Graham Hancock joins Joe Rogan to debate Richard III’s execution under a parking lot, contrasting Somalia’s Siad Barre-era order with today’s chaos, while critiquing Western leaders’ lies—like Julian Assange’s detention and suppressed Collateral Murder leaks—as threats to democracy. They explore Gnostic texts (discovered 1945) framing war as demonic manipulation, linking psychedelics like Amanita muscaria to ancient liberation myths, and mock anti-cannabis doctors paid by pharma giants while deadly opioids kill 16,000 yearly. Hancock’s research—Giza’s Orion alignment (10,500 BC), Gobekli Tepe’s 12,000-year-old mystery, and Younger Dryas comet scars—suggest lost civilizations erased by catastrophe, with psychedelics potentially revealing hidden realities science dismisses as unproven. His upcoming Magicians of the Gods trip aims to expose dismissed "magic" as advanced tech, but the episode ends abruptly with cryptic warnings: "We're dying." [Automatically generated summary]
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Cell phone provider is just this big company and they have their rules and if you go over, it costs you money.
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I think I would prefer to because being completely deaf was slightly alarming for me, although I realize that sensory deprivation is part of the deal.
Yeah.
And so you close the door.
There's a towel hanging off the back of the door in case you do get salty water in your eyes.
And then you just lie down in this, I guess, body temperature saline solution in which it's impossible to sink.
And there you are in the darkness.
completely without without sensation totally by yourself for the first time in a way ever I mean this is the sometimes we're alone but to be completely alone in total darkness yeah suspended in that amniotic fluid that strange saline saline solution with no sensations coming in no sounds no
It's an extraordinary opportunity to meditate, to reflect, to just drift away into another place and not...
I find it difficult to shut down my mind.
My mind is always running.
And a few times when I was just wanting to let everything go, everyday concerns and worries came back in and started annoying me.
But most of the time I was able to let go and it felt like I was weightless and I was floating in space.
That's why I posted that picture on Facebook today.
That's what it felt like.
And sometimes I didn't know whether I was horizontal or vertical.
I felt sometimes like I was vertically, floating vertically.
It was a very odd sensation.
I wouldn't say that I got into deeply trippy space, but I did have fundamental visions, patterns, lights started to generate purple.
Purple strips of light started to appear, which certainly were not there in the darkness with me.
And that was And that was interesting.
But most of all, it was just very relaxing.
Just very relaxing to let go, be completely supported by this soft, gentle water and drift away into the realms of the mind.
It was a wonderful experience.
And I felt much better about it the second day than I did the first.
It's all about getting used to the experience, and the more you get used to the experience, the easier it is to slip into the deeper and deeper states.
Yes.
But the first time, it's very alien.
It's so odd, and you also kind of bump against the sides, and you have to center yourself.
There was nothing like his stuff when his stuff came out.
Now there's guys like the guy in Austin that is elevating his.
I spent some time there and checked out his facility.
It's beautiful.
He's friends with my friend Aubrey.
But what Crash did was there was no innovation.
states when it came to float technology there was like the standard samadhi tank which is really great i mean it's cool you could definitely get a cool experience in it and there's some some uh home models that a few people had but what he did is he just took everything to the next level and made everything
these steel modular boxes that it fits together perfectly more sound deadening more insulation better filtration system stronger reinforced sides because the samadhi ones would kind of bow out on the sides a little bit from the water and sometimes they would rot and like you He fixed everything.
He fixed, there was an issue with the linings would burn out sometimes because of the heat pads.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Heat pads would short out, it would burn through the linings, and it would leak water everywhere.
He fixed that by, first of all, by setting this redundant system and having two heat pads too, so if one burns out, you have a second one ready to go.
And then secondly, he put these thick pond filters.
He doesn't use the same kind of filters that a lot of people do.
Not filters, rather, liners.
His liners are very thick.
They're like koi ponds.
So he's done a lot of innovation.
He's really figured out a lot of different things.
It's the place to go if you're lucky enough to live in L.A., Well, also if you're lucky enough to be able to get in now, because now he's booked way in advance.
And I kind of equate it to just the ability to communicate on the internet and the ability to access information on the internet has led us to this weird place where if you wanted to, your day could be filled with horror.
You could just go every day to the worst possible websites and see the most horrific videos and the most horrific photographs and see the world in the worst possible light.
if you chose to just immerse yourself Or just watch the news.
Even worse than the news.
I mean, if you really wanted to really change the way you saw the world.
I mean, you could live on a beautiful tree-lined street with the nicest neighbors and the cutest little dogs barking, and the life looks beautiful.
But through the portal that is the internet, you can immerse yourself in the most twisted, sadistic minds.
And it's like you have this decision to not do that.
That's, in sort of reinforcing that decision and making those choices, you build up your resistance to doing things that are negative.
You build up your resistance to indulging in negative thoughts.
Like, one of the weirdest things is, if you've ever seen someone who's never been in any sort of a conflict-type situation, but they get thrown into one and they have a panic attack.
Impose your mind on that situation, because I don't know why, actually, if we have all this evolution, why we panic.
I mean, they would have thought millions of years of evolution would have got rid of that terrible, dangerous thing called panic, but actually it's there.
He does particularly Brazilian jiu-jitsu at a place called the MMA Clinic in London.
And he does it three, four times a week.
He's very, very, very devoted to it.
And he's been talking me through a lot of these issues over the last year.
And I get it.
I get why he loves it.
And I think it's been a really great thing for him.
And I think it's a really...
It's a really great thing for anybody.
There was a time in my life when I did do a martial art.
I did Aikido.
I got to Brown Belt in my very early 20s and then I quit.
I'm not quite sure why.
I had traveled.
I went away.
I'd lost the practice.
And then in my 40s, I went back to it and I went my way back up to Greenbelt.
But Aikido is a different thing from this real grappling.
I mean, this Brazilian jiu-jitsu, what I see is two people who are interlocked and they're sensing each other, each other's movements all the time.
You can't predict what's going to happen next in any way.
And I understand that it's a kind of meditative thing also, that if you actually start thinking, I imagine, because I don't do it, but this is what my son-in-law tells me.
If you start thinking while you're in there, in that grapple with that other very strong person.
very dangerous person, I don't think that's really good.
I think you have to not be thinking.
You have to be acting somehow on muscle, memory, on instinct, on experience.
You're not really thinking through your next move, or are you?
Sometimes you're thinking, but a lot of times you are reacting in what you try to do is achieve sort of a zen state, a flow state.
And when you're at your best, you're in that flow state where sometimes you'll be in a position where you don't even realize how you achieve the position.
You just...
You instinctively did it.
And it's instinctive based on thousands of repetitions.
Many, many hours of mat time.
Mat time is very important.
Mat time being the actual sparring itself.
Because the rolling, the grappling, sparring, you understand the language of human interaction.
There's an interaction between a person attacking, a person defending, and there's this thing that goes on where you kind of figure out...
But the benefits extend outside of that, in my opinion.
The benefits are it prepares you for the drama of regular life pales in comparison to the real drama of training and of competing inside the gymnasium.
Because essentially every time someone does jiu-jitsu, they're competing.
Every time you spar, even if you spar with a very good friend, you're still competing.
You get used to this struggle.
And that's something that most people don't have in their life.
And in having that struggle and in this competition, it makes the regular stress that people go through, the stress of bills and of relationships, it alleviates and mitigates a lot of the issues that people have.
Because the life or death struggle of someone trying to choke you and you battling it out and you're tired, you're exhausted, and you're trying to remain calm and catch your breath and defend and trying to stay cool and trying to figure out what's the proper defense for this situation.
And how to turn this around and how to get back to a better spot.
No, you're not thinking about any of those things.
And in that sense, it is very meditative.
It alleviates a lot of the stress of life.
And then when it's over, you just kind of feel very relaxed because you've spent all this excess energy that I believe people...
I mean, it's not a scientific way of looking at the human body, but I think of the human body in a lot of ways as sort of like a battery.
And a lot of people's batteries are overflowing with juice because you don't use them.
You sit down in a sedentary state in front of a computer all day, which is pretty bad for your back, and you stare at a screen, and you do your work, and then you sit in your car or on the train or whatever to get home, and then you sit in front of the television.
While you're young and alive and while you have energy, your body wants to be involved in activities.
Your body wants to go hiking and do things.
And if it doesn't, it atrophies and shrivels up and it stops being functional.
Mm-hmm.
When you can get all that energy out in a training session, it does a couple things.
One, it strengthens your body so that if you ever do have to use it for something, even if something as simple as picking things up or just strength to help move something, you have that.
But two, you alleviate all the excess energy.
You drain the battery a bit.
And by draining the battery, you put more juice in the battery for the future.
Like the battery has like a higher threshold.
And then you also like, you can deal with stuff easier.
Like when I don't train, if I don't exercise, if I don't do some sort of rigorous physical exercise, like at least a few days a week, I react differently to stress.
Or I could work with one personal teacher, you know, who would understand my level.
I see huge advantages in doing it.
I think I've got more and more interested in it over the last couple of years.
It's a really fascinating thing.
And also, tell me about this.
I mean, in a way, you're being a warrior in there.
In a way, it's a warrior thing.
I mean, this is a contentious issue.
The human race, we've been around in anatomically modern form for the last 200,000 years.
For a lot of that time, our young men...
In many societies have been called to warfare in one form or another.
I would say that it's gone on long enough for it to be a fundamental part of the human experience, actually.
in our society today a lot has a lot has worked to move that aside and probably that's a that's a very good thing although we still do have war of course but it's done at a distance largely it's done it's not I mean I'm writing I'm writing novels about the Spanish conquest of Mexico at the moment I am dealing with I'm getting inside the heads of warriors and those guys are on the battlefield hand to hand with edged weapons um
That kind of experience of battle and warfare doesn't happen, I think, much in modern warfare today.
It's more the guy remotely piloting a drone and shooting people from a distance.
But maybe there is a warrior need in us which can be met in a harmless and positive way on the mat in something like mixed martial arts.
It's very possible that there's something to that.
I think it's very possible that there's something to the idea that we have ingrained in us a certain amount of experiences based on the genetics of all the people that have lived before us.
And that whatever fight or flight is inside of us, whatever...
I mean, throughout history...
Like, I've been discussing this with friends, like how fascinating this time is, because throughout history, in the past, if a boat of strangers showed up, it was very dangerous.
Those experiences that led us to, that led the human race to 2014, these experiences of people, pirates showing up and Vikings showing up and all those dangerous people showing up in these different places, you know, people coming over the hill, oh, an army's coming.
That was just a part of being a human being for the longest time.
I think that there's a long tradition regarding him and the battle that he was killed in.
There's even a Shakespeare play where he's at the end of the battle saying famously, my horse, my horse, a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse, so that he can flee.
But it seems that he died in face-to-face combat and was hacked to pieces as far as I can.
And it is in fact a radical collapse in other parts of the world.
I've been talking about this on stage a lot lately.
Because there's a lot of these...
There's this Duck Dynasty guy.
It's hilarious.
Duck Dynasty is this ridiculous American reality show.
But one of the main guys on Duck Dynasty, he gave this speech, this video speech, where he was talking about the impending apocalypse...
And what they call the rapture, where Christians think that Jesus is going to come and he's going to take away everybody that's Christian and bring them to heaven and everybody else is going to be stuck on earth.
And he told people that they should watch this Nicolas Cage movie that's about to come out, called Left Behind, that's based on this very famous series of books amongst the Christians, Left Behind.
And all you had to do was not get in the face of Saddam Hussein.
That was the simple rule of life.
Just don't get in the face of Saddam Hussein.
And that was a simple rule of life in Somalia in the 1970s.
Don't get in the face of Siad Bahre if you do.
I'll tell you a story.
Siad Barre, Mohamed Siad Barre, who was the president of Somalia when I went there in 1975, he did a number of interesting things.
For example, the Somali language was not written.
This was a nomadic society, 70% nomadic.
He introduced a written script for the Somali language based on the Latin alphabet.
This had not been possible before because religious leaders had said they had to have it in the Arabic script because they were Muslims.
He just forced that through.
Then he introduced a family law which allowed women to divorce their husbands.
At that point, 11 religious leaders, 11 sheikhs, mobilized the public and said they had to rebel against Siad Bari.
Well, what he did, he hauled those guys out of the mosque the very same day and shot them all.
And that was the end of that argument, and suddenly women could divorce their husbands, and the society was very free and very open.
One can't imagine today, from the scenes of horror that we see from Mogadishu, actually how peaceful it was.
So, you know, it may be the case that in some situations, an Iraq is definitely another example.
We in the West are constantly saying we must have democracy.
Democracy is a great thing.
Well, maybe it is a great thing at a certain point, at a certain level.
When you're in a society that's very sectarian, very divided into tribal interests, very divided into different religious groups, maybe it's actually more comfortable if you have a dictator.
I think the issue is civilizations largely operate on momentum.
And when things have been set up in the way that they have been in Iraq or the way they have been, obviously, in Somalia, Where there's one guy who's calling all the shots, and they've got this whole thing established, when that guy's not there anymore.
You have this hideous death cult called the Islamic State, which may or may not have been initially funded and set up by the United States of America and its allies.
Who knows?
But it's a death cult, and it's horrible.
Frankly, I would rather have Saddam Hussein than the Islamic State.
Like, the idea of a society, the idea of taking a million people, 500 million people, whatever the number is, and having a group of people that Adhere to the best interests of all the folks that are in that society.
Their needs are so varied.
Their resources are so varied.
Their fortune in what situation they find themselves born into is so varied.
And then you have the people that are fortunate sons and daughters that are trying to keep the unfortunate from getting into their gated community of life.
Yeah, the arguments that the United States has funded ISIS in order to build up support for an invasion of Saudi Arabia, or of Syria, rather, are really terrifying.
And more terrifying because I don't want to look into it, because I don't want to know.
And the problem is that we can't really believe anything that our political leaders in the West say.
I mean, they have been proven to be.
Absolute crooks, thieves and liars.
They lie by instinct all the time and the problem with constant lying at the top levels of politics is that it pollutes the debate completely.
You suddenly can't believe anything that's said and that leads to suspicion of all kinds of horrendous possibilities including the funding and setting in motion of this ISIS horror.
Yeah, it doesn't help when someone like Julian Assange comes along and exposes all these things that a lot of people disagree with, and what do they do?
They try to get him locked up on some trumped-up charges and export him, as if they were really trying to export him to Sweden and eventually to the United States because of some sexual thing that wasn't even violent, or it wasn't even rape.
It was consensual.
It was some weird sexual charge.
I think they call it surprise sex or something like that.
There's one thing, like, if there was a woman who was saying, hey, Julian Assange, she's a piece of shit, he drugged me, he raped me, you know, okay, yeah, send that guy to Sweden.
But they're not even saying that.
This isn't a charge that makes any sense.
And the fact that this guy's been locked up in the embassy in London for all these years...
And it's where a lot of people truly believe and act as if it is a democracy, but at the very top, there's fuckery and manipulation and coercion and money and corporate greed and interests and the military-industrial complex that is funding all of these maneuvers, and it's people profiting wildly.
Not to forget all the big corporations, big pharmaceutical corporations.
All of this is about management of information that we are given.
What the internet offers is the opportunity for ordinary people who are not part of a power structure, not running a big corporation, to take power back to themselves.
2014, where we're at now, it's really only been around in this form for the last decade, like 2004, 2005, and then social media allowing people to exchange information in the heat of political crisis, where they've been able to expose things that are happening in real time that ordinarily would be protected by the media.
They would shelter and filter the information.
Now it's all just coming out and they can't...
So they'd have to shut down the whole fucking internet in some of these countries.
Now, I've seen the huge shift in power that this has introduced.
There was a time, just at my own small level, as an author...
Where I would have depended on the goodwill of the big media in order to get my ideas out there.
And since my ideas have sometimes been radical and contradictory to the established order of things, it was very difficult to do that.
Well, I don't need the big media anymore.
I absolutely don't need them.
They're not required at all.
They're redundant as far as I'm concerned.
What is important...
Is the community of like-minded people that I am reaching through social media, through Facebook, through my website.
Not to say that Facebook is perfect because Facebook is very problematic and is itself a large corporation which is filtering and controlling information.
But a lot of when people are commenting, they're commenting using their Facebook identity.
So that's a real person, as opposed to Twitter or a lot of message boards where you're getting trolls and a lot of assholes that are posting under fake names.
There's a lot of people out there that it's like a sport to them to be shitty or to rile people up.
And it's like, damn, if you put that energy into something productive, instead of stalking Graham Hancock, you know, and fucking with him all day, you could get a lot of shit done.
But do you also agree, I definitely feel this about myself, that some of the criticism that I've received, even extreme criticism, even if it's unbalanced, I've benefited from.
It's like I was saying, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
I mean, you have to learn from this.
It's out there.
We have to engage in some way with criticism.
I've received an enormous amount of criticism from my work and for the suggestion that it was a lost civilization and the work that I've done on psychedelics and altered states of consciousness.
Just endless.
It's nonstop.
And my view is thank you.
Thank you for criticizing me.
I appreciate it.
If there are holes in what I'm saying, if my argument is weak in a particular area and you're helping me to see that… The right response is gratitude to that.
They really are, in a sense, working for you in some way, because, I mean, there's been unwarranted criticism that I've received that have made me rethink a lot of things I do.
Even if it's unwarranted, they've made me rethink, like, what is causing this reaction?
Like, is there anything that I could have done differently that could have avoided that?
Or is this a necessary evil that just comes with the business?
And once again, it's putting us into a real social situation.
As you say, these people are real.
It's like being back in the village in the old days where...
You might be directly criticized by one or other of your fellow villagers.
Well, now our village is the whole world, and it crosses all national boundaries and all religious interests.
It can be anybody, anywhere, who's taking an interest in you.
I'm constantly receiving information, some of it critical, some of it positive, through Facebook, in particular through Facebook, which is very helpful to me.
And I really appreciate it.
And I try the best I can.
I try as much as I can do.
I don't want to spend my entire day Morning to night on Facebook.
But I try to engage with it.
I try to respond because I realize that people are giving me their time.
Somebody sends me a link to a story I haven't ever seen before.
I've gotten more information from Twitter, more interesting websites that people have sent me to, more interesting articles that people have sent me to than any other resource that I've ever been in contact with.
And it's just...
Directly because of interacting with people, and when they send me interesting things, I retweet them, and then those retweets get seen by a large number of people, so people see that I do that, and so they send me more interesting stuff.
It's a whole new situation, which we've not faced before, done on a gigantic scale, and What it means is that information which used to be strictly controlled and in the hands of elites is now changing.
The power structure of information is changing entirely and that's potentially a very exciting new time to live in and great things are coming out of it.
It's easy to say this, but I think a new consciousness is dawning in the world, actually.
I don't think it's very big yet.
I think the old way of doing things is still extremely strong, but people are waking up to their power and saying, you know, I am not simply to be pushed around and told what to do by people.
An expert or a government official or a corporation.
My friend Amber Lyon has an interesting way of talking about certain events and one of the things she talks about when it comes to corporate control of information and things along the lines of the Julian Assange situation She talks about being on the wrong side of history, and I think that's a very good point.
The people that are trying to suppress information in that way, and the information that would directly affect the lives, but the consciousness of the entire culture.
That that's the wrong side of history and exactly all things are said and done people trying to act in their best interest Currently they don't realize like the fucking jig is up man You might be able to hang on and keep treading water for another three or four years.
Yeah, but the jig is up Yeah, it's like the Inquisition was on the wrong side of history You know when it made when it made Galileo say that actually the Sun did revolve around the earth Even though he knew that the earth moved It's clear that Galileo was on the right side of history We know that now.
We've got perspective on it.
We can look back with hindsight.
And it's the same thing that's happening today in different ways.
In every case, Pandora's box has been opened and the immediate result has been that things got way worse than they were before.
And then, you know, if we're talking about the dark side, the negative side of things as well, there is this horrible problem of bigoted religious fundamentalism, which is not confined to the Islamic world by any means.
I mean, there are many Christian bigots as well.
There's a tendency for people to cling on to old and devalued ideas and to have an almost religious, fanatical commitment to them and be willing.
I mean, what idea is worth killing another fellow human being for because they don't share your idea?
I mean, this is demonic.
It's a horrendous, horrendous situation that this happens.
I followed a few guys on Twitter that are a part of that whole Islamic state.
There was an article about this guy who was a rapper who is suspected, a rapper from London, suspected of being one of the guys that beheaded one of the American journalists.
There was this thing that was going on with his interaction with the other people, There was this intense camaraderie, this intense camaraderie with his other Islamic warriors, you know, that they all looked at it.
Everyone was brothers and sisters and everyone was, you know, it was all, there was great intensity to all of the decisions that were being made and great intensity to the bonds they all had, you know, fighting against what they thought was the evil United States government.
And, unfortunately, there was also some things that he said that, you know, they were talking about how everybody's freaking out, that one head got cut off, one body part got cut off of this one guy, but what about the thousands of people that are blown to bits by these drones that no one's talking about?
Completely innocent people who are so-called collateral damage, who are just ripped apart by our high-tech weapons, which will behead a person in an instant, slice body parts off just completely broken.
Well, that's the real thing, because then you come back to the question of the manipulation of public opinion by very small interest groups who have...
If it's not you and it's not I, do we take responsibility for people we don't even know, doing things that are under the orders of people we also don't know, and under the influence of corporations, we're not really exactly sure who's pulling the strings or how it's getting done or what politicians are moving what pieces into place.
But then, of course, there was then a counter-reaction to that, which we call the war on drugs, which slapped down on that and shut it all down again.
I mean, I know you're not big into supernatural issues, but when I look at all of this, I have to say the Gnostics who...
If I simplify the Gnostic ideas, we know about Gnostic ideas because a batch of texts were found buried at a place called Nakamadi in Upper Egypt near the Temple of Dendera in Upper Egypt, and they'd been buried for 1,600 years.
And they were found in 1945, and they contain a complete corpus of ideas of a people who call themselves the Gnostics.
And they see a dark force at work in the universe, which is seeking to snuff out the divine spark in humanity.
And it's a supernatural force.
And what they say is that the entity who we've been taught for the last 2,000-plus years to believe is God, The God of Abraham, who may be called Yahweh or who may be called Allah, that from the Gnostic point of view, that's not a God at all.
That's a demon.
That's a lower-level supernatural who's got this huge inflated ego, who wants to be praised and worshipped, who's constantly urging his followers on to acts of violence and war.
And I think we cannot say there are any facts in this area.
Maybe it's just the dark side of the human psyche, and maybe it's all generated by our brains, or maybe there is a supernatural realm.
But I think Gnosticism is a very useful tool to look at the society we live in today.
They believed that there were entities called archons who are evil angels who disguise themselves as human beings and mingle with us to drive us into all manner of That's why the serpent in the Garden of Eden Is the good guy in the Gnostic frame of reference.
I mean, actually, for the Gnostics, very clearly and definitely it was a psychedelic mushroom.
When the Gnostics portray...
The tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden.
It is Amanita muscaria.
It's the phyagoric.
Sometimes it's a psilocybe.
It is a visionary substance, which they are depicting.
And that, in a way, from the Gnostic point of view...
Is a necessary part of the liberation of the spirit, that it's an agent for awakening.
That's what the serpent was giving.
Now, I know that all the fundamentalist Christians out there are going to say Hancock is a devil worshipper because he's saying that the serpent is the good guy.
But that's what the Gnostics said, and there was a deep and ancient study of the mystery of life and the mystery of reality.
I've read somewhere, I don't remember the source, but I read somewhere where they were talking about the interpretations of ancient languages and the translations from, you know, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, all to Greek, Latin, that a lot of things got lost along the way in the confusion, and that one of the confusions was that the word apple, It could be interpreted also as red.
And that it wasn't an apple, but that it was a red.
And that red being the color of the Amanita Muscaria.
I mean, folks have to understand, if they've never tried to pay attention to how people translate ancient languages, And then try to translate them several times, not just into, you know, from ancient Hebrew to Latin, but also from Latin to Greek, from Greek to English.
There's so much that gets weirded out along the way.
Like, if you've ever taken a phrase from, like, a Russian website where you don't know what they're saying and then put it into, like, Google Translate and you see the English version of what they're saying, like, Oh my God, it's so convoluted and confusing because of the way the structure of their language is very different.
The grammar that they use is very different.
And it's nothing in comparison to how different it was in ancient times.
A lot get lost in translation, and a lot the translator imposes his or her idea of how things should be on the material.
And many of the texts that come down to us are...
which are actually representing a particular point of view.
That's why these hidden Gnostic texts, which just lay buried for 1600 years until they were found in the 1940s, are extremely interesting.
And actually, we don't need to rely on translations.
Most of the Gnostics were wiped out by Christianity when Christianity pulled on the jackboot of Rome and became the state religion of the most powerful militaristic empire of the ancient world.
It set about destroying all competitors.
And amongst those it destroyed were the Gnostics.
And they were burnt at the stake from a very early date.
But some Gnostic sects survived and they have left us images.
And there are a number of Gnostic churches.
These guys saw themselves as Christians.
There are a number of Gnostic churches where they painted the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil quite specifically as Amanita Muscaria.
Yeah, and even in French frescoes, what is that fresco from like, it was, I don't remember the year, but it was an Adam and Eve portrayal that showed several different types of mushrooms.
Several different types of mushrooms, I know the one you mean.
Including psilocybin, and it's Adam and Eve clearly standing.
No, this was like 1200 AD. It was like 800 years ago, something like that.
We were at the tail end of the last surviving Gnostic sects.
The Cathars in the southwest of France are an example of a Gnostic sect who survived through until the Catholic Church wiped them out with the so-called Albigensian Crusades, a truly horrendous act of ethnic murder that took place in the 1200s.
So we're actually not that long ago, and things have survived from that time.
and it's very interesting that they are clearly indicating that the psychedelic experience is of crucial importance, that it's a liberating experience, that it allows us to wake up to the true nature of things.
Now, of course, they would do it right.
They would do it in a sacred context.
They would work very hard on the setting to create the place and the space where this experience unfolded because that's part of the experience.
The substance on its own is only part of the story, as anybody who's worked with psychedelics knows.
The context in which the experience unfolds is at least as important and the intent with which you go into it And what we're seeing now, again, history has been obscured from us, but recent research is showing, for example, the famous Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece.
2,000 years at the Temple of Eleusis.
Pilgrims came from all over Greece once a year to undergo an experience, and that experience involved drinking a brew.
We can now say with absolute certainty that that was a brew closely, that there were elements in it closely related to LSD. How do we know that with absolute certainty?
Because the work has been done by Hoffman, by Gordon Wasson, and others.
There's a very detailed study of what was in that brew.
It was called the Kaikion.
And growing on the barley that was used in the brew was a form of ergot.
Which contained LSD amides and which was soluble in water.
They've really done the science in great depth.
And when you read the accounts, you know, of great figures from the ancient world, people like Plato or Socrates, who went and had the experience at the Eleusinian Mysteries, they drink this, they enter a darkened series of corridors and passageways and chambers in this huge temple, and this light appears and they start seeing visions.
They felt that there were several of the ancients who had this experience and who said that after having had this experience, they lost their fear of death, that they understood.
That it was not the end.
Now, we could argue about that, but that was the experience that they had.
Yeah, that's the experience that a lot of people have when they take acid.
One of the things that Larry Hagman said, who is a popular American actor, he did this interview when he was on CNN, and they were talking to him about death, and he said that LSD completely took away his fear of death.
What I call the unled problem-solving state of consciousness.
That state of consciousness is not our friend when it comes to understanding our place in the wider scheme of things.
It is our friend in many ways, and it's a good state of consciousness, but there are so many other states of consciousness that are of value and that need to be sought out.
Now some people are very lucky and they can get into deeply altered states of consciousness and see reality in a different way without needing to take any substance.
It's fine, you know.
Or they can get there through meditation or they can get there through floating in a flotation tank.
But for a lot of people a very powerful vehicle For changing our perspective on the nature of reality has been, for thousands of years, the psychedelic experience.
And it's time that we rehabilitated that and gave it a place in our society.
And I think a lot of people are getting informed by guys like you who have written books on these experiences, from Supernatural to your own discussions, including the one that got banned from TED. The whole TED thing has kind of been exposed as being this really bizarre, almost cultish thing.
Thing that's done a lot of great good.
I mean, I'm a big fan of a lot of the speakers that have come on TED. But I had Eddie Huang on the show where he talked about his experience in TED, where they kicked him out because he left there to do my podcast.
They wanted him to be a part of this whole thing all day where you had to hang out.
He had to stay in a hotel room with someone else.
Like, they made him.
He's like, can I get my own hotel room?
They're like, no, the TED experience, you have to shack up with some fucking random dude who's talking about physics or whatever it is.
And when things become intensely profitable, they become this giant business that's part of why your talk got banned from TED instead of having an open discourse about agreeing or disagreeing about what you're saying.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But your talk got banned because of pressure from a bunch of people.
They start using the word pseudoscience.
Pseudoscience!
Stop the pseudoscience!
There's almost a cult of people that are afraid of debating ideas that are very controversial and very difficult to nail down, especially when you're talking about the emergence of consciousness in early man.
Okay, no one knows how the fuck people got from hunting things to drawing on cave walls to experiencing visionary psychedelic states, but we do know that happened.
But it's a weird thing where people are ignoring that aspect and concentrating on all the other potential aspects which I think probably worked in some sort of a symbiotic fashion.
The introduction of meat into the diet, the experimenting with different food sources because of the changing of the climate.
There was a lot of factors that We're good to go.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, there was a lot of things had to take place.
Because people who've not had the experience at all, they don't, even in my view, need to come to the table, because they've got nothing to bring to the discussion.
And then you are confronted by one of the most intense and extraordinary experiences that it is possible for any human being to have.
Yes, we can jump out of an airplane at 10,000 feet.
Yes, we can scale a sheer cliff.
That's also very intense and very, very extraordinary.
Yes, we can go scuba diving to the depths.
But if we look at the whole range of human experiences and say, what is one of the most intense and potentially most transformative experiences as possible to have, I would say DMT done with the right intention in the right context is right up there with anything else.
And it doesn't mean that those things aren't intense as well.
But to deny the impact of those things, it seems silly.
And the people that are arguing against the efficacy of these experiences, or against the influence of these experiences, to have those people actually have never had taken these experiences arguing against It seems so silly.
Well, you know, McKenna found out about DMT by a friend who was a scientist who worked at the Army Research Lab, and they had like a barrel of the stuff.
They had a fucking barrel of DMT. DMT is very small doses that are transformative.
These tiny little doses that you smoke take you into these incredible realms.
So the idea of a barrel...
Or LSD. I mean, McKenna described LSD in the best way I've ever heard, is that the amount of LSD you need for it to be effective is like an ant that can break down the Empire State Building in 30 minutes.
I mean, talking about psychedelics, what's happening with cannabis in the United States right now is very interesting to me coming from Britain where nobody is ever even willing to contemplate the legalization or the de-restriction of cannabis.
But in America, state by state, people are voting with their feet and the barriers are being broken down.
I mean, America has been the huge dark force behind the war on drugs all over the world for the last 40 or 50 years.
So many countries around the world have just blindly followed the American lead.
That's the American government.
That's the American power structure.
But the American people are saying no.
The American people are saying, actually, we want to smoke cannabis and we find it positive and nurturing for us.
And state by state, either it's being decriminalized or medical marijuana is available or it's actually being legalized in a number of cases.
This is a big change.
Again, there's all kind of conspiracy theories like how Monsanto is going to take it over and so on and so forth.
But I see it as a really good thing that these barriers in the heartland of the war of drugs are being broken down by the American people themselves.
And I say kudos to the American people for getting on and making that happen because it's going to be a benefit to the whole world.
I mean, people are going to make commercial advantage of this.
But at the end of the day, I just come back to this is something that I've said again and again as the years have gone by.
For me, the fundamental issue is the right of the adult to to make sovereign decisions about their own consciousness and one of those sovereign decisions has to be the right to use cannabis or not to use it but one must be free to make that decision and not controlled by society and once that is recognized once all the scare stories about cannabis go away and we find that in fact state by state it's a positive rather than a harmful thing I think
that the question marks are going to begin to arise over the psychedelics too, and we're going to see all those barriers breaking down in the years to come.
I think bringing up Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett's company, specifically, what's happening is he's a part of this company.
He's a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has this company called Cubic Designs, and they sell, they maximize usable floor space in warehouses, and they send 1,000 flyers to weed dispensaries.
In recent weeks, and these flyers, they show these medical marijuana grow-ups, and it's like double your usable growing space.
This is intense stuff, because it's companies that are real estate holders that have giant amounts of money invested in this that are saying, you know what, we're going to dip our feet into this growing marijuana industry.
I have a friend who works at a dispensary in Colorado, and the dispensary is $5 Five acres indoor.
But they're finally allowing the people to put their money in banks, which was, for a long time, they had to do this weird shit where they had to Like, put it in safe deposit boxes, or they had to take the cash and then use it to buy bank notes and buy bank checks.
It was very strange.
They weren't allowing them to use credit cards or any of the normal ways that people do business that keep them from being robbed at gunpoint by criminals, untrackable bills.
So they had these kids that were driving around with stacks of cash.
Well, it's interesting that guys like Sanjay Gupta, who used to do that, who used to be on board with that, now has stepped up, come out in a huge way.
And he's also starting to address psychedelics, starting to address what's going on with psilocybin, the new study that's shown these people that took psilocybin and quit smoking.
Six months later, 80% of them, some large number, 70 or 80% quit smoking and didn't go back to it because of just the clarity of those visions where you kind of understand, like, what am I doing?
And that's the big news, you know, that these things are positive and beneficial.
And the way forward for society is to create...
Positive social environment and positive spaces in which we can explore these experiences, and the result for society as a whole will be very positive.
And it's all these different doctors that have been...
Like, here's one.
Dr. Herbert Keebler of Columbia University.
He's been...
Impeccable academic credentials.
He's been quoted in the press in academic publications warning against the use of marijuana, which he stresses may cause wide-ranging addiction.
That's my favorite.
Wide-ranging addiction.
And public health issues.
When he's writing his anti-pot opinion pieces for CBS News or being quoted by NBR and CNBC, what's left unsaid is that Clever has served as a paid consultant to leading prescription drug companies including Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, Reckitt Bankizer, the producer of painkiller called Neurofin, and Alkermes, the producer of a powerful new opiate...
And doctors are on the take to keep promoting that and to stop us exercising our free choice as adults to manage our pain in other ways, for example, with cannabis.
So I'm wondering now, three years after I gave up cannabis, whether the time has come to dip my toes back in the water in a respectful way, not do it every day, have some sacred moments.
I value the sensual side of it.
I don't know.
The next time I have an ayahuasca session, I'm going to I'm going to ask ayahuasca.
It's going to be my intent because it was ayahuasca that really interrupted my cannabis habit.
I'm going to ask, is there a way I can do this?
I don't know.
Maybe that's weak of me.
I wonder this.
I was talking with a friend last night and he said there's a true addict speaking when I said this because it sounds a bit like that.
But I did value cannabis.
It was an extraordinarily positive thing for me in many, many ways.
And what I feel is that I got out of balance with it.
And if I could...
If I could find that balance again and use it rarely at special times, then I think it would be okay.
That's the thing, is that I think there's some people that do get physically addicted.
I'm not...
You know, I used to say, marijuana is not addictive.
And I don't think it is with most people.
But I think biological diversity, biodiversity in human beings is such that, like, there's certain folks that have weird reactions to all kinds of different things.
Cats.
Some people around cats, like, my friend Gary, he can't even come over to my house.
And what works for one person doesn't work for another.
And that's again why this issue of adult sovereignty, of us having the right to make our choices about our own bodies is fundamental.
And actually with the psychedelics and the cannabis issue, that's just the tip of the iceberg of the whole issue of health and personal health.
And how our society is working to take away our choices over our personal health and to turn us into robots who consume the products that are pumped at us by the big pharmaceutical companies or who inventing every year this unholy alliance with psychiatrists, inventing every year new mental conditions for which new pills will be will be dosed out.
How about antidepressants that supplement the antidepressants?
There's a certain antidepressant, I forget what it was called, that had insane side effects that they were promoting as a supplement to your regular antidepressant.
If your regular antidepressant isn't doing it, mix it up with this one.
But this one could cause fucking kidney failure, your dick might fly across the room like a mockingbird.
Anything could happen to you, but you might not be depressed, or you might.
Commercials are influential, and the influence of commercials is very insidious, because there's one thing if a commercial is influencing you to buy a particular vacuum cleaner.
That doesn't bother me, man.
This is the best.
Hey, look, if you're If you're too much of a knucklehead to go on Consumer Reports or to read reviews online by independent people that tell you, this vacuum cleaner is great, this vacuum cleaner sucks, if you're too much of a knucklehead to do that, I don't feel bad for you.
Also, what's insidious about it is selling it on television like that does a huge disservice to the actual people that could use antidepressants because they have a real mental imbalance.
There's people that do do that.
So, like, you're selling it as an antidote for a shit life, where there's other folks that might have a real issue.
People that have a miserable life, they can make their life wonderful.
But instead, people will trivialize it because you see a commercial where a chick's running around a field of wheat and spinning around with her baby, and then someone says, I want to live like that, and then they call her a fucking doctor, and next thing you know, you're on a pill that you didn't need.
If you just started eating vegetables and going jogging every day, you'd be a way happier person than you were on that pill.
And again, let me say outright that the psychedelics are very effective antidepressants.
Psilocybin, being trial tested in human communities for thousands and thousands of years.
Ayahuasca in the Amazon, at least 4,000 years of use.
And anybody who's worked with psilocybin or ayahuasca enough will know that they do help with mood.
They do help you take a more positive outlook on life.
And whether that's to do with altering the chemical balance in the brain, because they do work on the serotonin system in the brain chemically, or whether it's to do with the revelation that one has that life is an incredible gift and an incredible joy and a privilege to be alive.
This is what we forget.
We're immersed in the cares and woes of daily life, constantly struggling to pay the next bills, to get on in work, relentlessly driven by To produce and consume and we forget that it's a magical, enchanted Gorgeous, glorious universe that we live in and we have this amazing bodies and we should just celebrate every minute of it.
It's hard to keep a balanced perspective, but I think it's also important to realize that perspective-shifting, consciousness-shifting experiences can also change the way you look at the world, and when you change the way you look at the world, it can adjust the way your brain functions.
And that it's not an either-or situation.
It's a combinatory situation.
It's like they might affect your brain in a very chemical way, but also just the altering of a perspective could enhance your mood.
And it could enhance the way your body and brain function.
The perspective enhancing aspects of that, I do believe, can change your overall health or change your overall consciousness, which can change your overall health.
Yeah, there's a lot going on, man.
And I think these conversations are super important for people that are uninitiated and that haven't...
They don't understand what's the hoopla all about.
Why is everybody...
Goddammit, that Rogan's going on about drugs again.
I have a constituency of my readers and people who follow me on Facebook who are constantly throwing that Hancock's a druggie and all of this at me.
And I just feel this is a really important conversation to have and fundamentally get right down to – To the bottom of what it's about, it's about this whole issue of us taking back power over ourselves.
That's what it's really about, and it needs to be seen in that context, to make decisions about our own lives, right or wrong, and to learn from our mistakes and to grow and develop as a result.
Well, for you, it must be incredible, because that's the site of so many ancient, huge, monolithic structures that are unexplained, as far as their construction methods or...
And they are lifted to 20 feet above the ground and built into a wall.
I've sat on top of one of those stones.
I've been down underneath it and looked up at it.
840 ton stones.
This is a gigantic achievement.
Now, the Orthodox view is...
That the Romans did everything.
That they built those foundations and they built the temple.
I think, and many researchers who've studied them in this field agree with me on this, that actually the Romans found a much more ancient site, which was just extraordinarily megalithic, gigantic stones, and they built their temple on top of it.
And later historians have simply given the whole thing to the Romans without considering what was going on there.
And part of the reason I think that is because of these stones that are still in the quarry, which I was trying to – I don't know if it showed up on the screen.
You got it.
I'm trying to show it, you know, I'm trying to show it just now.
These stones stood in the quarry, okay?
Now, so what the historians say is that the Romans, okay, they found they could move the 840 ton stones.
The Romans found they could move the 840 tonne blocks, and they did.
This is the orthodox theory, and then they built their temple on top of it.
But they found they couldn't move these 1,200 plus tonne blocks, and by the way, this one is completely separated from the bedrock out of which it's been caught.
They couldn't move them, so they left them in the quarry.
I think that actually proves that the Romans didn't create the 840 ton megalith, because if the Romans had known that these gigantic blocks, if they had cut the blocks, okay, if they had cut them themselves, which we must say they did, if we are saying that the Romans were responsible for these megaliths, if the Romans had cut these blocks themselves, they knew they were there.
And the very first thing they would have used for the smaller blocks that they put into place in the Temple of Jupiter was these large blocks.
They would have sliced them up like a loaf of bread into smaller blocks and moved those over to the temples.
The fact that these huge megaliths still stand in the quarry suggests to me that they were buried when the Romans came to that site because otherwise it would have been the very first thing they would have used for quarrying smaller blocks.
That they were buried and that the Romans found an existing prehistoric megalithic platform And on top of it, they built their Temple of Jupiter.
And there are plenty of people arguing that the Romans did it.
I feel, along with other researchers who've approached this subject, I feel I want to look at alternative possibilities for what these megaliths are all about.
And that's one of the things I've been doing for the last year is traveling around the world.
I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to do this.
and one of the countries that i visited and i want to to really mention this is armenia where i have seen incredible stone circles just wonderful dwarf stonehenge make make us just stand in awe and look at the way that these huge megalithic stones in the what is called the holes drilled in them to line up with particular areas of the sky.
And an Armenian archaeoastronomer from that kind of data believes that the place called Karahunj is not just 2,000 or 3,000 years old, as most historians believe, but well over 12,000 years old.
Because of the astronomical alignments, that the positions of the stars in the sky change very slowly down the ages, that the alignment to the solstices changes because there's a slow nod on the axis of the earth, very, very slow over tens of thousands of years, which means that if the very slow over tens of thousands of years, which means that if the sun rises at a certain point on the horizon on the summer solstice today in 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 years time, that point on the horizon
You wouldn't notice it in a lifetime.
You wouldn't notice it in 10 lifetimes.
But if you stay long enough, you'll note that actually the sun isn't rising in the same place on the horizon anymore.
But the effect is, because the Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars and which we observe the other celestial bodies, such as the moon and the sun, the Earth is our viewing platform.
If you change the orientation in space of that viewing platform, then the rising points of stars, the moon, the sun change, and the positions of the stars and the sky change.
Wow.
And it becomes a kind of language.
Once you...
Understand this, that it is universally available to us.
The calculations can be done.
We can do it.
Anybody can buy computer software today, which will show you the ancient skies over any point on the Earth's surface at any time in the last 30,000 years.
And here I cite the work of my close friend and colleague, Robert Boval, in particular, in his book, The Orion Mystery.
You take the three great pyramids of Giza, and you look at the heavens overhead.
And you also look...
At the religious system of the ancient Egyptians.
What was important to them?
What did they believe?
You pretty soon discover that stars were incredibly important to them.
Stars cover the inside of the ceilings of all tombs, all the pharaoh's tombs, for example.
Monuments are lined up to particular places on the horizon where a star, perhaps it's Sirius, whose counterpart amongst the gods was the goddess Isis.
Perhaps it's Orion.
Whose counterpart amongst the gods was the god Osiris.
This is the thing.
You have a mythology that speaks of entities who are clearly stated to be connected to particular asterisms, particular constellations.
That's the first thing.
Are the constellations that are being said to have a reflection upon the ground in architecture, were they significant to the culture concerned?
Well, yes.
Absolutely.
The constellation of Orion was of enormous significance to the ancient Egyptians.
Therefore, It has to be a matter of interest that the three pyramids on the ground are laid out in a pattern that is temptingly similar to the pattern of the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion.
Then you have shafts which run through the body of the Great Pyramid.
There's a place called the King's Chamber high up in the Great Pyramid.
It has a shaft in its north and south wall, which are about eight inches high and eight inches wide.
And those shafts cut all the way through the body of the pyramid, and they come out on the south and north sides of the pyramid.
You can actually, and it's been done in the past, you can drop a cannonball in at the outside entrance to those shafts, and that cannonball moments later will appear in the king's chamber.
The shafts are about 200 feet long.
Okay?
In the queen's chamber down below, there are also two shafts.
These shafts do not exit on the outside of the pyramid, which creates a mystery of its own, of great interest, what is at the other end of those shafts, but they do have very definite alignments.
Thank you very much.
All of those four shafts that shoot up out of the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber all targeted very significant stars in the sky at that time.
Like, for example, the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber targeted the star Sirius at exactly the moment that the star crosses the meridian.
That's the north-south line that divides the sky above our heads.
At exactly the moment that the star crosses that line The shaft targets it and you could fire a laser beam up and you'd hit that, in theory, you'd hit that star.
The alignment is that great.
So they're locking the pyramid in, in the epoch of 2500 BC, to four significant stars in the sky.
Another one of those stars is the lowest star of the belt of Orion.
That tells us that this is a dating mechanism of some kind.
And it can't be an accident that that's the case.
And once you understand precession, you understand that these alignments will change.
So it therefore becomes very interesting to discover that the orientation of the pyramids on the ground, which Robert argues are the terrestrial reflection of the three stars of the belt of Orion, that the orientation of the pyramids on the ground because of precession shifts very slowly down the ages.
And you can see this clearly on any good SkyMap program.
As you go back in time, you find that the constellation of Orion, at the moment it crosses the meridian, the same place that was targeting the star Sirius at the moment it crosses the meridian, that the perfect alignment between the belt stars of Orion and the three great pyramids of Giza is not in 2500 BC, but in 10,500 BC, 8,000 years earlier.
So we have a very interesting problem here.
Either it's all coincidence...
Or the pyramids are monuments that speak both to the age of the ancient Egyptians, 2500 BC, and to a much earlier time.
Well, that's, again, the third part of the lock, and Robert and I looked at this in depth together in our book called The Message of the Sphinx.
And so we have the Giza Plateau, we have the three pyramids laid out on the ground in the pattern of the belt of Orion in 10,500 BC. That's looking south.
Now let's look east.
Let's look due east.
East, of course, is where the sun rises, but people who don't observe the sun don't realize that the sun tracks back and forth along the horizon during the solar year.
It reaches its northernmost point on the summer solstice, 21st of June, and its southernmost point on the winter solstice, 21st of December.
On the equinox, The day that night and day are of equal length, the sun rises directly perfectly due east.
That's actually how you define an equinox, because the sun is rising perfectly due east.
And looking at it is the Sphinx.
Aligned, gazing directly, perfectly at the point of sunrise.
Now we have to consider what's behind the sun then?
What is the constellation of the zodiac that the sun is rising in?
Because that's what the zodiac is.
It's a group of constellations that by chance the sun passes through during the course of the year.
But that The constellation that the sun rises against the background of is also affected by precession, the wobble on the axis of the earth, and that changes.
You have roughly 2,160 years in each house of the zodiac.
For the last 2,160 years, we've been in Pisces.
And as I often say, it's not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol.
Before that, it was the constellation of Aries.
The ram.
Rams were incredibly important in the years from 2000 down to the time of Christ.
Just look at the biblical stories.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Great Sphinx is a lion, admittedly with a human head, but that head is rather small and we think that the head almost certainly was re-carved in a later time.
Probably the whole statue was originally a lion, crouching there on the horizon, gazing due east, At the rising sun on the equinox and at the constellation behind the sun.
And that constellation is, in 10,500 BC, the constellation of Leo.
As above, so below.
Leo, speaking to the Sphinx.
Orion, speaking to the pyramids.
Locking in to a date that is far before any civilization began.
But just at that point, when the Egyptologists say, well, it's impossible for there to be any...
civilization at Giza 12,500 years ago, just when they're very happy saying that and they're telling us that no other monument can be found anywhere in the world, which is 12,500 years old on this scale, lo and behold, up pops Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.
Gobekli Tepe in the area of Turkey that, by the way, was once historic Armenia.
Gobekli Tepe pops up.
It's dated by the German Archaeological Institute.
They discover that this huge complex of stone circles has been deliberately buried 10,000 years ago.
And the carbon dating, because you can't date stones, you have to date organic materials, the carbon dating of organic materials found with...
Those stone circles puts their age back to 12,000 years and more.
I have to confess that it was a nice moment for me when the New Scientist magazine in Britain...
Which, years ago, back in the 90s, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods, was amongst the magazines that attacked my work as, quote-unquote, pseudoscientific.
I don't know how my work can be pseudoscientific, because I don't claim to be a scientist.
And by the way, I'll just say, I guess we may be running out of time, but I'll just say, are we good?
I'll just say also Indonesia, which is the other place that my wife, Santa, and I have done a lot of research in the last six or seven months, has been found what was thought to be a 2,500-year-old site on top of a hill, a site made of blocks of columnar basalt, which forms naturally, but which can be used as a construction medium.
It's called Gunung Padang and on the top of a hill in a series of terraces is a rather extraordinary monument thought to be about 2,500 years old made of these blocks of columnar basalt.
No really thorough research was ever done by archaeologists.
A little bit of trenching down to about half a meter in depth was done and some carbon was brought up and dated.
But really the site, it was just kind of taken for granted that it was two and a half thousand years old.
Along comes Danny Natawajija, who is a Caltech-trained PhD geologist working out of the city of Bandung in a government agency of the Indonesian government.
In fact, he particularly focuses on earthquakes.
Earthquakes are his thing.
He comes along and he's intrigued by Gunung Padang.
First of all, that there's old traditions about it being a sacred place.
It seemed to go back a very, very, very long way.
And he starts to look at it as a geologist.
And what he realizes, suddenly it comes to him, he's not looking at a natural hill.
He's looking at a pyramid, on top of which is this relatively recent monument.
It looks like a hill, but inside it's a man-made structure.
That was Danny's intuition, but then he had to prove it.
So he put together a team and they did a huge amount of remote sensing work and some core drilling down to depths of about 15 meters into the top of the hill.
And what they discovered was incredibly tempting.
It supports Danny's intuition that we are looking at a man-made pyramid here.
It produces dates that go back as much as 26,000 years, right into the last ice age.
And the remote sensing equipment shows rather regular cavities inside the monument, which look like chambers of some kind.
Well, naturally, Danny and his team were stopped working for quite a long while by the archaeological establishment in Indonesia, who said, we know that this structure is 2,500 years old, and there's no need for any further research on it, and it just disturbs the local villagers and, you know, go away.
And so they lobbied and they had him stopped.
But Danny took it to the highest level.
He got the support of the Indonesian government, and two and a half weeks ago, they started work excavating, thoroughly excavating Gunung Pada.
And again, you know, I can't summon up a map magically, but if I were to do so, consider Indonesia, which is a long string of islands today.
But if you go back 12,500 years ago, that long string of islands is joined to a gigantic mainland, a huge ice age continent because sea level is hundreds of feet lower.
And therefore, Indonesia becomes actually quite a plausible place for some sort of hall of records, some sort of time capsule, because Gobekli Tepe is also a time capsule.
1995. 1995. And now, you know, after being scorned and put down by the archaeological establishment, there is enough new evidence out there for me to produce a whole other book.
There's a whole other story to tell.
Not an update of Fingerprints of the Gospel, but a new book.
And they decide not to look at it because it's so finely done that they think it belongs to the Ottoman period within the last four or five hundred years.
They began the excavations in 1996, and it's fine for...
Fine.
And now that they've finished the excavations, they decide that in that particular area, they're excavating other areas, they decide to stick this horrendous roof over it, which cuts out the light, makes it impossible to see the stone pillars.
The roof is badly built, so there are platforms built inside it on which huge heaps of stones have been piled up.
That's to keep the roof on if there's any high winds.
So suddenly, yes.
So suddenly the possibility of any kind of magical experience at the world's most intriguing place.
And mysterious ancient site is completely written off by this hideous piece of so-called protective architecture, which in my view is just the worst kind of vandalism.
I'm really offended by it.
I was in Gobekli Tepe in 2013. I went back again this year, and I was just horrified.
It made me feel physically sick to see what had been done to it.
Nobody else will really get to form an opinion about it because we're going to damage its appearance so much in protecting it that it'll lose its essential mystery.
Not many people who go to Chichen Itza and see the temple of Kukul Khan there, the pyramid of Kukul Khan, which is the famous monument of Chichen Itza, not many people realize that there's another pyramid inside it.
The pyramid that we see has been built on top of an earlier one, and there's a passageway that leads up to the top of it, and there's an altar, and there's a figure of a puma or a jaguar inside.
Unless you can find your way, unless by some miracle you can find your way through that fog, where the very first thing, if you're going to do that, that you have to do is you have to calm your mind.
And I made an offer at that time on your show where I said that if people wrote to me at a particular address, which is wargoddedications at gmail.com, and sent me their own address and showed me that they pre-ordered the book, I would send them a signed, dedicated book and sent me their own address and showed me that I would send them a signed, dedicated book plate.
In other words, I would sign a label, I would dedicate it to them, I would send it to them.
Little did I know that nearly 5,000 people would ask for those signed, dedicated book plates.
It became a massive labor of love for myself and my wife, Santa.
She's doing the enveloping, I'm dealing with the correspondence.
We're signing the book plates.
We're going to the post office.
We're spending thousands of pounds on postage.
But it was great.
It was a fantastic thing.
And it helped the book to get noticed because there was great skepticism about buying a second volume from my publishers unless the first volume worked.
And the first volume worked enough for me to be commissioned to write volume two of War God, which is called War God, Return of the Plumed Serpent.
First off, if you go to my website, go to www.gramhancock.com and go to the War God page.
It's very easy to get there.
Scroll down at the bottom of the page that shows the covers of all the editions and you will find a statement there and that is that if people write to me, if people pre-order, first of all they have to pre-order, either order Volume 1 or pre-order Volume 2. Amazon don't take your money until they actually send the book and I've got the links to Amazon.com there.
I will, when I finish my travels, and I'm going to be on the road until the 27th of October, but during November, I will send out those book plates again.
But what I can't do this time is I can't get into personal correspondence with people.
It was very interesting.
It was very touching and heartwarming thing that so many people wrote to me.
And so many of them, I wanted to speak back to them.
It's very cold, you know, to receive a letter and not to reply.
So I did.
But the problem this year is that I've got to write the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods.
And I really need to start that during November because my research travels will be over at that point.
I've got to write that, and I can't spend two months or three months corresponding in detail.
So my offer is, write to me.
Show me that you've bought the book or pre-ordered Volume 2, and above all, please give me your postal address, because you can't imagine how many times people write to me Asking for the book plates, and don't give me their postal address.
Please give me your postal address.
And when I get back from my travels, I will sign the book plates.
I will send you a signed book plate, which is simply a label that you can stick inside your copy of the book.
And if that results in a bit more uptake for War God II, it'll be good for me, because it's very difficult to start a sort of new career as a novelist at the age of 64. But you seem to be really enjoying it.
I love it.
I love writing novels.
This is why I was talking about warriors earlier.
I love getting into the spirit of the warrior.
I don't know why.
It's fascinating.
It's just absolutely fascinating.
What would drive a man like Cortez to take 490 men and face them against the might of the Aztec Empire?
Hundreds of thousands of men under arms who will kill you in the most awful way if they...
If they catch you, what kind of will does it take to do that?
And it's been interesting for me to get inside the heads of these people and also to consider, because I'm interested in them, supernatural elements.
Were they being misled by demonic forces in some way?
That's something that I examine there.
So I love doing it, but I'm known as a nonfiction author, and that's mainly what I do.
People buy nonfiction because they're interested in the subject very often.
People buy a novelist because they trust that novelist and know that his next book will be good.
At the same time, I didn't believe in any spiritual element to life.
I didn't see any of that at all.
It was only really when I started drinking ayahuasca in 2003. I suppose for a decade before that, I'd been immersed in the ancient Egyptian texts.
And the ancient Egyptians are all about the quest for immortal life.
They're all about how you live this life to continue on as a spirit and ultimately to live the life of millions of years.
And they very clearly indicate that Dark forces are at work in the universe which can mislead us, as well as there are light and positive forces that we can choose to follow which will lead us into very nurturing and worthwhile and excellent directions.
All those influences are there.
So that's there in ancient Egypt.
Then I start drinking ayahuasca in 2003 and I encounter seamlessly convincing parallel realms inhabited by intelligent beings, some of whom seem very dark and dangerous and some of whom are filled with light and joy and exercise some of whom seem very dark and dangerous and some of whom are filled
Now, I absolutely accept that all of this could be a projection or a creation of my own mind, that there is no exterior reality to it whatsoever.
It's just that's all there is.
But I don't think it's that way.
I think that what happens in a deeply altered state of consciousness is that we retune the receiver wavelength of the brain and encounter other levels of reality that are normally closed off to our senses.
And the first thing I would say to any...
I know that a number of people who've worked with psychedelics in depth haven't come to that conclusion.
I know that, but the conclusion that I come to, the little offering that I bring to the table and that many others have brought, is that there is a separate freestanding reality of some kind which we don't fully understand yet, and that in altered states of consciousness we can encounter, interact with that reality.
That's the view that I have now.
In that reality are spiritual forces, some of which seem to eat fear and energy and dark energy.
They seem to thrive on anything that's miserable or wicked or cruel or thoughtless or vile about humanity.
And at the other side of it are entities that glow with light and love and that seek to show us how we may bring to light that divine spark within us to go back to the Gnostic idea.
Those you encounter in a very direct way in the ayahuasca journey become...
Thank you.
It's unfolding over four hours, not four or five minutes.
And that is a huge effect.
And it had a huge effect on me.
And I'm not adamant about this.
I accept I could be fantasizing it all.
It's interesting that other people encounter pretty much the same beings and the same sort of drive to do something better than they've done before.
It's interesting that there's that transpersonal side of it.
I choose to believe that there are freestanding parallel dimensions and that we are encountering them in altered states of consciousness and that therefore there's interesting scientific work to be done because in theory we could actually begin the targeted exploration of those dimensions by using volunteers and psychedelics.
I choose to believe that that's what's going on.
I could be completely wrong.
It could just be the majesty of the human mind and we just invent all these worlds.
And the reference frame, and this is again where I got myself into so much trouble with Ted.
The reference frame is the reference frame of materialist science, and that reference frame says that all consciousness is a kind of accidental epiphenomenon of brain activity.
There's actually no reality to consciousness.
That is not something that's been proven scientifically and experimentally.
It is just the way that a large and influential group of scientists see the world, that everything can be reduced to material causes.
So the changes in brain activity that accompany visions, you can observe those changes on an MRI scanner, those changes in brain activity Are the experience you're having according to this reference frame.
Your experience can just be reduced to that and there's nothing else to it.
But that's not a fact.
That is a philosophical view about how reality works.
We don't know for sure.
It could easily be the other way around.
That the brain activity is simply necessary in order for us to see something that was always there, but that was normally closed off to our senses.
Yeah, and it's also one of those things where I feel like when you've experienced it yourself, you get a really better frame of reference as to why is this compelling at all.
Because it sounds preposterous to someone who has no experience.
But, you know, there's that thing that people, when you want to define certain aspects of whatever the psychedelic experience is, where they seem to be almost impossible to define for people who have actually experienced it.
The real problem is when someone who hasn't experienced it tries to define it.
It's like, man, you can come up with a bunch of really compelling arguments from a medical standpoint.
It's like, what's the effect on the cerebral cortex?
What's the effect on the visual aspects of your interpretation of this thing?
Is it because of this chemical interacting with that?
It's bad science to present it as fact when it isn't.
Many times, given this very simple analogy of the telescope, which I think explains the logical problem in the materialist view, if you want to look at a distant star with your telescope, you're going to point it at the right area of the sky, first of all, and then you're going to focus it.
And as you focus it, physical changes will take place in the relationship between the lenses inside the barrel of the telescope.
And that's the same idea with DMT, that it's changing brain function to allow you to see something that you couldn't – it's refocusing the brain, in other words.
Until very recently, it's been considered a career-ruining move, you know, for any academic to speak positively to psychedelics.
Even though they all knew the news, they all knew the positive side of this.
But this is, again, gradually changing.
And again, I think the American role, the role of the American people in changing the legal status of cannabis state by state is also going to feed into this and allow us to have a more rational dialogue regarding psychedelics.
Of course, I'm not saying to people, go out and take psychedelics.
What I'm saying is that these are very powerful agents and that they can be extremely healing, used in the right way, and they can change our whole view of reality.
Why should we be forbidden to explore that if, as responsible adults, we choose to do so?
Yeah, the argument is stupid, and I think the argument is eventually going away, and I think it'll be replaced by a new argument, and then the new argument is, what the fuck is really happening?
Yeah, that's it.
And your question about it, or your proposal, is a very fascinating one.
But whatever it is, those things are there, and you can benefit from them, or not.
And if people are having very bad experiences from time to time with psychedelics, part of the reason for that is the world we've created where these are illegal and where it's impossible for people to get good advice that they can trust and where there's this atmosphere of danger and threat that surrounds it.
Take all that away and this very powerful instrument can be managed much more effectively.
No doubt, and I equate it in a lot of ways, this idea of it being bad and negative.
I equate it in a lot of ways to vaccinations, and here's why.
There's this anti-vaccination movement in this country, and a lot of people feel like vaccinations are unnecessary, and they may have some good arguments.
They may have some good arguments, especially about certain vaccinations for things that are sexually transmitted diseases and things along those lines, like hepatitis shots and shit you're giving to little kids.
There's a real good argument against that.
And there's definitely an argument that there's a lot of medication that kids are taking, and is it the right amount?
But there's no argument that vaccinations haven't saved a fuckton of lives, because they have.
They've stopped a lot of diseases dead in their tracks.
Absolutely.
They also, much like we talked about, some people are allergic to cats.
Some people have very different biological reactions to all sorts of different chemicals.
And there's going to be some adverse reactions to anything you put in your body.
So, it's one of those scenarios, very much like psychedelics, in a way that there are going to be some rare cases if we make psychedelics legal across the board.
There's going to be some rare cases of a person in a bad state of mind or a bad...
Mental makeup or, you know, what have you, bad psychological makeup, fill in the blanks, where they take it and it's detrimental to them.
And that'll be highly publicized and used as an argument to stop all of these freedoms.
And Bill Hicks had the very best answer to that, as I'm sure you remember, you know, the lunatic who leaps out of the window imagine he can fly on LSD. Why didn't the fucker try and take off from the ground, you know?
It's just a strange argument to keep people from doing it because, especially this doctor that we were talking about earlier that's talking about cannabis and the addictive properties of cannabis.
This isn't even talking to someone who was addicted to cannabis than you.
It's still, it's a silly, like there's a lot going on when someone's addicted.
It's not all necessarily chemical.
And the ones that are chemical, you're getting paid for.
So that doesn't even make any sense.
The ones that chemically make you addicted is the ones you're getting money from.
And I think one of the reasons why they're notoriously mellow is because they're faced with overwhelming evidence that they ain't shit.
You're sitting there looking out at the greatest natural force that you could imagine.
It's an entire different world.
You're out there.
Literally, it's like...
If we had explained it in a galactic term, it would be like you're parking yourself next to the membrane between dimensions.
I mean, you are literally in this world over here, and right next to your face is a whole other world.
We couldn't even imagine that, but that's the fuck exactly what it is.
If you go to Santa Monica, and you go over by where that pier is, and you just walk along that sand, and just start walking out into that water, you're in another world in like 20 steps.
Not just psychedelic, but it's very isolation tank-esque in a way.
It's an overwhelming amount of information.
But there's like solitude in the sound and the noise that sort of drowns out the rest of Yeah.
Yeah.
static image because it's these water waves that are coming at you and they're very similar so you get in this very similar thing over and over again with very little variation and then there's the overwhelming number the gallons of water that's just so in front of you so you can't see past this fucking thing and it's dark So then there's the unknown.
The unknown, which is the big freaker.
You know, you're looking at this black monster, and sometimes when it's this black monster, you get a better sense of it than when it's this beautiful blue thing during the day, when the sun's hitting it, it's reflecting, because then you get all this visual stuff that's distracting you from the fact, that's how fuck It's a giant fuckload of water.
It's a giant fuckload of water and it's right there.
You know, Randall was so far ahead of the curve in recognizing that the gigantic flooding that came off the North American ice cap...
It wasn't just caused by what I used to think it was caused by, which is that lakes of meltwater develop on the surface of the ice cap and finally the ice dam breaks and the meltwater pours out.
Randall has been pointing out for years that the water flows were much too radical for that.
Something much bigger had to be involved.
So he was well ahead of the evidence when scientists began to realize that the North American ice cap had been hit by a comet.
12,980 years ago, set in motion the epoch that geologists called the Younger Dryas.
So Randall is a great expert in this area.
My wife, Santa, is traveling with us as well, and a friend of Randall's who's worked with him for many years called Bradley, and we're going to do a road trip from Portland, Oregon, all the way to Minneapolis, following the...
it's about 2,000 miles, I believe, following the southern edge of the former ice cap.
And Randall's going to show us the scars and tears on the landscape of what happened when that ice cap was instantly liquidized by a comet impact and huge tidal waves of water roared down off it across the land.
I'm going to take loads and loads of pictures, and we're going to go up in an airplane a few times and look at the land underneath us, and it's going to be a great, exciting research trip.
And it's the last research trip for this sequel that I'm writing to Facebook.
Any scientists who were attempting to argue that there wasn't a comet impact, now, with all the evidence that's come in over the last five or six years, it's just settled by the nanodiamonds, scattered in a huge swathe all over the world, which are a sure chemical imprint of a massive comet impact.
And they know...
A lot about it now.
It's really very, very clear.
And this was an episode that changed the world.
It killed off many of the megafauna that we've all heard of, the mammoths, the woody rhinos and so on and so forth.
And it got rid of what was called the Clovis culture, hunter-gatherer culture in the United States.
And I think it got rid of a whole civilization that we've only remembered in myth and memory.
It was massive in America, but the effect was everywhere.
Both impacts, because this comment broke up into fragments like Shoemaker-Levy 9, both impacts, but also, very important, the gigantic cloud of dust that's thrown up into the upper atmosphere.
So you have this immediate reaction of flooding as the comet liquidizes part of the North American ice cap, and then a huge dust plume is up in the air all over the world, and the whole Earth is shrouded in dust.
And cooled, because it's reflecting back the sun's rays.
So we go into this 1,300, 1,400-year period called the Younger Dryas, where the Earth gets incredibly cold, even though previously it had been coming out of the...
It's truly a gigantic event.
And then, weirdly, all our history, everything we think of as our past, begins at the end of the Younger Dryas, kicks in 12,980 years ago, ends 11,600 years ago.
The earth begins to warm up again.
And everything we know about ourselves, or can claim we know, unfolds in that last 11,600 years.
And the period before the Younger Dryas, we really blank on so much of it.
It's amazing that all this information keeps coming up to support this, and it's amazing if we do consider the possibility that it is true, that everything can be essentially shut back down to zero with some rocks from the sky.
That's absolutely right.
And that's something that we really need to get in our head.
That could happen.
There is a very distinct possibility that we could be hit by something.
The NASA photographs of the, I think they call it the black diamond, the Earth at night, What you see is certain areas of the world are brightly lit up.
Europe, North America, for example.
On the other hand, Africa and large parts of South America are dark because there's no electrification in those areas.
And those photographs are often taken to speak of our achievement.
Look how we can light up the planet like a Christmas tree so that it can be viewed from space.
But I would say it also says another thing, that if we were to confront again the same sort of cataclysm that hit the Earth 12,980 years ago, Then the people who would survive and carry the human story forward would be those very people who live in the dark areas, the areas that aren't electrified.
And we who live in the glowing lights that show up on those NASA photographs, who've become so specialized, who most of us are unable even to know how to plant a vegetable or hunt an animal, we're the ones who would be gone.
And the whole order of the world would be reversed.
Without a doubt, the information is something to consider.
Just the information about these It's something to consider.
And it's also something to consider that if that's correct, boy, what a magical time it must have been back when they had developed some sort of technology that was enabling them to make structures like Gobekli Tepe.
That's why I'm calling the book Magicians of the Gods, because there's something magical, something about it that we would call magic, but perhaps was just another form of science.
Yeah, whatever they were able to do, I mean, it's amazing that we haven't figured it out yet, but we're so arrogant in our assumptions that it had to be all the ways that we've already figured out.
Like this new ability that they've just found out, that they've taken people and they've used the internet to send information from one person's mind to another person's mind 5,000 miles away.
It's incredible.
But nobody else did that before that, so we didn't really think that that was it.
We thought maybe it would be a possibility, but now we know it's a possibility.
Well, whatever the fuck they did to make these pyramids, just because we haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean they were using wooden rollers.
They could have had some really incredible technology that just we don't have a trace of it anymore.
And it's almost like the universe is giving us a puzzle that's so incredibly in your face with its most obvious results.
And because we have these preconceived notions, that we're not willing to accept that as a possibility.
Like when people look at the pyramids, they go, well, you know, the thing is they build ramps and they use stone rollers and like, There's a whole faction who will look for the most boring, meaningless possible explanation.
But the fact that there are large groups of people whose mission is to look for the most boring rather than the most extraordinary possibility, it's good.
That's how we have balance in our society.
We do need to look with a skeptical eye and say that there could be mundane explanations for this.
But we also need to keep a tiny fraction of our research effort, perhaps a very small fraction indeed, To exploring alternative ideas.
Because if they do come out right, they change everything in the way that the mundane things don't.
And it's really worthwhile.
And the only thing, I understand why I've been subjected to so much criticism.
And I welcome it.
I've learned a great deal from that criticism.
But is it wise for us to live in a society which is hostile to the exploration of extraordinary possibilities?
Shouldn't we actually protect that and make that something which we encourage those who wish to do so in our society to do, just on the off chance that they might come up with something utterly world-changing?
Especially if it's done with careful consideration like you've done, or especially like what Randall Carlson's done with asteroidal impacts is absolutely stunning and fascinating.
I mean and what he's done is done with very careful consideration Absolutely.
Yeah, these ideas are fascinating, but what I was going to say was that it's almost like the number is so large, like 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid, which is so bizarre.
And your book, Fingerprints of the Gods, I've said it before when you've been on the podcast before, changed my single-handedly, changed my ideas about history.
Changed my ideas, not in any way discounting the amazing work that traditional historians have done, but just that these things exist that defy explanation and that I didn't know.
Just the fact that there is a guy from Boston University named Robert Schock, who's a prominent geologist, who said, this is clear erosion, and the last time there was erosion was 9000 BC. You're talking about an insane amount of time has passed since there was thousands of years of that rainfall, by the way.
You needed thousands of years to do what we see on this.
That's what I tried to do in Fingerprints, was to bring together people like John Anthony West, who brought Robert Shock to the Sphinx, like Robert Boval, like Randon Rose Flemath.
A lot of researchers were working in the field and coming up with extraordinary information.
And part of what I did in that book was to bring all that information together into a kind of synthesis, I suppose.
It's such an interesting theory, and it's such an interesting subject, and now that it keeps getting substantiated by places like Gobekli Tepe or these micrometeors, it's sort of like piece the puzzle together slowly but surely.
I think as time goes on, we're going to find there's going to be a bunch of civilizations that we uncover.
Those ones that they're finding in Mexico, and then, of course, there's ones that they're finding in the Amazon, where they think, just like we were talking about with the other- Fascinating.
They find a hill, and they think it's a hill, and then someone realizes, like, holy shit, this is a building, guys.