near-Earth objects that are just floating around out there that could easily come down, collide into each other, Slamming the Earth, and that's a wrap. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| This again is something that needs to be taken very, very seriously. | ||
| Again, I want to say, let's emphasize the positive, and let's emphasize positive thinking, but let's also be rational and reasonable. | ||
| And when you look at the orbits of near-Earth asteroids called Apollo objects, it's like looking at a cat's cradle of harm. | ||
| That is surrounding this precious jewel of a planet. | ||
| And we don't even know them all. | ||
| We know a tiny fraction of them. | ||
| What becomes clear is we only know a little bit of these things, some of them 10 miles wide, which are winging through outer space and can hit us at any time. | ||
| And then comets, then comets. | ||
| Some comets can have 12,000-year orbits. | ||
| The suggestion that we're seeing a lot of increased meteor activity as well right now, a lot of action going on. | ||
| And the suggestion, and again, Randall Carson's work has been really important in this area, is the torrid asteroid comet. | ||
| The torrid shower is a remains of a disintegrated comet. | ||
| And in that shower, there may be huge things the size of cities, which are... | ||
| Which are flowing through and crossing the orbit of the Earth regularly. | ||
| It's not just pretty little lights in the sky. | ||
| One day we're going to run into something the size of New York, which is going to hit us. | ||
| So this is a matter for care and concern. | ||
| And again, look what we do. | ||
| We spend billions, trillions, limitless, endless amounts of money in inventing new ways to destroy each other. | ||
| And very little on actually looking on how to protect the Earth. | ||
| How could they protect the Earth, though, from something like that? | ||
| Well, if we don't look into it, we certainly won't have an answer to that question. | ||
| Some of them, don't they come from behind the sun and we can't see them because of the gravity? | ||
| You can't see them come. | ||
| You can't see them come. | ||
| But if the kind of focused scientific effort that is presently put into creating weapons of mass destruction so that we can all fight each other, if that kind of effort were put into making sure That we understand the orbit of every single asteroid that's out there. | ||
| We identify them and find them. | ||
| Well, we'd be a lot safer than we are today. | ||
| There's no profit in that, Graham Hancock. | ||
| I don't know what you want our corporate stockholders to do. | ||
| That's ridiculous, sir. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It almost mimics the cyclical nature of life itself. | ||
| It seems like civilization builds up to this incredible point where it's like... | ||
| Completely out of control and just reckless and wild and then boom! | ||
| Gets knocked down and then builds back up again and boom. | ||
| And it's almost... | ||
| I'm not suggesting that these things floating around in space are there for a reason. | ||
| But if they were, I mean, they would be like little reset buttons. | ||
| Little reset buttons. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, maybe that's what happened with the dinosaurs. | ||
| And that's why the ancient mythology... | ||
| Which consistently says, right or wrong, consistently says that mankind is implicated in these cataclysms. | ||
| Our behavior, our wickedness is implicated in this in some way. | ||
| I think it's worth listening to that a little bit. | ||
| And maybe this time we don't have to go through the reset. | ||
| Maybe it's possible for mankind to actually wake up now that we are globally connected, now that we do have this possibility of all talking to one another, that before it's too late, we can reset ourselves in a positive direction. | ||
| I feel like the only way we would is if we knew something was coming. | ||
| I think that's almost the only way. | ||
| And we would have to be informed, and then we would have to believe it. | ||
| And then there would be disputes, and I'm sure the Republicans would start laughing nonsense. | ||
| We're going to show you right here. | ||
| The same scientist that brought you climate change. | ||
| are telling you right now that there's an asteroid heading our way. | ||
| Sadly, they would say that. | ||
| Jesus is gonna protect us. | ||
| What we need to do is cut taxes for corporations and ensure that we can move to Mexico with our factories. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder. | ||
| I wonder if we would really pay attention if we knew that we had a year left. | ||
| If we had a year to go... | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| What a difference. | ||
| What a situation that would be. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| We barely pay attention to what we're doing that's really obvious. | ||
| Like the polluting of the ocean or the destroying of the... | ||
| Pulling the fish out of the ocean at an alarming rate that doesn't allow them to recover. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| All of it about the pursuit of short-term profits. | ||
| All of it about immediate payoffs. | ||
| Nobody thinking long-term. | ||
| Again, I come back to this. | ||
| We are a deranged society. | ||
| And little nodes of sanity are beginning to wake up all around the world. | ||
| But maybe it's not in enough time. | ||
| And doesn't it also go back to what you were saying about psychedelics and how beneficial psychedelics can be? | ||
| Because one of the main themes of ayahuasca is save the planet. | ||
| It's save the planet. | ||
| It's a universal theme of ayahuasca. | ||
| Sooner or later, anybody who works with ayahuasca enough is going to start picking up that message. | ||
| That this beautiful earth that we have, this gift that the universe has given us is precious beyond measure, precious beyond imagination, and that we are part of it and that we must treat it with love and respect and reverence rather than in the horrific way that we do. | ||
| And that part of treating the planet with love and respect and reverence is treating fellow human beings with love and respect and reverence at every level. | ||
| This is a very strong It's a message of ayahuasca. | ||
| It is fundamentally a message of love. | ||
| Not in a wishy-washy way, but in a really firm and clear way. | ||
| That is the salvation of the human race. | ||
| Bill Hicks said it, you know, love is the opposite of fear. | ||
| Fear is what presses our buttons today. | ||
| It's what's used deliberately to press our buttons. | ||
| And what's the opposite of that is love. | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| Yeah, and Bill Hicks did a lot of mushrooms, folks. | ||
| And Bill Hicks did a lot of mushrooms, and what a brilliant, brilliant man he was. | ||
| Oh, yeah, he's one of my comedy heroes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| For sure. | ||
| There's a 19-year-old inventor who found a way to clean up the world's ocean in under five years' time. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| This great pacific garbage patch, this young kid has figured out this machine that would absorb all the plastic material in the ocean. | ||
| Really fascinating stuff. | ||
| There's an article about it. | ||
| This is vr-zone.com. | ||
| But I'm sure if you do a Google search on that, you can find several different sites that have covered that. | ||
| But it's like this machine that would essentially sit in the center of the ocean and start sucking all the plastic up. | ||
| We have a huge, huge, huge problem with this. | ||
| This plastic in the ocean is something that no one even considered until roughly a decade or so ago when they started being aware that all the stuff that we're littering on, you know, whether it's throwing it off of boats or just finds its way to the ocean through drainage pipes or what have you, we're dealing with a massive, massive amount of material and material that's not biodegradable, that's being Turned into, like, this sludgy sort of shitty stuff that's floating around. | ||
| It's a kind of symbol of everything that's wrong with our culture, actually. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| But is this guy's idea going to be taken up? | ||
| Well, hopefully. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty amazing that this 19-year-old kid... | ||
| The point being that what I find fascinating is that when our back is up against the wall, like when someone realizes, oh my god, we have this country-sized patch of plastic that's floating around in the ocean, when your back is up against the wall, people start thinking. | ||
| When people start thinking, they start innovating. | ||
| When they start innovating, solutions come about. | ||
| And maybe even a solution when they say, hey, you know what? | ||
| That plastic is actually, you could turn that into stuff. | ||
| That actually could be used as fuel. | ||
| That actually could be used to create things. | ||
| That actually could be used in a beneficial way. | ||
| But then the problem is going to be, how do you keep people from continuing the same process and re-polluting it again once you've cleaned it up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Psychedelics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It might be the only way. | ||
| The realization, the huge kick up the ass that comes with a major problem. | ||
| Responsibly taken psychedelic journey. | ||
| And then there's also the challenge of our current trend in these gigantic cities. | ||
| These gigantic cities aren't sustainable. | ||
| They're not agriculturally sustainable. | ||
| Completely non-sustainable. | ||
| So, like, how do you figure out a way to stop the trend of these gigantic cities or provide food or figure out a way to be in a sustainable environment and still have modern conveniences and technology and medicine and all those, you know... | ||
| Very difficult. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very, very difficult problem. | ||
| If possible. | ||
| Hard to solve. | ||
| But like all of these gigantic problems, if we begin to solve them at our personal level within our own sphere of influence, within where we live in our relationships with other human beings, that's a good start. | ||
| That's where we do have power. | ||
| That's where we do have choice. | ||
| We cannot change the world, any one of us, but we can change the way we interact with others. | ||
| Yeah, and it seems like that's probably the best way to fix this whole mess, is to fix it on a macro scale or a micro scale. | ||
| A micro scale, yeah. | ||
| Fix it in individuals and spread it like a virus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Spread this newfound realization of what we're really doing, what our impact really is, the awareness and this sort of newfound idea of connectivity that we have. | ||
| And that we're starting to grasp a hold of because of this internet culture, because of this new area, this new area in history, this new level of information. | ||
| This new level of information. | ||
| That's where it's happening. | ||
| And that's where I take hope. | ||
| Because I meet young people every time I go out and give a lecture, give a talk. | ||
| I meet young people who've come there and they are thinking in a new way. | ||
| The old ideas of nationalism and patriotism and all that bullshit have gone. | ||
| These are people who are thinking in terms of humanity as a whole and are thinking in terms of what a glorious gift the universe has given us with this planet and we have to live right. | ||
| There is a tremendous spirit in the world today. | ||
| Well, one of the benefits of travel is that travel sort of erodes the idea of nationalism in a way where you meet these people in these other countries and you realize, well, they're just like me. | ||
| They're just like me. | ||
| They might talk in a different accent or speak a different language, but they're just people. | ||
| And I think one of the reasons why people have nationalism is based on a fear of those other people. | ||
| Again, fear is the theme. | ||
| And this is fear that can be manipulated. | ||
| That the powers that run the world at the moment are deliberately manipulating all the time to divide us from one another and prevent us from realizing. | ||
| And amongst those powers are of course all of the big states and government apparatus and are of course all of the big religions. | ||
| Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all in the fear business as well. | ||
| They're all in generating fear and telling us that this is the only way to do things and we are different and this is the right way to do things and that is the wrong way to do things and that's the old model. | ||
| The big corporations, they're part of that too, you know, you have to rely on us, we will be the answer to all your problems, such bullshit. | ||
| That's the old model, and that's the model that is bit by bit, day by day, one step at a time, one brick at a time, getting replaced. | ||
| It truly is, isn't it? | ||
| And the model of government itself is a giant chunk of fear with a little bit of hope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And the hope is all lies. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the hope is all silly. | ||
| I mean the hope is basically bullshit provided by corporations so they can keep fracking. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The ghastly thought. | ||
| Fracking. | ||
| You know, yeah. | ||
| All fear. | ||
| All fear. | ||
| Fear generated. | ||
| And this is what we need to move beyond. | ||
| I think the way we've known it for the last centuries and what it's come to today, it's done. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Its story is over. | ||
| It's hanging on. | ||
| It's fucking everything up as badly as it can. | ||
| But it is done. | ||
| That is a model that will no longer work. | ||
| And whether or not it wants to or not, it will slowly be phased out. | ||
| I think that when you're talking about... | ||
| It's interesting that I think that the very practices that it's using right now, that our government is using, are going to aid its own demise. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The practices of the NSA, monitoring everybody's email and constantly spying on America. | ||
| So ridiculous. | ||
| Socially, where people are just completely up in arms and upset about it. | ||
| But also that technological trend is going to lead to ultimate truth. | ||
| And that's a real issue with the government because the government relies on deception and bullshit and bribery and special interest groups. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You can't keep that up if you have ultimate truth. | ||
| If you have ultimate access to information and the boundaries between people and that information are all gone, how are you going to run a country? | ||
| So the seeds of their own destruction are already planted in the mechanisms they're putting in place. | ||
| Yeah, it's like they can't... | ||
| Have you ever seen, there's a method of hunting wolves that the Eskimos use where they would take a very sharp knife and put it in the ground and put blood on the knife and a wolf would come along and start to lick the knife because of the blood on the knife. | ||
| Taste his own blood and continue to lick and bite the blade and bleed to death. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| That's extraordinary. | ||
| That actually happens? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah, it's a method that the Inuit people devised of hunting wolves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How incredible. | |
| Yeah, they would plant these knives in the ice. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what our governments are doing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They're licking their own blood, and they don't even realize it. | ||
| A perfect example is... | ||
| I don't know if you know the story in our country of General Petraeus, who was the head of the CIA, was exposed through... | ||
| The head of the CIA is supposedly the number one spy in the country, right? | ||
| That's the head. | ||
| Well, he was fired because it was exposed that he was having an affair, and that affair was exposed through email exchanges where the FBI examined the CIA. So the FBI is ratting on the CIA and getting rid of the number one CIA guy through email, through a transparency in email exchanges. | ||
| Absolutely, completely fascinating. | ||
| Because this is the main government entity that's involved in spying, you know, other than the NSA. And it's just, it all, like, you guys are going to get exposed too. | ||
| Everyone's going to get exposed. | ||
| Everybody's getting exposed. | ||
| And the real problem isn't in affairs. | ||
| I mean, affairs obviously are an issue, but the real problem is going to be in the structure of power itself. | ||
| And when the influence is so clearly exposed, the influence, whether it's of special interest groups, of corporations, of lobbyists, whatever it is, when it's so clearly exposed that it cannot be tolerated by rational people. | ||
| You can't bear it anymore. | ||
| There's this growing anger about all of this. | ||
| This is what the people in big government who are advocating this continual surveillance and invasion of our privacy in every possible way, they're not getting the anger in society. | ||
| People are just not prepared to put up with this shit any longer. | ||
| And I think it's a great thing because I think there's nothing wrong with government. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with There's nothing wrong with having a mayor. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with having a president. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with police. | ||
| As long as everyone's honest and rational and ethical. | ||
| Truth is the key. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they'll be forced to do that. | ||
| It's not like we're advocating that the government needs to be destroyed and anarchy. | ||
| Nonsense. | ||
| We want honest government. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| And if it's forced, Then it's forced. | ||
| But if it's forced because of technology and innovation, instead of some crazy, radical, violent revolution, it's just as powerful. | ||
| Just as powerful. | ||
| In fact, more. | ||
| And undeniable. | ||
| You can't just build up a wall to keep the internet out. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| No, the truth is key. | ||
| This is what matters. | ||
| And also those who go into government, there shouldn't be this huge status and power associated with it. | ||
| It's a mistake. | ||
| It should be done. | ||
| The person who doesn't want to go into government, that's the person who should be in government. | ||
| Yeah, it's unfortunate that that is how it's been for a long time. | ||
| The people that shouldn't be president are the ones that want to be president. | ||
| It's been that way for a long time. | ||
| Give them ayahuasca. | ||
| I would hope. | ||
| I would hope also that the trend is moving. | ||
| I mean, if you go back to these people that we're talking about that existed, these... | ||
| Pre-humans that existed 1.8 million years ago and the way they conducted each other, conducted their lives, and then look at how we conduct our lives in 2013. It's been a massive, incredible amount of progress in understanding each other, that this trend will continue. | ||
| And if we don't get hit by some kind of giant meteor, that we will ultimately reach a level of understanding that will sort of Make this happen, whether or not psychedelics are involved or not. | ||
| We'll just reach this level. | ||
| As I say, it's happening. | ||
| It's happening now. | ||
| It's interesting that psychedelics are a catalyst in it. | ||
| They come up again and again in the conversation. | ||
| And what it boils down to is the recognition, and I've been banging on about this for a long time, the recognition of the adult sovereign individual that we have a right to explore our own consciousness. | ||
| That is a grotesque invasion of our privacy and our sovereignty over our own bodies that a government would even have the temerity to suggest that it's got a right to punish us for doing that. | ||
| It's not the issue of the psychedelics themselves, it's the issue of the Right to make sovereign decisions about our own bodies and our own consciousness. | ||
| And this I see a big awakening all over the world taking place. | ||
| It's a litmus test. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And it's one of those things we're going to look back on through history and the way we look at the Inquisition, the way we look at burning witches. | ||
| We're going to look at the prosecution of people for using psychedelics and it's just as ridiculous. | ||
| We're going to look back on it with horror. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As a horrific episode when human society made terrible mistakes. | ||
| Your book, Supernatural, is a fascinating book. | ||
| I really enjoyed that. | ||
| And that details the concept of human beings learning from psychedelic experiences and actually it giving birth to a new level of creativity and a new level of culture. | ||
| Yeah, I believe that there's no doubt that psychedelics have played a huge unrecognized role in the human story. | ||
| And I want to pay tribute to Terence McKenna for being one of the early people to recognize that. | ||
| Again, in so many ways, Terence McKenna, just an incredible genius. | ||
| That stoned-ape theory that he came up with is absolutely key to this. | ||
| And again, he was far ahead of his time. | ||
| Academics followed behind him in this. | ||
| We need to recognize that these demonized plants have played a huge role in the human story. | ||
| Just in my recent travels in South America, I was in a place called Caral, 200 kilometers north of Lima. | ||
| In Peru. | ||
| Now, back in the 90s, people were saying that there could be no relationship between old world pyramids and new world pyramids because all the pyramids in the new world were much younger. | ||
| That story is now gone as a result of Caral and another site, Banduria in Peru, which are definitively 2500 to 3000 BC, the same date that is put on the Great Pyramids of Giza. | ||
| And what's fascinating at Caral is a couple of things. | ||
| Firstly, there was a big city complex there 5000 years ago and absolutely no evidence of warfare whatsoever. | ||
| Traditionally, it was believed that the evolution of cities was connected with warfare in some way, that people came into cities to protect themselves from war. | ||
| No warfare. | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| These people did not make war. | ||
| Secondly, they were using psychedelics. | ||
| Quite clear evidence of this. | ||
| So, you know, this unexamined part of the human story needs to be brought back into prominence, and we need to realize we owe a lot to the visionary plants, and we're making a mistake to create a society that seeks to cut us off From that source of learning and that source of teaching. | ||
| It's not an accident in the Amazon that they call these plants teachers. | ||
| They are teachers. | ||
| And I think it's also very fascinating that the academic world has, in many ways, especially the older academic world that grew up without the internet, has turned their back on the concept of psychedelics being beneficial to the point where it's laughed at and poo-pooed to the point where McKenna's psychedelic stoned ape theory is, if you don't know the theory, his theory involves the evolution of humans, the doubling of the human brain size directly related to the consumption Of psychedelic mushrooms. | ||
| It's an incredibly controversial theory, but when I had Dennis McKenna on the podcast, Dennis explained it in a very scientific way that would show how the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms would correlate with the creating of language, with the expansion of consciousness. | ||
| It's an incredibly intricate and detailed idea that's completely ignored by so many mainstream people, but if they have had any psychedelic experience themselves, they would know what an incredible Incredibly different experience that is than the normal state of consciousness. | ||
| If you were looking for a culprit, a thing that would change conscious beings or intelligent beings like lower hominids, something that would just rock them out of their current state, what better thing than psychedelic drugs? | ||
| What other culprit that you could connect to a doubling of the human brain size? | ||
| I've seen it attributed to a bunch of different things like consumption of fish, the throwing arm, all these different things. | ||
| Don't bears eat fish? | ||
| Aren't they stupid as fuck? | ||
| I guess the omega-3s would help a little, but man, humans are a different thing, man. | ||
| Yeah, humans are a very different thing. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, I have no doubt in my mind it was psychedelics that played that role. | ||
| And that was one thing that I looked at in Supernatural was this whole issue of the cave art. | ||
| Because that's where, you know, that's where in the long evolutionary story of the human species, you suddenly find us confronting ourselves. | ||
| We're looking at this amazing symbolic art, this incredible, incredible works, and these very mysterious, eerie spaces that you go into, like the Cave of Lascaux. | ||
| And from the nature of the art itself, it's clear it was visionary art. | ||
| These were people who were working with psychedelics and painting their visions, just as shamans do in the Amazon today. | ||
| Did you see Werner Herzog's documentary? | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| The Cave of Forgotten Dreams? | ||
| About Chauvet, yeah. | ||
| Wasn't that like 40,000 plus years ago? | ||
| 33,000 years ago, Cave of Chauvet. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Amazing place, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, just so strange to think that these people... | ||
| It's so hard for us to... | ||
| When you get to a number, even a thousand years, it's like, I can't see it. | ||
| It's too far away. | ||
| It's almost like it's over the curve of the earth. | ||
| It's like a thousand years is... | ||
| It's hard for me to wrap my head around what it was like during the Genghis Khan era. | ||
| Never mind 33,000 years. | ||
| Yeah, that's where it gets incredibly squirrely. | ||
| And when you talk to guys like John Anthony West, they start talking about the hieroglyphs that depict a civilization, and not just that, but name the pharaohs of 30-plus thousand years ago. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| This is something that really annoys me about Egyptology. | ||
| John Anthony West is just such a brilliant man. | ||
| He's an old An old friend of mine going way back to the 90s, super, super guy, and he's done so much to bring to light the mysteries and the magic of ancient Egypt. | ||
| And he's absolutely right, because you go to the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, and you will see a mural carved in high relief on a wall in a corridor, which shows The pharaoh Seti I, showing his young son, Ramesses II, a list of all the pharaohs who've ruled before their time. | ||
| Now, this is called a king list. | ||
| And the Egyptologists, they take these king lists and they use them as the basis for the chronology that we are given of ancient Egypt. | ||
| As long as it fits into their reference frame. | ||
| So the king list is fine. | ||
| It's accepted back to 3000 BC, the first dynasty when civilization is supposed to have begun. | ||
| They then completely ignore the fact that the king list continues long before that. | ||
| For tens of thousands of years, as much as 36,000 years before that, lists of pharaohs and the time when the gods walked the earth. | ||
| All of this is in the king lists as well. | ||
| So the Egyptologists grab the bit that fits their prejudice and ignore the rest and say, well, the ancient Egyptians were just Yeah, and then there's, of course, the water erosion on the Sphinx that John Anthony West and Robert Shock exposed, which is really, in my opinion, one of the most undeniable things that I've heard people deny. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of the most important pieces of history. | ||
| Evidence for a lost civilization, and this is John Anthony West and Professor Robert Shock at Boston University, the evidence that the Great Sphinx was reigned upon for thousands and thousands of years. | ||
| Now, what's interesting, and again, Gobekli Tepe comes into this story, is that Egyptologists at the time said, look, there's no way that the Sphinx could be 12,000 years old. | ||
| The geological evidence must be wrong Because if there was a culture that was capable of creating a monument on the scale of the Sphinx 12,000 years ago, well, why we would find other monuments that are 12,000 years old, other big monuments, and they regarded that as the killer argument Against the geological weathering of the Sphinx, you know, that shock and West must just be wrong. | ||
| Well, now we have Gobekli Tepe and it is 12,000 years old and it is on the scale of the Sphinx and it's not even that far from the Sphinx, you know, and suddenly that old argument about the Sphinx, which was dismissed by academia back in the 90s, they're going to have to reconsider it very, very, very carefully. | ||
| That Charlton Heston hosted documentary on the Sphinx, I believe it was on NBC. It was on NBC. I watched it, I found it incredibly fascinating, but infuriating when you hear that Egyptologist just laughing at Robert Shock saying, where's the evidence of this culture? | ||
| Show me the pot shed. | ||
| And what's crazy is, What do you think would be there when you're dealing with something that's that old? | ||
| I said about a thousand years being over the horizon, I can't see it. | ||
| Twelve thousand years, you might as well just be speaking another language. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| My stupid brain can't wrap my head around how long ago that is. | ||
| Terribly, terribly long ago. | ||
| And what would be left? | ||
| If you left a car outside for twelve thousand years, you came back twelve thousand years later, you'd find zero. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Absolutely nothing. | ||
| The earth would just reabsorb it. | ||
| What would be left would be the stones. | ||
| And that's what we're left with. | ||
| I was just in Tiwanaku in Bolivia and there are stone structures there, beautifully cut, unbelievable precision cutting of the stone. | ||
| They look to me like they had metal parts fitted into them at some point. | ||
| The metal's gone, the stone is left, and we're left to wonder. | ||
| What was going on there? | ||
| So yeah, the passage of time rubs out all memory and all traces, and it's very easy to get the wrong idea about the past. | ||
| But places like Gobekli Tepe, places like Gulung Padang in Indonesia are going to change this. | ||
| What year did people start using metal? | ||
| You know, the ancient Egyptians, they didn't make iron, but they knew meteoritic iron. | ||
| The only form of iron that was available to the ancient Egyptians was iron that came in in meteorites. | ||
| And there is the odd knife that's been crafted from meteoritic iron. | ||
| But the metal that they used, if you go back to 3000 or 2800 BC, was copper. | ||
| But they had a way of hardening the copper. | ||
| Some lost technique of making the copper harder that was definitely present. | ||
| How do we know that? | ||
| This is the orthodox view because the copper was used to cut stone. | ||
| You can't cut stone with copper. | ||
| It's way too soft. | ||
| So there must have been some method of making the copper harder. | ||
| This is the argument. | ||
| But this is the orthodox view. | ||
| We don't really know what they had. | ||
| Maybe metal wasn't the only way to cut stone. | ||
| This is where I maybe Get a little bit mystical, but maybe, you know, because our society has done things a certain way, that we use mechanical advantage, that we use machine tools, that we want to look for that in the past, but maybe there are all sorts of untapped faculties of the human mind that the ancients were working with in one way or another. | ||
| Certainly when you go to a place like Sacsayhuaman in Peru, outside of Cuzco, and you see these gigantic blocks of stone, 100, 150 tons each, fitted together like jigsaw puzzle, the edges kind of melting into one another, The notion that some sort of heat might have been used to shape these stones begins to make a weird kind of sense. | ||
| Some sort of heat? | ||
| Heat, yeah. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| There's vitrified stone up there. | ||
| In my journey in Peru, I spent several days with a local guy called Jesus Gamara, who is now 77 years old, and his father... | ||
| Alfredo Gamara was working on that site back at the beginning of the 1900s. | ||
| And they, as a family, have been studying the megaliths of the Andes for a hundred plus years now. | ||
| And they are actually descended from the Incas. | ||
| So you would think if anybody had an investment in saying that the Incas made all this, it would be them. | ||
| But they say no. | ||
| Jesus Gamara is adamant. | ||
| The Incas have been wrongly handed The majority of the architecture in the Andes by archaeology, the Incas only did a fraction of it and most of what they did was pretty poor quality. | ||
| The great stuff was done by earlier civilizations and he took me and he showed me vitrified stone which has been subjected to fantastic heat and melted and shines in a way that's really stunning and striking and convincing when you see it. | ||
| That some kind of technology that is not the technology that we use today was being employed to put these stones into place. | ||
| And archaeologists have dismissed such ideas for a very long time, but I'm not sure how much longer they're going to be able to dismiss them. | ||
| I don't know how they can dismiss those enormous stones that have strange shapes that are fitting perfectly into each other. | ||
| Like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. | ||
| It was like giants a hundred feet tall. | ||
| Decided to make a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. | ||
| Yeah, tell Jamie what those images would be to pull those up. | ||
| What would they be? | ||
| I may be able to show you an image. | ||
| But have him pull it up. | ||
| Okay, well, Sacsayhuaman. | ||
| S-A-C-S-A-Y-H-U-A-M-A-N. Sacsayhuaman. | ||
| And it's also, there's one stone that Giorgio Succolo showed me where it was carved out of this piece of stone. | ||
| There's this slab carved through the back of it and removed. | ||
| And they have no idea how they got through this stone. | ||
| Yeah, look at that image. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| Yeah, pull it towards you this way. | ||
| This way? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Just flatten, yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That's you standing next to that stone. | ||
| That's me standing next to that stone. | ||
| And look at the way those stones are fitted together, you know? | ||
| I mean, that is a really monstrous thing to do. | ||
| It's just a gigantic work of art that they've created. | ||
| And it goes on for hundreds of feet. | ||
| There's not just that section. | ||
| It goes on forever in these huge walls. | ||
| And it does feel like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. | ||
| And so beautiful, too. | ||
| I mean, the way they did it, they didn't make everything square and level. | ||
| They just decided to use this sort of method of turning these stones into these puzzle pieces. | ||
| When you go look at it up close and you realize that you can't get a sheet of paper in the gaps between the joints, you realize that you are looking at some sort of technology that we don't get. | ||
| There was some way that these people were able to do this and make it incredibly difficult for themselves if it was done in any modern way. | ||
| What's the mainstream explanation for that? | ||
| Oh, hours and hours of patient labor by tens of thousands of people grinding away at the stones and making them all fit. | ||
| Consider the planning, you know, to make that happen. | ||
| Let me show the whole wall. | ||
| I've got a picture of the whole wall. | ||
| We could pull it up if you just tell us what patient it is on your website. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| When I say the whole wall, I mean that's just a section of the whole wall. | ||
| That wall runs for hundreds of feet in all directions. | ||
| The planning that's involved in making no single block of stone is the same size as another. | ||
| They're all different sizes. | ||
| They're all tongue and groove into each other in this incredible way. | ||
| And it really feels like they were melted. | ||
| They were kind of softened. | ||
| That's what Jesus Camara says. | ||
| He says these stones were softened by some technique that we don't understand. | ||
| He thinks heat was involved. | ||
| They were softened and in a soft state they were fitted together and then they solidified. | ||
| Is that possible that they figured out some way to make a blow torch or something? | ||
| I think it's possible, yeah. | ||
| But even then, how do you push them into place? | ||
| Not a blow torch necessarily, but something goes on that defies explanation there. | ||
| And I don't think we need aliens to explain it. | ||
| I think it's human work. | ||
| I think it's human workmanship, but it's at a level and at a standard that we do not fully understand. | ||
| Yeah, that alien thing gets real weird, you know? | ||
| Well, you know, I've had the privilege of traveling around this planet for the last 25 years looking at ancient sites. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| That's Sacsayhuaman. | ||
| How big are the largest stones? | ||
| About 20 feet high, 150 to 200 tons in weight, 6 to 8 feet thick, just monstrous. | ||
| So 200 tons is 400,000 pounds? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| 200 tons is... | ||
| So I think of it in kilos. | ||
| A ton is 1,000 kilograms. | ||
| Oh, you're a kilo man. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a kilo man. | ||
| I don't do it in pounds anymore. | ||
| At least you don't do it in stone. | ||
| When we go to England and we do UFC weigh-ins, we have to say like 10 stone. | ||
| We have to do it in stone. | ||
| Let me think there were 14 pounds in a stone. | ||
| Okay, so 10 stone means you're a 140 pound guy. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's really complicated. | ||
| Yeah, they're sexy. | ||
| Now the point, looking up at the top left of the screen there, there's some inferior work on top of the better work. | ||
| And what Jesus Guimara is saying in the inferior work was the work of the Incas, but the other stuff is much older. | ||
| So the smaller rocks that were easily manipulated. | ||
| They were copying the older style and respecting it and overbuilding and building around it. | ||
| But they were honoring an earlier work of construction. | ||
| And the conventional dating of this is... | ||
| Very recent. | ||
| The Incas were wiped out by the Spanish 1530, 1540. They were destroyed as an empire. | ||
| They'd only existed according to history for 150 years before that, 200 years before that at the outside. | ||
| And all of this work, this incredible megalithic work that's all over the Andes Mountains, you just can't move for bumping into it, all of it is supposed to have been built in that 200-year period by the Incas because archaeology just can't bear the idea that there might have been some earlier culture. | ||
| Why date it then? | ||
| It seems like if it's so confusing, there's so many open-ended questions where when you see these enormous pieces, when you see them fitted together, when you don't have an explanation of how they did it, you're not exactly sure who did it because the history gets really murky when you get that far back. | ||
| Why date it? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Why date it? | ||
| I don't understand why they have to do that. | ||
| It seems to me that archaeology comes to history with a pre-existing reference frame and makes everything fit into it. | ||
| Makes everything fit into it. | ||
| And that's been the mistake of science down the ages. | ||
| There was a long period. | ||
| A very good example of this is the notion that the sun revolved around the earth. | ||
| That was based on a pre-existing reference. | ||
| It seemed to make sense. | ||
| Get up in the morning, look at the sun, it rises, goes through the sky. | ||
| But it was complete nonsense. | ||
| It's the earth that's going around the sun. | ||
| You have to change the reference frame. | ||
| In order to see what's really going on. | ||
| And I think that's the problem with history and archaeology. | ||
| What impact, if any, has this Gobekli Tepe discovery changed archaeologists' view of backdating things? | ||
| As I mentioned, I liked Klaus Schmidt when I met him, the archaeologist who's working on Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| I thought he was charming and enthusiastic, and I enjoyed his energy. | ||
| When I asked him about, when I said, so what does it feel like to be the man who discovered the site that's rewriting history? | ||
| And he said, no, it's not rewriting history. | ||
| It's adding a new chapter to existing history. | ||
| He still wants to fit it into that reference frame somehow that we have to, okay, we have to completely rethink our ideas about the upper Paleolithic, but somehow desperately... | ||
| We must look at this site in a way that's not going to rock the boat too much. | ||
| And I was sad to hear that. | ||
| I think especially when he himself admits that at least 20 times as much, if not 50 times as much, is still under the ground awaiting to be excavated. | ||
| I think a little bit of provisional thinking is needed before we decide. | ||
| Do you just attribute that to him being a professional academic? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that professional academia, particularly in the realm of archaeology, It encourages those who are working in the field to think in terms of the existing paradigm, not to think in terms of challenging the paradigm, because it's dangerous. | ||
| If you challenge the paradigm, you're going to be ridiculed by your colleagues and regarded as completely lunatic and attacked and insulted. | ||
| So it's better not to challenge the paradigm. | ||
| But what a fascinating area of research to not challenge the paradigm, an area where you have so little information about what could have possibly happened. | ||
| When you get back to 5,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 7,000 years ago, and you're trying to piece these puzzles together, to pretend that you have the entire timeline It seems a little silly. | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| It seems so... | ||
| I mean, it's one thing if you're trying to pretend that you have a timeline when you're dealing with something... | ||
| Or, excuse me, pretend you have all the information when you're dealing with something like mathematics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or when you're dealing with something like very clear manuscripts. | ||
| You know, like, oh, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| Very clearly X amount of years old. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| With history, where you have written documents that you can draw upon, where you have those written documents, you can be reasonably certain about what's going on. | ||
| The further back we go, we don't have the written documents. | ||
| Beyond 5,000 years, we have no written documents. | ||
| And to draw fixed and firm conclusions about what happened before 5,000 years ago on the basis of a few things dug out of the ground, it's not good enough. | ||
| It's a mistake that's being made. | ||
| And that, I believe, is going to change. | ||
| It's going to be painful. | ||
| It's going to be slow. | ||
| It was painful to change the Ptolemaic system to the Copernican system, but it will happen. | ||
| The system will change. | ||
| And the backdating of the Sphinx, has there been any progress on that now because of Gobekli Tepe? | ||
| Because what Robert Schoch did in exposing the erosion, the water erosion, and we briefly touched on this before, but I've seen people dispute it, and boy, it seems so forced and labored. | ||
| They're disputing of it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I have no doubt that Robert Shock is right. | ||
| Robert Shock and John Anthony West, they're right about the Sphinx. | ||
| And they have been attacked in all kinds of ways and all kinds of elaborate contorted explanations have been given to explain away that kind of weathering. | ||
| But the fact is they remain to be right. | ||
| And now we have Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| Now on the other side of the world we have Gunung Padang. | ||
| We have sites that are 12,000 plus years old, indisputably so. | ||
| I think it sooner or later will cause a reconsideration of the Sphinx. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| And that's something that I also intend to focus on. | ||
| Well, I think it has to. | ||
| As soon as Jamie gets back from the bathroom, we'll show some of the images of the Sphinx enclosure that led Robert Schock, who is a geologist, to very clearly proclaim that what you're dealing with is thousands of years of water erosion. | ||
| Thousands of years of water erosion. | ||
| The smoothness of it, the curves, the fact that there's all these fissures that indicate water running down. | ||
| I honestly think Robert Shock and John West are going to be seen in future generations as the Copernicus of their time. | ||
| That they saw what nobody else saw. | ||
| And they had the courage to put the information out there. | ||
| And they were attacked for it. | ||
| People don't get burnt at the stake these days for proposing alternative ideas, but in a kind of way, you know, we do. | ||
| There's the vicious nature of the attacks on people who propose an alternative view of history, but I think in our lifetimes we will see this change. | ||
| And if folks haven't seen or haven't heard me talk about John Anthony West's amazing documentary series on Egypt, it's called Magical Egypt, and I can't recommend it enough. | ||
| It is absolutely fascinating. | ||
| So in-depth. | ||
| I believe, is it six or seven DVDs? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Big collection of DVDs. | ||
| It's a massive, massive amount of work. | ||
| And John is a man who's devoted his whole life to... | ||
| Understanding, an alternative understanding of Egypt done with great wisdom and great care. | ||
| Yeah, it's a really, really incredible series that I've watched many, many times over and over again and tried to absorb as much of it as I can, but it's so staggering. | ||
| And he also showed very clear that there's some different styles of techniques of building and that these older techniques that you find or different techniques are We're all on a lower level of the soil. | ||
| It's exactly like it is in the Peruvian Andes and Bolivia. | ||
| What has happened, I think, is that archaeology has taken the work of the latest culture to work on the site and handed the whole site over to it. | ||
| Actually, Giza is a very complicated site. | ||
| You have the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid. | ||
| Why do we have to believe that that is from the same date as the pyramid itself? | ||
| You have the so-called mortuary temples and valley temples, these gigantic megalithic structures. | ||
| The valley temple beside the Sphinx is actually made of blocks of limestone that were cut out from around the Sphinx to create the body of the Sphinx. | ||
| So if the Sphinx is 12,000 years old, and I honestly think it is, then the valley temples are 12,000 years old as well. | ||
| What we have are very complex, multi-layered sites where there's a very ancient, megalithic layer of architecture, and the later culture comes along, perhaps venerates that, perhaps overbuilds around it, and attempts to copy it in some ways. | ||
| And the mistake has been, both in the Andes and in Egypt, that the later culture has been attributed with all the work. | ||
| We need a more sophisticated, more in-depth exploration of this. | ||
| And I think Gobekli Tepe is going to force us to do that. | ||
| Jamie, if you could pull up some of the images that Robert Schock created of the water erosion as opposed to... | ||
| I mean, you showed a little animated or illustrated image of it before. | ||
| But it's pretty fascinating stuff. | ||
| And that seems to me to be the one smoking gun in Egypt that sort of points to... | ||
| It's a smoking gun, for sure. | ||
| It's a smoking gun which the mainstream academia has tried to... | ||
| Ignore the smoke, but the smoke is there. | ||
| And Gobekli Tepe, Gunung Padang, other sites are going to force them to reconsider that. | ||
| What are they going to do if they dig up something that's 30,000 years old? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Well, I hope that they're not going to hide it and pretend... | ||
|
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Do you think they would? | |
| Well, I know of cases where it's happened. | ||
| I know it happened in Malta. | ||
| What happened in Malta? | ||
| In the Hypogeum, which is an underground structure in Malta. | ||
| Amazing underground. | ||
| This should be on everybody's bucket list, by the way, the Hypogeum in Malta. | ||
| It is an incredible place. | ||
| It's like a huge temple complex cut out underground. | ||
| And there are traces of red ochre paint on the walls. | ||
| They look much more like the caves, the painted caves, than they look like stuff from the Neolithic. | ||
| And there was at one time a figure of a hybrid creature, a half bison, half bull. | ||
| Such a figure would be normal in the painted caves from 30,000 years ago, but doesn't fit in with the idea that the Hypogeum belongs to 5,000 years ago. | ||
| And this was solved by a certain gentleman, who shall remain nameless, who had the bison bull scrubbed off the walls of the Hypogeum in Malta. | ||
| It was literally scrubbed off. | ||
| I reported this at some length in my book, Underworld. | ||
| Who do they think scrubbed it? | ||
| Well, we know who scrubbed it. | ||
| It was the former director of museums in Malta, back in the 60s. | ||
| He scrubbed it off the walls. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I took the National Museums of Malta to task over this when I was back there making a documentary with Channel 4. We put in a formal document to them asking them to answer this charge, and they refused to answer it. | ||
| They would not comment upon it at all. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So yeah, I mean, archaeologists do actually sometimes do incredibly dishonest things to maintain the view of history. | ||
| That's so sad. | ||
| I mean, just think about the whole cycle of thinking that goes from being a young person, wanting to explore history, wanting to become an archaeologist, getting involved in archaeology, getting involved in academia, and then... | ||
| Destroying evidence that's contrary to what you've been taught or are teaching. | ||
| Yeah, it's the opposite of science. | ||
| It's so scary that human nature, even in a scientific work sometimes, finds its way to rear its ugly head. | ||
| The nasty aspects of human nature can even find their way into archaeology. | ||
| Most unfortunate, yeah. | ||
| That they can't in certain sciences because it's so cut and dry. | ||
| Mathematics and physics and you know... | ||
| But in archaeology so much is based on interpretation. | ||
| An interpretation of very limited facts actually. | ||
| So what's next for you? | ||
| What do you do from here? | ||
| Well, I am writing, at the moment I'm researching and writing a sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods. | ||
| Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995. The reason I'm doing a sequel is because of the new evidence. | ||
| We've talked about Gunung Padang in Indonesia. | ||
| We've talked about Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| We've talked about the comet. | ||
| The comet for me is the cataclysmic smoking gun that explains how we lost a whole civilization. | ||
| And a whole lot of material like this. | ||
| I'm not going to write an update of Fingerprints of the Gods. | ||
| I'm going to write a completely new book. | ||
| And that book, I'm in the process of researching. | ||
| That's why I'm on these travels at the moment. | ||
| That's why I'm going to Indonesia at the beginning of December. | ||
| That book will be published at the end, in the fall of 2015. I'm due to deliver it to the publishers in December 2014, and it'll be published in the fall of 2015. And I see this as... | ||
| In a way, a kind of summation of my life's work on this whole issue of a lost civilization. | ||
| And I feel very committed to doing it. | ||
| But honestly, my heart these days is in writing novels. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I love writing novels, yeah. | ||
| So it took a long time for you to break away from... | ||
| You were originally a journalist, then went from journalism to writing about ancient history and alternative view of ancient history. | ||
| But it was a psychedelic experience that led you to want to write... | ||
| It was a psychedelic experience with ayahuasca. | ||
| Back in 2007, that set me on the track to write my first novel, which is Entangled, which is a story of two young women, one living 24,000 years ago in the Stone Age, one living in modern Los Angeles, whose destinies are entangled. | ||
| That time is not what it seems, that it's a kind of spiral or a cat's cradle of intercrossing lines rather than an arrow. | ||
| And they're brought together by a benign supernatural force, who I call the Blue Angel, to do battle with a demon who... | ||
| Travels through time and then since then I've written War God which is a novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. | ||
| Did get a British publisher for that book. | ||
| That book's been published in Britain and it did okay. | ||
| It did well enough at any rate for the publishers in Britain to commission volumes two and three because it's a series. | ||
| I couldn't get any American publisher to take that book on but because publishing sees people in terms of brands and I am branded as a non-fiction author And how dare I write fiction as well? | ||
|
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How dare you? | |
| How dare I do that? | ||
| You know, life is short. | ||
| I want to try many, many things. | ||
| And so what I've done is published it, pretty much effectively self-published it in America through Amazon. | ||
| And the book is available on Amazon.com. | ||
| That's what it looks like, by the way. | ||
| The US edition. | ||
| People can also order it from bookshops, but it's easier to get it from Amazon.com. | ||
| What is that on the cover? | ||
| Well, that's actually derived from an Aztec image of a skull found on a ball court because they played this terrible game of And War God is the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. | ||
| And if I could say to anybody who's listening, special offer for the next 10 days only, go to my website, which is grahamhancock.com, and click on the War God section, and you will find links to get it on amazon.com, either as an e-book or as a printed book. | ||
| And what I will do is write to me at the address that's on my website there, which is wargoddedications at gmail.com. | ||
| Write to me. | ||
| I will write back to you and I will send you a signed, dedicated book plate. | ||
| That's essentially a label. | ||
| You buy the book from Amazon in the normal way. | ||
| But you will receive through the post from me, if you write to me and give me your postal address, you will receive through the post from me a signed dedicated book plate to place inside it. | ||
| Wow, that's awesome. | ||
| But that's ten days that that offer is available. | ||
| That's a beautiful image. | ||
|
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That's it. | |
| That's War God dedications there. | ||
| Wargoddedications at gmail.com. | ||
| That's a beautiful image, that image of the Aztec skull. | ||
| I had read something somewhere where scholars were contemplating whether or not they were incorrect about the sacrifice, and they were saying that there may be a possibility that they played a game where they sacrificed the winning team. | ||
| Human sacrifice was conducted on an industrial scale in the Aztec Empire. | ||
| I've investigated this very, very thoroughly. | ||
| This novel is a novel. | ||
| It's a work of fiction, but I've thoroughly grounded it in the historical facts. | ||
| And this was a tough history to investigate. | ||
| I mean, the Aztecs were truly a terrifying culture. | ||
| The Spanish, who turned up with 490 men in 11 ships on the Gulf of Mexico in 1519, were, if anything, an even more terrifying culture. | ||
| These are two martial cultures who are brought together in this horrendous conflict. | ||
| But, you know, it was a different time. | ||
| It was a different world then in 1519. And I've tried to tell the story through the eyes of ordinary human beings. | ||
| My main heroine is a true historical figure, a woman called Malinal, who became the mistress and the interpreter of Cortez. | ||
| And when she enters history, she's given to Cortez as a surrender gift by the Maya. | ||
| When she enters history, it's already clear that she has a grudge against Moctezuma. | ||
| The Aztec Emperor, and that she is going to use Cortes as her instrument to bring him down. | ||
| And I was just interested in her quest for revenge against the Aztec Emperor, and also to have a woman who's a hero in a story rather than just a man. | ||
| What is the origin of this horrific level of human sacrifice? | ||
| What started it all with the Aztecs? | ||
| Well, again, that's a reason why I've written War God as a novel, because for the Aztecs, they believed that they were in touch with a supernatural entity that they called Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird. | ||
| I use his name in the English translation in the book, Hummingbird. | ||
| Who is their god of war. | ||
| He's their war god. | ||
| And this is an area where we have to recognize that there is a dark side to psychedelics. | ||
| I am a big fan of psychedelics, and I do think that psychedelics have a hugely important role to play. | ||
| But the Aztecs were using psilocybin mushrooms in their human sacrifice rituals. | ||
| And Moctezuma was encountering this demonic entity, hummingbird, In psilocybin trances and was constantly being given incredibly bad, even wicked advice by him. | ||
| So I'm playing with the idea of dark spiritual forces at work behind human history, manipulating Moctezuma, manipulating Cortez and plunging mankind into this sea of cruelty and misery. | ||
| And, you know, what redeems the story for me and does it at all times is that the human spirit still shines through, even in the darkest times. | ||
| There is courage, there is decency, there is love. | ||
| People struggle to show the best in themselves and to deliver the best in themselves. | ||
| So I've tried to show both sides. | ||
| This book is about the battle of good against evil. | ||
| And it's not that the Spanish are good and the Aztecs are evil, because the Spanish were wicked, wicked, wicked as well. | ||
| And they did terrible things. | ||
| They fed people to dogs. | ||
| They burnt people at the stake. | ||
| What is actually burning somebody at the stake if not a form of human sacrifice? | ||
| That's what the Spanish would do to their god. | ||
| They were sacrificing people to their god. | ||
| So no different from the Aztecs in that respect. | ||
| The level of sacrifice was so insane. | ||
| I tried to explain it to a friend of mine and he literally told me I was bullshitting. | ||
| I told him that 80,000 people were sacrificed. | ||
| 80,000 were sacrificed. | ||
| Over a period of like four days? | ||
| Four days with teams of killers, 50 teams of killers working at the top of the Great Pyramid to process people within a minute or two. | ||
| Process them. | ||
| Think of it. | ||
| That's how it's done. | ||
| It was done on an industrial scale. | ||
| Cues of victims stretching a mile in every direction, marching up the pyramid and having their hearts cut out. | ||
| And all of this in honor of a demonic A demonic entity, which the Aztecs passionately believed in. | ||
| They believed that he needed to be fed human hearts and blood. | ||
| What did they call him? | ||
| They called him Huitzilopochtli, which means hummingbird at the left hand of the sun. | ||
| He's the war god after whom this novel is named. | ||
| And the way I look at it, the same demonic entity is manipulating both Moctezuma and Cortez. | ||
| He appears to Cortez in dreams and takes on the disguise of St. Peter. | ||
| He appears to Moctezuma as the war god, but it's the same demon that's playing with men. | ||
| And that's one reason why I wrote this as a novel, because you can't get into this stuff in a nonfiction book. | ||
| But it's very real. | ||
| It's a very real part of human history. | ||
| And the whole shape of the world we live in today, the terrible genocide that happened in North America, the destruction of the North American Indians, the conquest of Peru, the whole relationship of the European powers to Africa, for example, all of this was based on what happened in those years between 1519 and 1521 when the Spanish conquest of Mexico unfolded. | ||
| And I think we were led onto a dark track. | ||
| Imagine how it could have been if those two cultures, if the Spanish and the Aztecs, had met one another in a spirit of mutual learning. | ||
| How much there was to exchange, how much each side of the Atlantic could have learned from the other. | ||
| Instead, it becomes this kind of conflagration of blood. | ||
| But it's difficult to place ourselves in the mindset of the people of that time. | ||
| It is difficult for us to do that today. | ||
| And I have to say, when you look at the Spaniards, I mean 490 men turn up on the coast of Mexico in 11 ships and they are going to take on this empire that can put 200,000 men into the field that will, if they catch you, will march you up the pyramid and cut your heart out. | ||
| And many Spaniards were sacrificed in sight of their colleagues. | ||
| It was an extraordinary time. | ||
| It was an extraordinary event. | ||
| And men of those times were different from men of today, I believe. | ||
| What is the mainstream explanation for human sacrifice? | ||
| What do they believe started off? | ||
| Well, that it's a feeding of psychic energy to supernatural beings. | ||
| That's what human sacrifice is about. | ||
| That you take the psychic energy Of the individual you're going to kill. | ||
| You kill them. | ||
| Take their psychic energy and feed it to these vampire-like creatures that are lying in the beyond, that thrive on human misery and pain. | ||
| And, you know, who are we to say that such things do not exist? | ||
| We don't understand the nature of reality. | ||
| And if you look at human culture today, I mean, look at wars. | ||
| Look at wars that are happening in the world today. | ||
| Look at the tens of thousands of people that are being slaughtered in warfare today. | ||
| That's also a kind of human sacrifice. | ||
| I think we have to consider the possibility that some kind of demonic force is thriving on this and being nourished by it. | ||
| And that's one of the things that we need to do as human beings is to separate ourselves from that and say, no, we will not do that. | ||
| We will not feed that energy. | ||
| We will not... | ||
| Offer lives to the beyond. | ||
| I don't go with you on that, but I do in a way. | ||
| I don't believe in demons, but I think it's undeniable that there have been massive groups of people that have participated in horrific things. | ||
| So what is that, if not demonic? | ||
| I believe it's demonic. | ||
| I can't prove it. | ||
| I can't prove that that's the case. | ||
| I just think we should stay open to that possibility. | ||
| That the nature of reality is so complex and so multi-layered that there may be much more going on than we think. | ||
| And that if we just confine our explanations of things to purely economic and material terms, we may be missing part of the picture. | ||
| And that when the ancients spoke of angels and demons, to use words, I'm not saying that I believe in angels or demons as such, but when they spoke of light and dark forces, negative and positive forces playing on the human race, maybe they had something going. | ||
| Maybe there was something to that. | ||
| Well, I always consider the fact that human beings have this incredibly broad spectrum of possibility, incredibly broad spectrum of behavior, of personality, of circumstance, of genetics, and that there's this yin and yang of life. | ||
| There's this pull and push of life and that the extreme ends of it are good and evil. | ||
| Good and evil, yeah. | ||
| And it may not be a demon, but it might as well be a demon if you're marching 80,000 people up the side of a pyramid and cutting their heart out with a fucking stone tool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's demonic. | ||
| It might as well be. | ||
| Might as well be a demon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that is that is worth considering. | ||
| And the question is, what is, you know, what is going on here? | ||
| I have a very dear friend called James Tiburon, who refers to this world that we live in as a university of duality, that we have that we have lessons to learn from duality. | ||
| Maybe duality is not the whole thing. | ||
| Maybe there is an overarching unity and oneness in all things. | ||
| But right now, here in this incarnation on planet Earth, we have to learn from duality. | ||
| And the thing about duality is human beings can choose. | ||
| We can always choose, even in the most straightened and difficult circumstances. | ||
| We can always choose for the light rather than the darkness. | ||
| We can always choose for good rather than evil. | ||
| We don't have to take that act. | ||
| That causes pain and suffering to another human being. | ||
| We never have to do that. | ||
| We can always choose not to. | ||
| The alarming thing is that people often will choose the act that causes pain and suffering to others. | ||
| And we are defined by our choices, and this is where we need to grow up as a species and start to choose the light. | ||
| Do you think that this broad spectrum of possibilities, whether it's possibilities of thinking or behavior, it's almost there to educate us as to the destructive possibilities, that this huge spectrum that we have, Is so open-ended and so massive as to indicate that there are these extreme variables and these extreme variables can push us by understanding of the consequences into a more positive way. | ||
|
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Yeah, I believe so. | |
| And if they didn't exist, if these horrific ideas of war and of human sacrifice didn't exist, maybe we wouldn't appreciate love as much. | ||
| We would not appreciate love as much and we would have nothing to learn. | ||
| From this strange and troublesome and mysterious and beautiful thing called being a human being. | ||
| We have to learn here. | ||
| We learn here because there are those two different poles at the extreme end of which are good and evil with all kinds of gradations in between. | ||
| That is what teaches us. | ||
| And it's the choices we make day by day as we go through life that define us, ultimately. | ||
| Now, whether there is any transcendental consequence to that, something beyond this life, some reckoning to take place, as the ancient Egyptians certainly believed there was, I don't know for sure. | ||
| But I do know that a lifetime of making Decisions that cause pain and suffering to others and that detract from their sovereignty is a life that ultimately the person who's lived that life is diminished by it. | ||
| I want to know how they got 80,000 people to get in a line to get their hearts cut out. | ||
| Terror. | ||
| Total terror. | ||
| They were the dominant military force in the Valley of Mexico. | ||
| They were very dominant. | ||
| The Aztecs had a huge secret police force. | ||
| They spied on one another. | ||
| They spied on their neighbors. | ||
| They would carry out human sacrifices as object lessons to their neighbors. | ||
| You will pay us tribute or this is what we will do to you. | ||
| They skinned people alive. | ||
| They were truly, truly awful. | ||
| And it was their awfulness. | ||
| It was the horrific nature of Aztec behavior. | ||
| That led them to lose that battle against Cortez because their numbers are crazy. | ||
| Cortez 490 men, Aztecs 200,000. | ||
| You think it's pretty obvious who's going to win. | ||
| How does Cortez win? | ||
| He wins because the Aztecs neighbors hate the Aztecs. | ||
| They have lived in terror of them for 200 years. | ||
| And they see him as a liberator. | ||
| They see him as somebody who's going to lift this yoke off their shoulders and allow them to be free. | ||
| Of course, they didn't know that he was just going to make things worse. | ||
| But in the time, in the nature of things at the time, that was how it was felt. | ||
| I mean, it's a fact that there were 30 million people in Mexico in 1519. And 50 years later, there were just 1 million. | ||
| The Spanish were responsible for a genocide of 29 million people. | ||
| So they didn't make things better, but it looked like they'd make things better. | ||
| And they came as a kind of karma. | ||
| And here's the weird thing. | ||
| Again, I'll show this cover because beside it is the feathered serpent in this photograph. | ||
| And that's Quetzalcoatl. | ||
| The feathered serpent who is there. | ||
| And this is another reason why Cortes won. | ||
| Because he was able to play on the prophecy that a god of peace would return. | ||
| And that that god would overthrow a wicked king. | ||
| And he was the feathered serpent. | ||
| He was Quetzalcoatl. | ||
| And it was predicted that he would return in the Aztec year one reed. | ||
| And it so happened that Cortez landed on the coast of Mexico with his tiny army in the Aztec year one reed. | ||
| 1519 was the year one reed. | ||
| So the return of Quetzalcoatl was a key part of Cortez's victory. | ||
| And my heroine, Malinal, is the person who tells Cortez about this. | ||
| She's the one who... | ||
| It shows him how to exploit this and how to play Moctezuma's superstition and fear to represent himself as this god. | ||
| But of course, Cortes is not a god of peace. | ||
| He's a god of war. | ||
| It's quite a coincidence. | ||
| It was an amazing, amazing coincidence. | ||
| Is that what it is or is it a prophecy? | ||
| Well, again, you have to wonder. | ||
| You have to wonder how this could have happened. | ||
| Because the prophecy was quite specific that Quetzalcoatl and his companions would return in the year one read. | ||
| They would return in ships that moved by themselves without paddles. | ||
| What were the Spanish ships with their sails but ships that moved by themselves without paddles? | ||
| They would be dressed in shining metal armor and they would deploy weapons called Xihucoatl, which means fire serpents, which would dismember men at a distance, i.e. | ||
| guns. | ||
| All of this cannon. | ||
| All of this was right there in the prophecy and Cortes was able to step right into that role and to turn around what should have been an obvious defeat for his tiny force into into a stunning, stunning victory. | ||
| That is absolutely fascinating. | ||
| So many correlating ideas. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So many correlating ideas come together and that's why I felt I want to write a book about this. | ||
| That's why I thought I want to get inside the heads of the characters and deal with that battle of good against evil at a level that one can't do in a non-fiction book. | ||
| How old was this prophecy? | ||
| Well, that image that I showed of the of the feathered serpent Again, I show it. | ||
| That image of the feathered serpent, which side of my screen am I on? | ||
| Here. | ||
| That image of the feathered serpent is from La Venta in the Gulf of Mexico. | ||
| And that is in the oldest archaeological strata of Mexico. | ||
| That image dates to an archaeological strata that is about 1,500 BC, 3,500 years ago. | ||
| The stone itself may be much older than that, but the strata it's dug up from was already 3,500 years old. | ||
| So this notion, and there are many images of people with kind of Caucasian features found in the same stratum, this notion of mysterious strangers who were in Mexico at some time and who would return is very ancient in the Mexican system. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And how did they, I mean, there's a very different language that they used than ours, and it was very difficult for them to decipher a lot of the, especially the Mayan, the Aztec, the way they're, what exactly they were saying. | ||
| How did they figure out that they're saying ships without oars and things, fire, guns, the whole deal? | ||
| It's an interesting point that you raise. | ||
| So when Cortez first lands in Mexico, He lands in the Yucatan and the people who live in the Yucatan are the Maya. | ||
| They're not the Aztecs. | ||
| They're the first people he encounters. | ||
| And there he has an incredible stroke of luck. | ||
| He can't speak a word of Maya and nor can anybody else in his group of Spaniards. | ||
| But they discover that somebody who looks like them is living on the mainland as a prisoner of the Maya. | ||
| The Spanish first landed in Cozumel Holiday Resort today. | ||
| And the Mayan tribe on Cozumel were relatively peaceful, but the people on the mainland were not. | ||
| The Maya of Cozumel came to Cortez with sign language. | ||
| They pointed at him and they said, Castilian. | ||
| They actually told him he was a Castilian. | ||
| And Cortez thought, how can they know I'm a Castilian? | ||
| That's what the Spanish called themselves. | ||
| And gradually through sign language, he figured out what it was, that there was a Spaniard who'd been shipwrecked on the coast of Mexico. | ||
| At some point, it turned out it was 11 years before. | ||
| In fact, 26 Spaniards had been shipwrecked 11 years before. | ||
| 25 of them had been eaten by the Maya. | ||
| But one, Jeronimo Aguilar had survived. | ||
| So Cortes grabbed him, and I tell this story in my book, and Aguilar became Cortes' first interpreter because he spoke fluent Maya by then. | ||
| He'd been living amongst the Maya for 11 years, and he spoke Spanish as well. | ||
| So suddenly they could understand the Maya, they could communicate with the Maya. | ||
| But then when they went on and they encountered the Aztecs for the first time, the Aztecs spoke another language, and that language was Nahuatl. | ||
| The language of the Aztecs. | ||
| And Aguilar suddenly became useless. | ||
| He couldn't speak Nahuatl. | ||
| And that's where my heroine, who is a true historical figure, Malinal, thrusts herself forward. | ||
| She's already been handed over to Cortes as a prisoner. | ||
| She speaks fluent Nahuatl and fluent Maya. | ||
| And she communicates to Cortes, look, I can work with your man, Aguilar. | ||
| I will give... | ||
| You will put the words from Spanish. | ||
| You'll speak Spanish. | ||
| Aguilar will give me those words in Maya, and I will translate them into Nahuatl. | ||
| And the reverse with the Aztec ambassadors. | ||
| And within weeks, she has replaced Aguilar. | ||
| She's a genius. | ||
| She masters Spanish. | ||
| She becomes Cortez's sole interpreter. | ||
| And she is communicating for him with the Aztecs. | ||
| And there's an amazing scene where she encounters Moctezuma directly. | ||
| She and Cortez face to face with Moctezuma. | ||
| And in those days, if you looked Moctezuma in the eye, you were killed. | ||
| This is what the Aztecs, nobody could look him in the eye. | ||
| They had to fall on their faces. | ||
| And the local accounts from the time tell us how Malinal, standing there on the causeway outside Tenochtitlan, looked Moctezuma straight in the eye. | ||
| She never lowered her eyes for a second as she gave him the words of Cortez. | ||
| And I'm just fascinated by the courage of this woman and what drove her to use Cortez as her instrument to bring Moctezuma down. | ||
| And she's a real historical figure. | ||
| She's a real historical figure. | ||
| There's still a statue of her in Mexico City today. | ||
| She became not only Cortez's interpreter, but also his... | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And the mother of his child. | ||
| And by all accounts, she was a very beautiful woman. | ||
| I would be disappointed if you didn't bang her. | ||
| You can't find a single Aztec painting of Cortez that doesn't have Malina in it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And she was in the heart of every battle. | ||
| And there's another Spanish writer of the time who spoke about her as Bernal Diaz, a common soldier who wrote a memoir called The History of the Conquest of New Spain. | ||
| And it's he who tells us of Marlinal's beauty, her grace, her courage, her charm. | ||
| She's regarded as a traitor in Mexico today. | ||
| Because she, Cortes said it. | ||
| He said, aside from God himself, it was Marlinal who gave me this conquest of Mexico. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| One woman changed the history of the world. | ||
| La Malinche. | ||
| That's how the Spanish knew her. | ||
| They knew her as La Malinche. | ||
| Wow, that's amazing. | ||
| So she's the central character in my novel, and we meet her in the fattening pen at the foot of the Great Pyramid, along with another woman who plays a big part in my story, a young witch called Tozi. | ||
| And this is the motive. | ||
| This is why Malinal escapes, but this is why she wants to bring Moctezuma down, because she sees him as the head of an empire of terror, and she sees Cortez as the only way to bring Moctezuma to his knees. | ||
| Well, it's fascinating they would regard her as a traitor when you think about what Montezuma had done to his own people. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Well, again, to give balance, we have to say that the Spanish did horrible things. | ||
| Horrible, horrible things. | ||
| Feeding people to dogs, using people as target practice for their weapons. | ||
| Let's see if this Spanish Toledo steel will cut off this man's arm, you know, things like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They were horrors, true horrors. | |
| And Cortes was a man of war in every possible way and a Machiavellian player, very cunning, very clever. | ||
| You can't help admiring him in certain ways, but he was unbelievably cruel. | ||
| What brought down Cortes? | ||
| Cortes was brought down by old age. | ||
| He wanted to become the king of Mexico. | ||
| After he eventually, there was an apocalyptic final battle. | ||
| When the Spanish took Tenochtitlan, which is the old name for Mexico City, and Cortes, really it's clear that his plan was to become the new king of Mexico, but the king of Spain had different ideas, and they pulled Cortes down. | ||
| They gave him a title, he became a Marquis, but he was never allowed to fulfill his dreams, and I see karma at work in that as well. | ||
| If he'd been a better man, perhaps he would have been allowed to fulfill some dreams. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| The guy lived to be old. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Old for those times. | ||
| Those times you lived to be 60, you were old. | ||
| How old did he live? | ||
| He lived to be about 58. That's amazing. | ||
| No antibiotics? | ||
| No aspirin? | ||
| No band-aids? | ||
| Massive war wounds. | ||
| He was clubbed on the head. | ||
| His skull was broken. | ||
| They've examined the skull of Cortez and there's three separate times that his skull was fractured. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| In battles. | ||
| And each time he recovered and bounced back. | ||
| They were men of steel, these Spaniards. | ||
| They were the ultimate warriors. | ||
| Weren't they tiny, though? | ||
| They were small, but they were mean. | ||
| How big were they? | ||
| Like five feet tall. | ||
| They were small guys. | ||
| Was that because of a lack of food, a lack of nutrition? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| It's a nutritional issue. | ||
| People are taller today. | ||
| In those times, they were small. | ||
| That is absolutely fascinating, isn't it? | ||
| How much the shape of human beings has changed? | ||
| Take Japan. | ||
| The shape of human beings has changed radically in Japan in the last 50 years. | ||
| There's some enormous Japanese people now. | ||
| Huge, tall Japanese now. | ||
| Yeah, big, giant wrestlers. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's been quite a few that have entered into mixed martial arts, which is enormous, enormous men. | ||
| And it's to do with nutrition, definitely. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| So can I say that again? | ||
| If anybody is interested in... | ||
| Actually supporting my work and spending a few dollars on getting hold of a copy of War God, go to my website, buy it through the Amazon link, check out the email address that's there, which is wargoddedications at gmail.com, write to me and I will at my own expense, by airmail, send you a signed, dedicated book plate. | ||
| To go inside your copy of War God, but that offer is only good for about the next 10 days. | ||
| Well, I guarantee you just sold a gang of books, because that was really fascinating. | ||
| I'm going to buy it tonight. | ||
| I'm really blown away by that whole idea, the whole story, the woman who was the translator. | ||
| It's a whole thing. | ||
| It's so fascinating. | ||
| When you live in this sweet, cushy society that we live in today, especially here in Los Angeles where it doesn't even rain, you know, go to a supermarket and get some meat, everything's so soft and easy. | ||
| It's so hard for us to wrap our heads around that just 500 plus years ago this was going down in Mexico. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Graham Hancock, every time you come on, it's better than the time before. | ||
| You blew me away again, man. | ||
| You broke whatever record you set in the last one. | ||
| It's even better today. | ||
| Man, I hope a million people go out and buy your book after that. | ||
| That's absolutely fascinating. | ||
| So again, it's War God. | ||
| You can get it on Amazon. | ||
| And the book that really got me into Graham Hancock in the first place, which is Fingerprints of the Gods, Also available everywhere on Amazon. | ||
| And the links for WarGuard are on my website, grahamhancock.com. | ||
| Very clearly marked. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Thank you very much, man. | ||
| That was amazing. | ||
| Thank you, Jim. | ||
| Really, really fascinating stuff. | ||
| And our sponsors, thanks to our sponsors. | ||
| Thanks to audible.com. | ||
| Go to audible.com forward slash Joe and get yourself a free audio book. | ||
| Thanks also to... | ||
| I'm trying to find the link. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Thanks also to Carbonite. | ||
| Go to Carbonite.com. | ||
| Use the offer code JRE and get a free trial. | ||
| No credit card required. | ||
| Plus, two free bonus months with your subscription. | ||
| That's Carbonite.com. | ||
| Offer code JRE and, of course, always onnit.com. | ||
| That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGAN and save yourself 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| We'll see you guys next week. | ||
| Lots of great stuff ahead. | ||
| And that's it for now. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Big kiss. | ||
| See you soon. |
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