Graham Hancock and Joe Rogan challenge mainstream archaeology’s timelines, citing Skull 5 (1.8M years old) in Georgia and Homo floresiensis (surviving until ~16K years ago), while Göbekli Tepe (buried ~12K years ago) and Gunung Padang (redated to 20K+ years) suggest lost civilizations erased by Younger Dryas cataclysms. Rogan’s hunting ethos aligns with Hancock’s critique of factory farming, while both praise psychedelics—like DMT and Ibogaine—for revealing consciousness truths and combating addiction. Hancock’s War God novel reimagines Cortés’ conquest (1519–21) as a clash between Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl, exposing brutal sacrifices (80K in four days) and Spanish atrocities, questioning whether history’s "victories" were truly just. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Carbonite.
Oh, look at that.
I'm consistent.
Carbonite is a way to back up your files online automatically without you even having to think about it.
More people are working from laptops today, giving them mobility and flexibility.
In fact, 60% of workers use laptops as their primary work computer.
But computer disasters can happen anytime and anywhere, affecting not only your business files, but possibly even Every computer that operates in your business.
That's why you need Carbonite Online backup.
Laptops can be especially vulnerable because 33% of stolen laptops are taken from the office, 28% from cars, and about 12,000 laptops are lost every week at US airports.
That's pretty ridiculous.
But if you have Carbonite, you'll have peace of mind that your backed up files are always safe no matter what happens to your laptop.
Carbonite backs up your computer files to the cloud automatically and continually, no matter how many computers your business has or where they're located.
We rely on Carbonate.
Carbonate?
We're not very convincing, but we mean it.
We rely on Carbonite to back up the files here for the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
It's super easy.
It's great.
It's a peace of mind.
Go to Carbonite.com and type in the offer code JRE for a free trial.
No credit card required, plus two bonus months with your subscription.
That's Carbonite.com and the offer code is JRE. We're also brought to you by Audible.com.
Audible.com is the leading audio provider on the internet with over 150,000 titles.
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.
If you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you will get a free audio book and 30 free days of Audible service.
A service that I personally use.
I'm a huge fan of Audible.
They've been supporting podcasts and stand-up comedy for a long time, so I'm a fan of them.
Just for what they do and also for their product itself.
It's outstanding.
It's just an amazing selection and I'm just a huge fan of using Audible Books and their service for any time I'm commuting, any time I'm on a plane.
It's a great thing to occupy your mind and actually entertain you when you would ordinarily be bored.
It's a fantastic service.
So that's audible.com forward slash Joe.
Get your free audio book and get hooked on Audible.
I know you will love it.
We're also brought to you by Onnit.com.
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.
But these are all, what they are is functional workout equipment that is also awesome looking.
Designed by Steven Shubin Jr., who is an artist that Onnit hired to create these badass designs.
They're all 3D balanced as well.
There's some other kettlebells out there that are artistic, but they're not balanced.
One of the more important parts of creating these was that we wanted to make sure that they were functional for actually working out with.
So we went above and beyond to make sure that they're 3D balanced and you can work out with them just like a regular kettlebell.
They just look more awesome.
We sell all sorts of other things at Onnit, including supplements, hemp protein.
We sell blenders, Blendtec blenders for making protein shakes and kale shakes.
Fitness equipment, DVDs, we sell books on nutrition, Himalayan sea salt, you name it.
If it's good for your body, we sell it at Onnit.
What we call Onnit is a total human optimization website.
That's what The company strives to provide you with all the things that you need to optimize your mind, your body, your immune system, your cognitive function, so on and so forth.
And if you go to Onnit.com and use the codename ROGAN, that's O-N-N-I-T.com, codename ROGAN, will save you 10% off any and all supplements.
Alright, without any further ado, the great Graham Hancock is here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.