The Hidden Truth About Ancient Technology They Don't Want You to Know | Graham Hancock DSH #902

Racism and white supremacism and misogyny and anti-Semitism.

These are all in the open letter that the Society for American Archaeology wrote to Netflix to try to get me canceled.

No such things are in the show or in my life, but they seem to be words in the modern culture that are used to cancel people.

If you don't really have an argument,

fling those words at them and they'll have some effect.

All right, guys, Graham Hancock here today.

Just released his new season of Ancient Apocalypse, right?

Yep, season two of Ancient Apocalypse, focusing on the Americas.

Season one was released by Netflix in November 2022.

It was a very controversial show.

Got me into a lot of trouble with archaeologists.

They didn't want to see the show again.

They didn't want ever to see it renewed on Netflix, but

even wrote an open letter to Netflix to try to get it reclassified as science fiction instead of documentary.

But the fact is, it is a documentary and it's been very very popular with viewers worldwide and so we have a second season and it was released

16th of October just just just very recently

did they come after you again oh they're coming they come after me all the time they come after me all the time there's there's a faction within archaeology and it's only a faction there are many great archaeologists who I hugely respect and admire but there's a faction within archaeology that seem to believe that they own the past that the past is their personal property, and that anybody who doesn't have their qualifications and isn't actually an archaeologist really has no right to speak about the past.

But it's okay if that person speaks about the past the way they do, if it buys into their line.

But if you present an opposite point of view or an alternative point of view, they come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Right.

It reminds me of history class in high school.

If you questioned what they were teaching, you would get punished.

Yes, and that's the case with archaeology.

I've been dealing with this for more than 30 years.

my first really big book in this field was called fingerprints of the gods and it was published in 1995

uh it was the first time i had a bestseller i'd published books before but this one was a massive bestseller six weeks at number one in japan millions of copies sold all over the world that's when archaeologists started to pay attention to me before that i was too small but after that they started to pay attention and since then I've been under a continuous attack from

a number of archaeologists.

And one of them actually seems to have devoted his entire career to me.

He says he's been following my work for 30 years.

He's called John Hoops at the University of Kansas.

It's like having a weird kind of stalker, you know, following you around.

That's crazy.

But

the volume of this has ramped up a lot since Netflix simply because the platform is so much bigger and

I'm being seen all over the world and they don't like that.

They want the main...

mainstream archaeological narrative to dominate studies of the past and they want a controlled narrative.

And it's just, it comes with the territory.

And I welcome criticism.

Criticism is a good thing as long as it's good faith criticism.

But when it's accompanied by ad hominem attacks, you know, when

they suggest that my show promotes racism and white supremacism and misogyny and anti-Semitism, these are all in the open letter that the Society for American Archaeology wrote to Netflix to try to get me cancelled.

No such things are in the show or in my life, but they seem to to be words in the modern culture that are used to cancel people.

If you don't really have an argument,

fling those words at them and they'll have some effect.

Right.

That's crazy.

So when you say controlled narrative, do you think part of that narrative is painting our generation as the most advanced in human history?

Oh, definitely.

That's right.

The view is that there's been this sort of long linear progression from you know, cavemen back in the upper Paleolithic through

the Neolithic, gradually moving into farming, building the first civilizations about 6,000 years ago.

That would be Sumer in Mesopotamia, Egypt about the same time, actually a little bit younger.

And then onwards, you know, to us.

And there's a tendency to

see our civilization as what it's...

all been about, you know, that we're the sort of apex, the pinnacle of this human story.

And I just don't agree with that.

I think there have been many rises and falls.

And I think we are missing a very important chapter in our own story.

And

the way I phrase that is we are a species with amnesia.

We have forgotten.

We have memories, but those memories are in the form of myths and traditions.

And archaeology doesn't take myths and traditions seriously.

It regards them as fantasies.

So the fact that there are 200 myths from around the world that speak of a cataclysmic global flood which submerged huge lands and wiped out a former civilization.

This is a very widely distributed story.

In the case of archaeologists, they say

lots of individual cultures just made this up.

Maybe they saw a river flooding and they thought it was a global flood.

That's not good enough for me.

These stories are too close.

They've got too much in common.

And I think they are our memory of the time that we got knocked on the head and lost our memory.

And that, to be specific, is between roughly 12,800 years ago and 11,600 years ago.

And it's an episode of radical climate change called the Younger Dryass.

It's a funny sounding name.

The dryass, D-R-Y-A-S, is a kind of flower that flourishes in extremely cold conditions.

And they call this the Younger Dryass because 12,800 years ago, the world had actually been coming out of the ice age.

Many people living today can't really imagine what an ice age is like,

but you have to look at a situation where there's an enormous ice cap that's three kilometers deep, covering the whole of the northern half of North America,

covering the whole of the northern half of northern Europe, covering parts of South America as well.

And that meant that sea level was much lower than it is today, around about 400 feet lower.

And as those ice sheets began to melt, they raised sea levels all around the world.

But this happened in a series of bursts and episodes.

And weirdly, 12,800 years ago, the world is getting warmer.

And then suddenly it goes into this radical deep freeze.

And that is the moment when, I mean, everybody's heard of the saber-toothed tigers, the woolly rhinos, the mammoths, the mastodons, the giant sloths.

All of these...

megafauna, as they're referred to, the megafauna of the ice age, they all go extinct in that period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.

And there's a lot of evidence that human populations were very badly damaged at that time.

So that's why we call the series Ancient Apocalypse, because for me that is a hugely important punctuation mark in the human story.

In geological terms, 12,800 years ago is yesterday.

It's so close.

It's not hundreds of millions of years ago.

It's not 66 million years ago, like the extinction of the dinosaurs.

It's almost yesterday.

And

this event was global.

There is evidence for it right around the world,

but particularly strong in North America,

in parts of Northern Europe, and as far east as Syria, as far south as Chile.

There's even evidence for it in Antarctica.

There are a number of...

nobody disputes that this happened.

The younger dry ass was a real event, and that's not in doubt.

The question is what caused it?

And a number of theories have been put forward.

A lot of mainstream scholars simply say, well, there were glacial lakes that formed on the ice cap and the ice dam that held the water in those lakes back would periodically burst and would release cold water which would flow across the landscape, enter the world ocean, and then entering the world ocean specifically would cut the Gulf Stream.

That's why the world got cold then.

And I don't dispute that.

The Gulf Stream is part of the sort of central heating system of our planet.

The overall term is global meridional overturning circulation, a series of currents that flow all around the world.

But the Gulf Stream warms the planet up, particularly the northern hemisphere.

And it was cut 12,800 years ago.

But

that was what did it.

But nobody then asked the next question, why?

Why would that happen?

And the melting of glacial lakes is not enough.

And I support the view of a group of more than 60 mainstream major scientists, oceanographers, geographers, geologists, who are of the opinion that the Earth crossed the path of a disintegrating comet.

All comets disintegrate.

It's a normal part of comet behavior.

They're rocky masses bound together with ice, and as they come close to something warm like the sun, the ice begins to melt and they start to break up into many, many different pieces.

Some of them may be quite small.

Some of them might be the size of a house, some of them might be five kilometers in diameter,

and

it looks like the Earth ran through the debris stream of a disintegrating comet.

By and large, there were not massive impacts.

The research suggests that there were some impacts on the North American ice cap, and the shock and heat of those impacts was what released that meltwater suddenly into the world ocean.

But others were smaller, but equally devastating because you're talking about thousands of these things.

And what happens with a smaller bit of a comet, if it's say 150 meters in diameter,

not that small actually, but if it's 150 meters in diameter, it probably won't reach the Earth.

It'll blow up in the sky.

So it's like a nuclear bomb going off in the sky up above you.

And, you know, we have a recent example of, well, recent, 1908,

June the 30th, 1908, over Siberia called the Tunguska event.

There was a massive airburst of a cometary fragment, and that flattened 2,000 square miles of trees in a totally uninhabited area of Siberia.

If that had been over a major city,

the death toll would have been horrendous.

Wow, just from one comet?

Just from one bit of one comet, just 150 meters in diameter, that blowing up in the sky is absolute catastrophe.

It's not a a global kill event, but a series of them all around the world is what I and my colleagues believe led to this die-off of the megafauna and this interruption, this punctuation mark in the human story.

It's when the so-called Clovis culture of North America, which for a long time archaeologists thought was the first human culture in North America, they start appearing in the archaeological record about 13,400 years ago.

12,800 years ago, right at the beginning of the younger dryass, they disappear completely.

So they go extinct like

the megafauna.

So comets are one explanation, is the one I favor, but there are other thoughts.

Could it have been some kind of massive solar outburst that caused this?

I'm open to other points of view.

I've spent many years

deeply digging into this material, and I think the disintegrating comet is the best explanation, but other explanations are possible.

Particularly so, the disintegrating comet, particularly so since we still pass through the debris stream of the same comet twice a year.

The astronomers working with the team behind the, let's call it the YDIH, the Younger Dryass Impact Hypothesis,

they're of the view that...

The point I

want to make is that the astronomers who are working with the team behind the Younger Dryass Impact Hypothesis are very confident that the remnants of that comet are still there.

It's called the Torrid Meteor Stream

and the Torrid Meteor Stream has a number of very large objects in it.

One of them is called Comet Enke and it's about six and a half kilometers in diameter.

But the research that the team behind the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis have done suggests that Comet Enke itself is one very large fragment of a much larger object.

They think actually about 20,000 years ago, a comet came in from deep space, was caught by the gravity of the Sun, and that comet may have been as much as 100 kilometers in diameter,

and then began to break up, break up, and actually...

In some ways, you want one large object because your chances of hitting it are much smaller than when it breaks up into a debris stream that might be 30 million kilometers wide.

And that's the case with the Torrid meteor stream today.

We're passing through it twice a year.

We passed through it in June, 30th of June.

That impact over Tunguska in Siberia happened on the 30th of June 1908.

Almost certainly a fragment from the Torrid Meteor Stream.

And then we passed through it at the end of October.

That's the time people see, most often see the shooting stars from,

and those are more bits of the comet.

They're even referred to as the Halloween fireworks.

Wow.

So we're in a relationship with this comet and with the debris stream of this comet.

And it's now divided into multiple filaments, spreads out across 30 million kilometers wide it takes the it takes the earth two and a half days to pass through it

and and

it's still a real and present danger to to life on earth uh because of those large objects that are that are within it and and while i know that nasa is now paying attention to the risk of asteroid impacts, it would be worth paying much closer attention to the torrid meteor stream.

Because it's not gloom and doom.

We're at a place with our technology now where where we could do something about it if we recognize the problem and we're prepared to act on it.

Do you think we could stop a meteor?

Yeah.

Ideally, particularly with big objects, you don't want to blow them up with nukes because that could just make the whole thing worse.

What you want to do is nudge them.

You want a blunt object that's nudging them slightly off their course so that a course that would intersect with the orbit of the Earth no longer intersects with the orbit of the Earth.

And we can do that if the will is there.

Is there a way to predict where the debris is going to land part of Earth?

No.

No, not at all.

You'd have to react quick then.

Well,

there's a way to predict that we are going to encounter a particularly lumpy and nasty bit of the torrid meteor stream.

And the astronomers who've worked on this believe that that is going to happen within the next 30 years.

So there is still time to do something about it.

And I don't want to spread gloom and doom.

You know, maybe it won't happen at all.

But there are many threats to life on planet Earth, of which probably the most significant is humanity itself.

You know, we're a kind of suicidal species with this

terrible hatred and anger that's spreading around the world right now.

But, you know, we have the technology, we have the funds, and we could deal with this other problem,

the problem posed by the Torrid meteor stream,

if we choose to do so.

If we were perhaps to say, let's spend less money on creating weapons of mass destruction to murder one another with, and let's spend a bit more money on protecting this precious garden of a planet.

We could do it.

Absolutely.

We would all need to come together, though, right?

We would all need to come together.

And it's high time human beings did that.

You know, I'm...

I love the diversity of human cultures.

That's one of the great things about humanity.

There's so many different cultures, and I honor and value that diversity.

But having spent most of my working life traveling widely around the world and living in a number of different countries, it's become very clear to me that at a fundamental level, all human beings are essentially the same.

We have the same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams.

We all love our kids in the same way.

We all enjoy a good meal.

We all want to make something of our lives.

This is true whatever culture you come from.

And the things that divide us, in my view, are much less significant than the things that unite us.

And we need to recognize that.

And we can recognize that without sacrificing a single bit of the diversity of humanity.

We can celebrate that, but we can find ways that we can work together.

And above all, to stop this current of hatred that's running in the world right now.

It's a very

disturbing thing.

I think that what's happened is that people have forgotten how horrific the Second World War was.

I was born in 1950.

So that was just five years after the end of the Second World War.

It hung over me in my childhood.

Everybody remembered it.

It was very, very, nobody wanted to go there again.

But as the decades have passed, the memory of that horror has gone.

And I don't think people are fully aware what a nuclear exchange would do

to our civilization, to this

earth that we live on that is our home.

A nuclear exchange, we are quite capable of wiping ourselves out.

And the only way to solve it

is to have a rise in consciousness amongst humanity in general.

The problem is when you look at the people who are leading the world right now, these are low consciousness individuals.

I can't think of a single leader anywhere in the world who I would even want to pass the time of day with.

They're filled with their own ego and their own quest for power.

And they have, with nuclear weapons, they have the power of gods.

but they have the consciousness of petulant teenagers.

And this this is not who you want behind a nuclear button.

So I do think that the biggest danger that faces humanity isn't comet fragments or a solar outburst.

It's us.

Yeah.

When you study these ancient civilizations, were they fighting at all?

Was there words back then?

There is very little evidence of any kind of war taking place during what's called the Upper Paleolithic.

That means the most recent part of the Stone Age, which ends about 11,600 years ago at the end of this strange episode called the Younger Dryass.

Just as the world suddenly got very cold 12,800 years ago, it suddenly got very warm 11,600 years ago, and the last of the ice sheets melted into the sea and sea level rose again.

That is the time.

It's from then onwards, what they call the Neolithic, that we start seeing evidence of organized warfare taking place and that cultures identify with their particular tribe and group and they will gang together to take stuff from other cultures or to defend themselves from other cultures.

I see that evidence for warfare very strongly in the Neolithic and not strongly beforehand.

What do you think caused that massive change?

Ego, power of leaders.

I think in the in in the upper Paleolithic

was a kind of society where everybody was their own leader.

And I think that's the kind of society we should aspire to today.

We do not need to give over control of our lives and our future and the future of our children to so-called leaders who actually fundamentally are misleaders.

That's what they're doing.

They're misleading the world and they have the power of the media to harness and to project this

their particular idea and they always want to identify an enemy.

They want to identify someone to hate because I think the feeling is that if they do that, they can unite their own population behind them.

But that's too short term.

Yeah.

I just found out today there's 456 government agencies in the U.S.

controlling our lives.

It's horrible.

It's crazy.

We got to go back to communities.

Yeah, we've got to go back to communities.

And, you know,

people have got to start thinking for themselves.

We cannot rely

on the people who are our supposed leaders.

We should not invest such power in leaders.

It's time to change that.

But leaders can rise to these positions of power precisely because

people do let them do it.

They let them get away with it.

And that has to change if we wish to continue.

I love that.

And I agree.

But today, critical thinking is punished.

Oh, God, critical thinking is hugely punished.

There's a sort of

follow-the-mass kind of idea, you know,

and

the powers that be, particularly academic elites,

seem to feel that the public is stupid.

And they seem to feel that the public must be told what to think.

And it's most unfortunate that large numbers of members of the public are accepting to be told what to think and aren't thinking for themselves.

But we have all the potential potential for a growth of consciousness in the world.

I do see it happening.

I do see more and more people waking up.

I do see that happening, but maybe not fast enough.

Yeah, I think tides are turning.

I mean, your show's still on Netflix, so that's good.

They didn't cancel you.

They didn't get me canceled.

No, no.

And that was because people all around the world voted for the show by watching it.

Nice.

You know, regardless of what the academics said.

Yeah.

And

seems to be happening with season two as well.

It's doing very well at the moment.

Let's go.

I can't wait to watch it.

Have you planned out where you're going for season three if that happens?

Well, of course,

I'm not in control of commissioning decisions at Netflix, and I can't know whether there will be a season three.

But if there were a season three...

Yeah, if there were a season three,

I would love to...

devote the whole of it to Egypt.

Egypt.

Wow.

The whole season to Egypt.

I'd like to devote a whole season to Egypt because there's such a huge story to tell there.

And of all the cultures, the recognized cultures of the ancient world, it's the one that best preserved its memory of times before.

So with Egypt, how they preserve, you're basically referencing the pyramids and the structures, right?

Well, not only the pyramids.

The Giza Plateau is where, just on the outskirts of Cairo, is where you find the three great pyramids, and particularly the Great Pyramid, which is the last surviving wonder of the ancient world.

And it's where you find the Great Sphinx as well.

There's an incredible series of mysteries

surrounding these monuments.

Egyptologists tell us that they were built, that all the pyramids were built as tombs and only as tombs.

They had no other purpose, no other function whatsoever.

The fact that not a single burial of any pharaoh has ever been found inside any one of the hundred pyramids in Egypt doesn't seem to bother with that with that respect.

They were built as tombs and tombs only, and then later they were raided, and and that's how the bodies got taken out.

Well, fair enough, but impossible in the case of the Great Pyramid.

The Great Pyramid remained completely sealed into the historical era.

We know that in the 9th century, Khalif al-Mamun

figured out that the Great Pyramid should have an entrance, and it should be in the north face, because other pyramids had been seen that did have entrances in the north face.

At that time, the Great Pyramid was completely covered in casing stones.

Today, it looks like a series of steps, because all those casing stones fell off in the year 1301 as a result of an earthquake.

But we're talking 9th century now before they fell off.

They could not find the original opening.

It was so cleverly sealed that they couldn't see it.

So they just started hacking their way in roughly where they thought it would be on the north face.

And sure enough, eventually they did encounter the whole passageway and chamber system of the Great Pyramid.

Wow.

And nobody had ever got in there before them.

And when they went in, much to their disappointment, they found the whole place completely empty.

Now,

recently, there's been very interesting scanning work has been done on the Great Pyramid.

Remote viewing or?

No, well, not remote viewing in the sense of some sort of psychic action, but muon scanning, where actually you can see into what appears to be a solid structure, and you can see if there are chambers, cavities inside it.

We now know that there are a number of unexplored major cavities inside the Great Pyramid,

which could become accessible.

One of the most interesting,

by the way, the names of the chambers inside the Great Pyramid, these are all just names that archaeologists gave them.

We don't know what they call themselves.

The best known are the subterranean chamber, which is about 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid.

It's cut out of solid bedrock.

It's quite interesting to be there, aware that you've got a six million ton monument 100 feet above you.

A little bit claustrophobic.

That's the subterranean chamber.

Then you come up, you have the Queen's Chamber, so-called.

And and then above that, you have the King's Chamber.

Now, the King's Chamber has two very small shafts.

They're about this high and about this wide,

which

exit on the outside of the pyramid.

And so it was able...

Back in the Victorian times in the 19th century, people who were interested were able to prove that because they could put a cannonball in the outside place and it would roll down and it would turn up in the king's chamber.

But there are two such shafts in the Queen's Chamber as well.

They weren't visible until 1872, when

a guy called John Waynman Dixon went around tapping on the walls.

He thought, there's shafts up there in the King's Chamber.

Maybe they're in here too.

And sure enough, he found two hollow points.

Cut those through with a chisel.

You could do that in 1872.

You'd go to jail if you did it in Egypt today.

And sure enough, there's these two shafts, same sort of size as the King's Chamber shafts.

horizontal at first and then rising at an angle.

So in 1992, the first exploration of those shafts was undertaken by a German engineer called Rudolf Gantenbrink with a little robot that he called upoat with a camera mounted on front of it.

Upuat is an ancient Egyptian word.

It means the opener of the ways.

And they sent it up the shaft, 165 feet, comes to a door with two metal handles.

You know, when I say a door, it's that sort of size.

With two metal handles, they can't get through it.

So another robot has to be designed, which has got a drill on the front, which can drill through that door.

They drill through that door, they find a

four foot long gap and then another door with more metal handles which they've not been able to drill through yet.

Now goodness knows what's on the other side of that.

But this monument is inviting us to explore it and inviting us to take it seriously and not as a tomb but as something much much more important than that.

The whole argument that it was a tomb is fundamentally based on the idea that it was built for a pharaoh called called Khufu in the fourth dynasty.

His reign, we know, was 23 years.

Therefore, if he built it as his tomb, he must have built it in 23 years.

And again, Egyptologists say, no problem, of course he built it in 23 years.

I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times.

There's no way you're going to build that massive...

extraordinary structure in 23 years.

That's the work of hundreds of years,

not of a couple of decades.

Six million tons, original height, 481 feet, roughly 750 feet along each side,

angle of slope 52 degrees on the outside.

When you go inside, you find all the corridors rise or decline at the rate of

26 degrees, so half of 52 degrees.

tells us what that geometers were at work in the building of the Great Pyramid.

The monument is incredibly accurate.

It's aligned to within just a tiny fraction of true astronomical north.

And to do that on a monument that has a footprint of more than 13 acres is quite an achievement.

So it is an incredible place and

I would like to dive into those mysteries.

I intend to do so.

I have done already in some of my books, but I'd like to dive deeper, particularly now that we know that there are so many unexplored spaces inside the Great Pyramid.

The Great Sphinx, fascinating structure.

weathering patterns on the side of the Sphinx suggest that it's much older than the Fourth Dynasty.

The Fourth Dynasty Dynasty is roughly 2,500 BC, but at some point in its life, the Great Sphinx was exposed to about a thousand years of very heavy rain, and that rain didn't fall in Egypt in the last 5,000 years.

You have to go back to, guess when, the younger Dryas, when the Sahara was humid and wet, when there were lakes, when there were rivers in the Sahara, to find the kind of rainfall that could have caused that erosion on the Sphinx.

So the whole place is just absolutely fascinating, but so much more.

There's a temple called the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Upper Egypt, which bears on its walls effectively the whole story of Atlantis

as relayed to us by the Greek philosopher Plato.

And Plato said in the dialogues called the Timaeus and Critias, he said that

that the story had been passed down from a Greek lawmaker called Solon, who visited Egypt in around 600 BC.

And he went to another temple, not the temple of Horus at Edfu, but a temple dedicated to the goddess Neith at Sis in the Delta.

And there were extensive inscriptions on the walls, and he asked a priest to translate those inscriptions for him.

And the translation was then passed down to Plato, and that translation is the basis of the story of Atlantis.

Whoa.

Now, Egyptologists say, no, absolute rubbish.

Plato made the whole thing up.

There was no Egyptian source for the story.

But

unfortunately for them, the Edfu building texts have now been completely translated.

And that complete, they've been translated into German, not yet into English.

But that complete translation absolutely supports the view that there was a tradition that is very close to the Atlantis tradition in ancient Egypt.

And therefore, archaeologists...

Egyptologists, they may continue to pretend that Plato just made Atlantis up, but they can't any longer pretend that he didn't have an Egyptian source for that story.

Wow.

Because he absolutely did.

That's some of the most definitive evidence I've heard of of Atlantis.

Yeah,

it's very important.

And I'm going to be doing a lot more work on this in the future

with a colleague called Manusifzada, who is fluent in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and in German.

So he can work with the full translation, and it's just amazing what's coming out of that.

And I would love to get into this in more detail because I don't like the way that archaeologists sneer at the Atlantis story and try to invent all sorts of explanations for why it shouldn't be true.

And the one, perhaps the worst thing they do is that they try to separate Atlantis from the worldwide tradition of a global flood, as though it's somehow different.

Atlantis story is also talking about a global flood that submerged a huge civilization.

So, you know, we can't examine that story without...

remembering that there are 200 such stories all around the world.

It can't be isolated from those stories.

Absolutely.

So do these archaeologists believe Atlantis ever existed at all?

No, they don't.

They believe it's entirely a figment of Plato's imagination and that he was attempting to make some sort of political or philosophical point in talking about it.

Wow.

I think they're dead wrong.

And I'd love to have the opportunity to dive deep again into ancient Egypt and prove them wrong.

That'd be awesome.

Have you ever changed their viewpoints on anything?

I don't think I've changed a viewpoint of a single archaeologist ever in the last 30 years.

Wow, they're that stubborn, huh?

Yeah,

and I don't I don't even seek or want their approval.

What I would prefer that they would stop doing is trying to smear me with it with with kind of suggesting in a in a cowardly way, suggesting that I'm some kind of racist or white supremacist, that my that my work there's no basis for that.

But it's a very easy way to get somebody cancelled.

It is.

I'm up for the criticism, but not for the smearing.

I mean, yeah, you debated one of them, right, on Rogan.

I did debate Flint Dibble on Rogan, and I've just published a video

looking back on that debate.

And the purpose of the video is not to prove that I was right in the debate.

No,

that's not my purpose.

Again, the spin being put on this, Flint Dibble and his guys are saying, oh, Hancock's trying to prove he was right.

No, I'm not.

What I'm trying to do is to show the tactics of a mainstream archaeologist in a debate and how the information that that person presents, when you fact check it and this is this video is called fact-checking flint dibble and it's on my youtube channel and it's on my website website when you fact check it you find that the public are being told things that are not correct they're being told flint dibble says in the in the joe rogan debate with me he he says we have mapped three million shipwrecks that is completely untrue sounds like a lot

it's crazy if you try and work it out on an annual basis mapped three million shipwrecks actually what it turns out is it's an estimate by UNESCO and what has been found is less than quarter of a million shipwrecks and most of them from the last thousand years and actually most of them from the last hundred years.

So he used that to say that you know if there were a global seafaring civilization in the Ice Age surely we'd find some of their ships.

The fact is we haven't found any ships from the Ice Age

but we do know that our ancestors were seafarers during the Ice Age.

I'll give you two examples.

One is the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

Even at lowest sea levels, Cyprus was always an island.

It's surrounded by great deeps and it was never connected to the land.

And there's absolutely irrefutable evidence now that Cyprus was settled in an organized way by groups of up to a thousand human beings at a time, around about 12,500 years ago.

And they brought animals with them.

If you're going to settle an island that people have not lived on before, you can't just turn up by accident with two or three people.

You'll go extinct within a generation.

You have to have a large population that will resist extinction.

So it's completely accepted that they had ships and pretty good ships that could move large numbers of people and their animals across the 60 or 70 kilometers of open water to Cyprus.

Same in Australia.

We know it's been inhabited by human beings for more than 50,000 years.

And even at the peak of the ice age, when sea level was at its lowest, you could do quite a bit of island hopping.

But once you come to Timor, you're facing 90 kilometers of open water.

And the only way that people got to Australia was by boat.

So to argue that, you know, the boats of a lost civilization that existed during the Ice Age should have been found, then you have to ignore Cyprus and you have to ignore Australia, where no boats were found, but everybody accepts that they were settled by people using boats.

Interesting.

Maybe they had another form of transportation that we don't know about.

Maybe.

This is

a whole other area, and it's a point that I often make, and I'll repeat here, which is if we're looking for a lost civilization in the past the biggest mistake would be to look for ourselves to look for something like us no it would be something very very different from us and and I get myself into a a lot of trouble with archaeologists here but but

I suggest that their

their technology may have been completely different from ours, so different that we wouldn't even recognize it.

I don't go into this at great length in any of my books or at all in the Netflix series,

but

there are so many myths and traditions which speak of, for example, priests chanting and raising huge blocks of stone into the air

that I wonder whether we're looking at accounts of some sort of lost sonic technology, which is using sound to levitate objects.

And by the same token, I'm a

great admirer of a guy called Rupert Sheldrake in the UK.

Rupert Sheldrake is a true scientist, but he's spent his life investigating what we call the paranormal and looking in particular at abilities like telepathy and telekinesis, the ability to move things remotely.

And

his work is extremely convincing that these are actually abilities that all human beings have.

One of his books is about telephone telepathy.

So the phone rings and you know who's calling you.

You pick up the phone.

That's a very widespread experience.

The suggestion is that these abilities were much more widespread during the Ice Age than they are today, and that we've lost touch with those abilities.

We've allowed them to lapse.

We may still have them, but we don't know how to access them or use them.

And we may actually feel slightly foolish, even suggesting that such things exist, because that's another point that mainstream science sneers at.

But

the possibility,

we've followed a path that depends exclusively on mechanical advantage.

We use machines to move things, we think along those lines, and those machines are extremely efficient, and they're very good at what they do.

So, gradually, I suggest what happened is that abilities to do things other ways lapsed, fell into disuse amongst human beings.

Because of technology?

Because of technology.

Yeah, it's even worse now with phones, right?

Yeah.

I mean, kids are just glued to their phones so average iq score uh score is dropping pretty fast totally my my wife sancta and i have nine grandchildren uh and we're seeing that already

well they know a hell of a lot more about cell phones than i do yeah but you're right they they are glued to them or glued to the you know the tablet and just just just watching stuff all the time and and um

I don't want to say that it's all bad,

but it shouldn't have a monopoly on the child's attention.

I agree.

Yeah, there's always that divide with science and spirituality, too, which I know the cool thing about you is you dabble with both.

Very much so.

I think that's what one of the things that's that's tragically missing in the modern world, particularly particularly a world which which is is kind of governed by science and has elevated science into a sort of religion where where scientists are the high high priests of of of that religion.

I think we've um

we've we've allowed them to have too much too much control uh over over the way that we think think and

have not freed ourselves from that control.

We don't need a religion of science.

Science is very useful.

It's very helpful.

It does some wonderful things.

I would not be walking today if it wasn't for science.

I've got two replaced hips.

I would be paralyzed if it wasn't for science because

my disc slipped out, my lumber five disc slipped out at the age of 32 in Nairobi, in Kenya, as a matter of fact.

And it became an immediate acute surgical emergency.

I couldn't I had no feeling in my legs I lost my legs completely I couldn't pee

they had to operate on me immediately but the operation worked and I got my in Kenya in 1982 that's impressive yeah

it's pretty impressive

particularly since

although it wasn't recognized then AIDS was in the blood supply in Kenya in 1982 and something went wrong with my surgery and I learned afterwards that I had been massively transfused.

They gave me a complete transfusion of my blood.

Oh my gosh.

So I was just lucky that I didn't get blood that had been infected by the AIDS virus.

But the bottom line is science put me back on my legs.

And so there are many good things about science, but it shouldn't have this monopolistic position where scientists are always going to tell us what to think.

We need to learn to think for ourselves.

I also think a lot of modern-day scientists are compromised because you look at who's funding their studies.

Yeah.

There's usually an agenda there.

There's almost always an agenda.

But to come back to the point, spirituality, I think the problem with our science-dominated society, and this was actually put to me by a shaman in Peru, is that Western civilization has cut its connection with spirit.

We've just cut it off.

And no, the mainstream religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they are not filling that spiritual need.

They are also hierarchies dominated largely by men who tell other people what to do.

Spirituality has to come from within the individual.

It's a process of seeking.

It's a process of opening up.

It's not something you can be taught.

It's something you have to experience.

And the experience of spirituality is unfortunately becoming less and less in the modern world today.

So I don't regard myself as belonging to any religion,

but I do believe that spirituality is a dominant force in my life.

particularly as I get older, I'm now 74.

Who knows how long I'm going to be around?

Could be any time.

I'd be very happy to live another 20 years

as long as I remain

physically competent.

But

inevitably, at my age, and even younger, we start to think about death.

What does death mean?

What is it?

What happens when we die?

And that's where spirituality can bring answers

that are very, very useful.

and helpful.

And in my case, I've opened up spiritually, largely due to ayahuasca,

to the vine of souls in South America.

My first experience with ayahuasca was in 2003 in the Peruvian Amazon.

And I've continued to work with ayahuasca ever since.

And it's had a very important effect on my life.

It's caused me to examine how I treat other people and

to persuade me to treat other people better.

And

it's also completely abolished the fear of death.

Really?

Yes,

I'm not saying this in any boastful way.

I don't have any fear of death.

Wow.

I think it's going to be an interesting experience.

Like I say, I'm not wishing for it to come sooner.

But what I do fear, definitely, is pain.

I fear the pain of cancer, the humiliation of

cognitive decline, the inability to use my body properly, that I fear

and dread.

But death itself, no, I don't fear it.

I believe it's the beginning of the next great adventure.

Wow, that's a rare spot to be in.

I think a lot of people fear death.

I used to.

I'm at a better place now.

I've experimented with mushrooms

and some psychedelics.

All of these medicines, these plant and fungi medicines, are a family.

They're all connected to one another.

It's largely the tryptamine family.

And they all allow this entry to a seamlessly convincing parallel realm at a sufficiently high dose not everybody is going to have that every time and with ayahuasca it's possible to have a whole ayahuasca session and experience nothing really oh yeah it's perfect perfectly possible in it amongst shamanistic cultures in the in in the amazon they they regard that as actually a really good thing why they they but they say that you're you're getting you're getting information but you're not recognizing it but it's there it's we would call it downloading right we would call it downloading um they call it a nada nada, a nothing, you know, but it's not a nothing.

It's just

it's everything.

But, you know,

it's this direct experience that

I may not be, as I'm told by Western science, I may not be my body.

I may not be my physical self.

The consciousness may incarnate in physical form.

There's no way to know at the moment.

We don't know what consciousness is.

Consciousness is probably the biggest mystery of science.

It's not fully understood what it is.

And is it generated by the brain?

Maybe.

Or does it manifest through the brain?

Is the brain operating like a television receiver receiving a signal rather than a factory making cars?

All of this is open and possible.

And the sense that consciousness is not local to the brain, that it's a deep mystery, and that consciousness can continue when the physical body goes, that's something that I've come to through ayahuasca.

And

eventually I'll find out whether I'm right or not.

Maybe it'll just blink out and there'll be nothing and the materialist scientists will be absolutely correct.

Or maybe, as I expect, and this comes from a study of many ancient shamanistic cultures around the world, maybe I'm going to have a fantastic adventure,

but also be required to account for the life I lived.

That's very important in all of these traditions.

You have been given a great gift.

You've been given the opportunity opportunity to live a life in a human body.

You've been given the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.

What did you do with that opportunity?

Did you use it well or did you waste it?

A life review, right?

They say with near-death experiences, your life flashes before your eyes.

Very much so.

Did you experience that on ayahuasca?

I certainly have.

I've also

had an actual near-death experience.

Oh, and you broke your hip?

No, as a result of an electrocution at the age of the age of 18.

Wow.

You were in some water and you got electrocuted?

Yeah, I was

I was 18.

I'd had a party.

My parents were away and the house was trashed.

You were a partier back in the day.

I was a partier.

Let's go.

I thought 30 people were coming, but 300 people.

That's how it goes.

And I was desperately cleaning up before my parents came back

on the next day, on the Sunday.

And I was standing in the kitchen.

The floor was wet.

My hands were wet because I was doing dishes.

My feet were bare and wet in water.

And I felt some, I'm a bit obsessive, compulsive in some ways.

And I wanted to make sure the refrigerator was properly plugged in.

And without looking at it, I reached my hand down to the plug and it had been broken off.

The back had been broken off during the night.

I hit the life terminals.

There was a huge bang.

And I was thrown across the kitchen, hit the opposite wall, slumped to the floor.

And suddenly I'm up.

around the light and I can see my own body on the ground.

Holy crap.

I did not have the full near-death experience.

I did not have the deceased relatives telling me it's not not my time.

I just had that, that moment when I was not my body.

I could see my own body.

That stayed with me ever since.

And it's been part of what I am now.

You astro-projected?

I guess so.

Whatever happened, my consciousness left this physical frame, but it was still able to see the physical frame.

And then, whoosh, I'm back into it again.

And I survived.

Fascinating.

Yeah, I believe there is a spiritual world.

Yes, there is.

We're very tuned in to the laws of physics on this planet, and we need to be.

We've got to

understand that if we fall off a high balcony, it's going to kill us.

We've got to be tuned into those.

And that close focus and what I think is rightly referred to as the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, which is highly valued by our society, that tends to diminish or dissolve all other states of consciousness.

The alert problem-solving state of consciousness is the dominant state of consciousness in the world today.

So when somebody says that they've received important information in a dream, mainstream scientists will just ridicule that and laugh at it.

But in the ancient world, dreams were seen as a path to true knowledge.

Wow.

That they could bring true knowledge.

And

there was always a recognition that not all dreams do that.

that some dreams do and some dreams don't.

And the talk was of a gate of ivory, a gate of sore and ivory.

If your dream comes through that gate, it's just flim-flam.

flam, it's just fiction in your own mind.

But if it comes through the gate of horn, then it's a true telling.

And you need to pay attention to that dream because it's giving you information that will be of value.

And I believe that it's the same with the deep trance state that we can get into with powerful psychedelics.

I don't think it's an accident that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak credited the Apple computer to their LSD trips.

I don't think it's an accident that Kerry Mullis

credited the the the Polymeraise PCR reaction to

LSD.

Again, the same thing.

Francis Crick

won the Nobel Prize for the double helix structure of DNA.

He said he got that he got the final insight into that, which really made him understand it as a result of an LSD trip.

Wow.

So, you know, the evidence is that these experiences, which have been so demonized by our culture for for so long may actually be fundamental even to scientific advances.

Absolutely.

They may be fundamental to that and that locking ourselves exclusively in the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, we may be limiting our potential to learn from other states of consciousness.

100%.

Look at Elon Musk even.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

He's announced that he does, I forget those psychedelic keys.

Ketamine.

Ketamine, yeah.

I haven't tried that one.

I haven't tried ketamine either.

I hear some interesting things about it.

Since we're talking psychedelics,

I'd like to make clear that

psychedelics are for adults.

They're not for children.

They're for adults and they're not for recreation.

Properly used psychedelics are about deep self-exploration.

They're not for play.

I mean, I'm not going to criticize somebody if they do take a mushroom trip for fun,

but fundamentally, here are tools that can enable us to realize parts of ourselves that we may even have hidden from ourselves.

And

the important thing is that we have laws now.

This is one of the things I love about the US, by the way, is that state by state, laws can be changed.

Cannabis is not a psychedelic, but I celebrate the fact that people have voted with their feet in so many states in America now, and that cannabis is legally available, that we can have cannabis without fearing that the state is going to step in and ruin our lives and shame us and humiliate us and even put us in prison.

This is a good thing that's happening and I'm glad that it's come from the bottom up, from people rather than from government down.

The

war on drugs, I think Richard Nixon was the demon behind that.

It's a fundamental abuse of adult human rights.

Adults should have a right to make sovereign decisions about their own bodies, their own health and their own consciousness, so long as they do no harm to others.

And, you know, we already have huge numbers of laws that deal with us if we do harm to others.

So long as we do no harm to others, the state, the government, should stay out of our heads.

It should stay completely out of our heads.

I don't understand why this isn't a Republican issue.

The Republicans, as far as I'm British, so I'm not...

completely familiar, I'm not completely familiar with American politics, but as I understand the Republicans, they claim themselves to be the party of individual individual liberty, of individual freedom.

Well, you can't be free as an individual if your government can tell you what to experience in the inner sanctum of your own consciousness.

How can you claim to be free when you're not free to make that decision about your own body and your own health and your own consciousness?

There's nothing more an intimate a part of ourselves than our consciousness.

So I do regard it as...

as an abuse of human rights that governments have this power to ruin our lives if we explore psychedelics.

Again, America America is changing this story.

I think psychedelics, particularly psilocybin mushrooms, are legal now in Oregon.

Good for Oregon for doing that.

That's how it should be everywhere.

These things shouldn't be surrounded by shame.

And once legalized, you can then be sure of the quality of what you're getting.

Right.

Yeah, it's probably safer in the long run.

It's much safer in the long run.

I've been,

again, we're not talking about a psychedelic now, but I've been using cannabis most of my adult life.

It's very important to me when I'm writing.

But in Britain, it's illegal.

I'm actually one of the very few people in Britain who now is a licensed medical marijuana patient.

Oh, nice.

That law came in quietly.

They didn't talk too much about it.

I didn't hear about that over there.

Well, I looked into it, and I'm a licensed medical marijuana patient, which means that I can get high-quality cannabis.

Nice.

Completely different from the stuff I used to buy illegally on the streets from a guy with a very ferocious dog on a leash as we exchange the bag for money.

I'm so happy that that's not the case.

They have no excuse to interfere in my life.

I'm consuming it legally, and that is my right as an adult to do that.

This is how it should be for everyone, everywhere.

People should be able to make these decisions for themselves.

I agree.

I think the prison system would be impacted.

That's why they don't do it.

brings in so much money.

The prison system is a money-making enterprise, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a huge one.

And pharma.

Yeah.

And big pharma, yeah.

It's a money-making enterprise, and it's making that money off often marginalized groups in our societies as well.

Yeah.

It's shameful.

It's shameful.

So wrong that for possession of a substance, somebody could be sent to jail.

And once sent to jail, their life is potentially ruined.

It's very hard to get another job.

All kinds of problems arise after that.

Yeah, all the trauma from jail, too.

And yet, look at us.

We're a society, Western technological society.

We're a society that celebrates alcohol.

Yep.

You could buy it.

It's advertised everywhere.

You can buy it like it's candy.

Yeah, you can buy it like candy.

And alcohol truly is a dangerous drug.

Cannabis is not a dangerous drug.

I don't think there's any lethal dose of cannabis.

I mean, you might send yourself to sleep, but you're not going to kill yourself by smoking a few joints, you know.

But there certainly are lethal doses of alcohol.

And look at what alcohol does.

Look at the illnesses that it causes, the cirrhosis of the liver.

Look at the brain damage that it causes.

Look at the fights that it causes because it brings out aggression in people.

Look at the road accidents that it causes.

Alcohol is a very harmful, dangerous drug.

So it's absurd and hypocritical for a society to say, feel free to drink as much as you want, but we're going to send you to prison if you smoke cannabis.

It's insane.

Crazy.

It's completely nuts.

I didn't know you write on it.

That's cool to hear.

You write on cannabis?

I do.

Well, I have indeed.

I've written a whole book published in 2005 and recently re-released in America.

The book was originally called Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.

And the edition that's just been brought out in, it was published in 2005.

2022, a new edition of it was brought out in the US called Visionary.

And this book is

the same text as the original book, but I've added a forward and an afterword to it.

This book is looking at the role, specifically at the role of psychedelics and at the role of altered states of consciousness in the making of the modern human mind.

And the moment that I say that, it's really important that I pay tribute to the late, great Terence McKenna and his book, Food of the Gods.

Terence was ahead of his time.

He saw the role that psychedelics had played in making human beings able to realize their potential.

Wow.

And Professor David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, he's shown that

all the cave art and rock art that we see around the world with its geometric patterns and its zigzag lines and its entities that are part animal, part human in form.

These are the classic

visions that one gets in a deeply altered state of consciousness.

Those were shamans who were entering deeply altered states of consciousness, perhaps with psilocybin mushrooms, perhaps in South America with ayahuasca.

And when returning to the everyday state of consciousness, they painted their visions.

Interesting.

When you study those ancient art pieces, are they similar around the world?

Yeah, astonishingly similar.

That's interesting, right?

Yeah, that is very interesting.

But even more more interesting, for example, the cave of Lascaux in France, about 17,000 years old.

It's full of these classic visionary depictions.

They call them therianthropes, a creature that's part animal and part human in form from the Greek therion, meaning wild beast, and anthropos meaning man.

These are all over the walls of Lascaux.

The geometric patterns are all over the walls of Lascau.

And the interesting thing is that shamans in the Amazon today,

after drinking ayahuasca, will very often paint their visions.

One of the best who I knew personally was Pablo Amaringo, and I know Francisco Montes Schuna, who I drank ayahuasca with while we were making season two of Ancient Apocalypse.

We don't actually show me drinking ayahuasca,

but

we show me sitting with the shaman.

I've had more than 75 journeys with ayahuasca.

It's a very important

place

that it plays in my life.

The interesting thing is that when Amazonian shamans paint their visions, the paintings are so similar to the ancient cave art that we find all around the world.

Whether we find it in Lasco Cave in Europe or in Peshmeo Cave in Europe or in Indonesia or whether we find it amongst the Aborigines in Australia,

this is the common factor, these geometric patterns and the entities that are part human, part animal in form.

Now, important new research is being done at the University of California at San Diego

and at Imperial College in London and that research is being done with dimethyltryptamine, DMT.

DMT is the active ingredient of ayahuasca.

DMT cannot be absorbed orally but ayahuasca allows it to be absorbed orally because the vine, the ayahuasca vine, contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

which allows the DMT in the other element of the brew to be absorbed by the gut.

In Imperial College and at UCSD,

they are giving DMT by intravenous drip to human volunteers.

Now, anybody who's smoked or vaped DMT will know that it's a very rapid journey.

It's typically 10 minutes or less.

Whoosh, bang.

By the fourth hit on the pipe or even the third, you're gone.

And you're in another place.

Completely convincing parallel realm.

But it's overwhelming.

There's so much of it.

It's so fast.

It comes onto you so quickly.

The entities, the beings that communicate with you there, if that's what they are, that's how you experience them.

It's so sudden.

So what they're doing at these two universities is they're looking at what happens if somebody can be kept in the peak DMT state for an hour, which they can do.

At the same time, they'll put them in an MRI scanner.

They'll even interview them and ask them.

And again and again, they report meeting sentient entities who are communicating with them, who are giving them information that is of value to them.

They often describe those sentient entities as part human, part animal in form.

And of course, all the geometric patterns are seen as well.

So something very interesting going on right now.

I tried to enroll in the Imperial College study,

but I did have an episode of epilepsy a few years ago, which was pretty bad.

Was that during your ayahuasca journey?

No, it wasn't.

It was during a research trip in New Mexico.

Oh.

The first one.

But that one, that was relatively minor, and it wasn't diagnosed as epilepsy.

Three months later, I was back in England and I had a massive epileptic seizure, which was so severe that it couldn't be stopped.

They had to bring two ambulances to get me out of there.

I was thrashing.

Apparently, my wife, Santa, told me, I don't remember any of it.

Roaring, shouting.

They had to hold me down, put me into the ambulance.

By the time they got to the hospital and were able to study the situation properly, the medics came to Santa and they said, look, you have to brace yourself.

You're probably going to lose your husband.

Whoa.

Or if he makes it through, he's going to be severely brain damaged.

But we're going to try one more thing.

And they put me in an induced coma for 48 hours.

And when I came out of that 48-hour coma, I was back.

What?

Yeah, I was back.

I was okay.

But for that reason, because

there's no real reason why having epilepsy should be a risk with DMT.

I've taken DMT.

in pure form at least 15 times, in ayahuasca 75 times.

It's never done me any any harm but they want to be super safe they don't want they don't want somebody having an epileptic seizure in the middle of their study but I'm hoping maybe the University of California at San Diego will let me will let me volunteer because I would like to be part of that study

and and you see the thing is ayahuasca will give you a long journey it will give you a four-hour journey

but that is interrupted by the physical effects of ayahuasca the vomiting the diarrhea which are a very common part of ayahuasca whereas with the DMT given by these universities by intravenous drip, the physical effects are not there.

Wow.

You're physically comfortable.

That's cool.

And so you're not distracted and you can focus on the experience.

I hope they'll let me volunteer.

Brilliant.

Have you seen entities when you've done these DMT journeys?

Yeah, all the time.

Wow.

And they're half animal, half human?

Often, yes.

Particularly with ayahuasca, it's interesting.

because this is an experience that's shared by many people.

Most of us who've worked with ayahuasca and most of the tribes in the Amazon that use ayahuasca see the spirit of ayahuasca as female.

There's a few cultures in the Amazon that see the spirit as male, but the majority, we're dealing with a shapeshifter here.

Majority see her as female, she,

mother ayahuasca.

And typically, for me and for many others around the world, wherever they come from, she will manifest in the form of a huge serpent with a human head.

Or it may be in the form of a jaguar,

which has human-like features.

These are the most common manifestations of Mother Ayahuasca, and she is a teacher, and that's how she's seen in the Amazon.

She's seen as a teacher.

Listen to her lessons.

I've been obliged to deal with my problem with anger and realize the effect that my anger has on others.

And that has gradually made me change that aspect of my behavior.

I'm trying to get anger out of my life completely.

And thank you to ayahuasca for helping me do that.

I write, of course,

non-fiction books, but I've written some novels.

And the very first novel I wrote is called Entangled.

And that was a result of a series of five ayahuasca sessions, where basically I was given the whole story that I then sat down and wrote in the book.

So I have in my personal life an example of how ayahuasca

helped my creativity.

It allowed me to exercise muscles that I hadn't exercised before.

It gave me a story and it made me want to write it.

So I can understand why people have had important breakthrough experiences on these medicines.

I'm going to have to look into one, man.

Yeah.

I'm excited.

It's a very interesting area of study.

And unfortunately, we wasted 60 years because of the war on drugs not studying these incredibly interesting molecules.

Now at least science is recognizing that for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, psilocybin can break that vicious cycle.

For people who are facing terminal cancer and are fearing death, psilocybin, one powerful psilocybin journey, can break that fear of death completely.

They no longer fear it.

Wow.

Depression, psilocybin, again, very, very useful for that.

And a number of other related tryptamines too.

I had bad depression and anxiety, and then I started taking it and completely gone.

That's right.

It does.

Crazy.

So we're dealing with medicines here, which we're not dealing with demonic substances like that demon Richard Nixon told us.

We're dealing with medicines that have co-evolved with humanity and that fundamentally play a very helpful role.

When you studied older animals, ancient creatures and stuff like that, did any evidence come of giants or dragons or anything like that?

When I look at the accounts of giants,

And there are many in the ancient world.

There is indeed in

the book of Genesis in the Bible.

There were giants in the earth in those days when the sons of God came unto the daughters of men.

There's those references there.

They're all over the world.

I may be wrong, but I don't interpret those references as physical giants.

I interpret them as intellectual giants.

I don't see a lot of evidence that would persuade me of the existence of physical giants in human bodies on this.

I mean, we have some pretty giant humans right now.

I mean, seven feet tall or so.

It's not completely unusual, but I don't see a lot of evidence for what we would actually call a giant

with a human form.

And also the question for me then becomes, okay, let's suppose there were giants.

What did they do?

You see, ultimately, whether it's somebody five feet tall or whether it's somebody 12 feet tall,

That's just meat.

That's just 12 feet of meat.

What does the person do do with their life?

Are they making giant contributions to human welfare?

Are they leading us forward in some way?

And that five-foot person is going to be just as able to make those leaps forward as that 12-foot person.

So I'm interested in what they did, not their physical characteristics.

I think physical characteristics of people are the least important aspect of ourselves.

They're the most in your face.

That's what we see.

But actually, they're very unimportant when it comes to the fundamentals of being a human being.

I agree with that, but a lot of people judge off physical appearances.

Unfortunately so.

And again, that's a sign of the state of consciousness in our society, that consciousness has not evolved to that state in enough people where it's possible to see that we're all part of one huge family and that our interests coincide and that we can help one another and look after one another.

With great power comes great responsibility.

And that responsibility shouldn't be used to smash and destroy other cultures that we dislike.

It should be used to build them up and help develop them.

Do you think consciousness is intentionally being suppressed?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I think that's what the war on drugs was all about.

It was about suppressing consciousness and inculcating a habit of obedience in the population as well.

So

the first thing is to persuade you, using the media and propaganda to persuade you it's in your interests to buy into this lie.

And that way immediately you're submitting to government.

You're saying, okay, government can tell me what to do.

So I think it was an experiment in

a habit of obedience, but I also think there was a recognition that unlike alcohol, which never leads leads people to ask any profound questions at all

unlike alcohol the psychedelics do lead people to ask profound questions about the nature of the society they live in and and and about what's going on in the world and I think that Richard Nixon type government didn't want people asking those questions they just wanted them to drink their beer and go to work every day and produce and consume and never ask a single question.

So we've been dominated by this mentality for 60 plus years and we're just now we're just now beginning to break out of it.

Yeah, because the U.S.

kind of inspires every other country to follow suit, right?

It does, very much so.

And that's a sad thing in itself.

That's, again, the follow-my-leader syndrome that we find all around the world that we need to break away from.

But now that...

minds are opening up in the U.S.

and we're recognizing the incredible therapeutic potential of these medicines and also recognizing their potential for the exploration of the mystery of consciousness.

Again, it's America that's leading the way.

Absolutely.

Do you believe in past lives, future lives, all that sort of thing?

I do.

Yeah, I I do.

And of course, this is a matter of belief, not of proof.

But I'm pretty sure that the universe has not invested in creating life on Earth.

The Earth is not alone.

The Earth is in a solar system, and the solar system is part of a vast universe.

And we can't separate ourselves off from that.

As far as we know, we're the only planet that has conscious, sentient life on it, but I bet there's millions of other planets that do as well.

I don't think the universe would have invested in consciousness in the first place

if it wasn't extremely important.

Yeah, I believe in it too.

I've done some past life therapy and things of that sort.

Yeah.

Well, see, past lives is the idea of reincarnation, for example,

the idea that

your consciousness can constantly be reborn.

in other bodies down the ages.

This is an idea that's sneered at and despised by Western science as well.

But when serious work has been done on it, particularly in in cultures that value the idea of reincarnation rather than cultures that piss on the idea of reincarnation like ours, culture like India, the idea of reincarnation is valued.

When studies have been done in India with children under the age of seven, you find that they often have distinct memories of past lives and they can identify particular locations where they lived their previous life and the researcher can go to those locations and find that actually what the person is telling them is true.

In one case, there was even an object hidden under the eaves of a hut, which was retrieved as a result of a past life memory.

And this is the work of Ian Stevenson, and it's a book called Children Who Remember Past Lives, and it's fascinating.

That is super cool.

It's clear to me now, with so many grandkids, I can see that under the age of seven, kids are very open.

They're very, very open and they're full of joy, the joy of life.

And

they want to embrace everything.

But then roughly after the age of seven, the world starts to close in on them and they cut themselves off from that so around the world past life memories are very common under the age of seven they're suppressed in Western culture they're encouraged in Indian culture and that's where the best evidence for them comes from and seven is when public school starts yeah that's right that's right straight into the indoctrination system at the at the age of at the age of seven so yeah without proof I do believe in in past lives and I do I do believe in reincarnation and again as with death who knows consequences for the choices you make yeah I could see why you get criticized by academia now

they would think you're loco for this yeah they do they they they they do think I'm loco and they're welcome to think that because I don't I don't seek their approval I think my role is to speak out on possibilities that precisely the mainstream are ignoring and not considering and to do so you know, in a thoroughly documented, thoroughly researched way.

That's why typically a book of mine will be 500 pages pages long i know we got one over there yeah the fake right here you've got american

man yeah you know probably a thousand footnotes maybe more in there well done yeah very very how long did this take you to write uh the actual writing of that book took one year wow when i'm when i'm writing i do nothing else i cut myself off from the world uh i'll sit in my office 16 hours a day seven days a week smoking cannabis and writing.

Wow.

And my critics will say, there, Hancock's admitted it.

All his books are written while he was on cannabis.

Well, yeah, I have.

Because, you know, sitting in one chair for 16 hours a day is physically very boring.

Yeah.

You may be mentally very alert, but physically you're bored.

And I find cannabis helps to take that boredom away.

It just

makes it a more pleasant physical task to still sit there.

And

I find it also opens me up in areas of imagination that I might not have gone into otherwise.

I can see connections that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

I love it.

I've had periods in my life where I've not smoked cannabis, where I've gone without it for three years once.

It was an interesting exercise.

It didn't affect my creativity particularly.

But I prefer and I choose to have cannabis in my life.

And the reason that I'm a registered medical marijuana patient in the UK is because I suffer terribly from migraines.

They're related to that epilepsy problem.

And And good cannabis, proper cannabis, whether as an edible or whether as a vape, particularly if it's about 50-50 THC and CBD, is very helpful for my migraines.

And it's radically changed the profile of my migraines in the last few months.

I can see that.

It helps with seizures too.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

Yeah, cannabis is powerful, yet they demonize it here.

Yeah,

they do demonize it.

I remember as a kid just smoking in cars, like looking over my shoulder.

The police are coming.

And why should we have to look over our shoulders, particularly when we're adults?

I mean, why should we?

And that caused me to have an anxious relationship with cannabis.

Yes, yes.

Like, I would get anxiety when I

totally, that's right.

And then the critics will say, oh, cannabis makes you paranoid.

No, it doesn't make me paranoid.

Smoking it puts you in a situation where you have every good reason to be paranoid because you might be arrested.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They know what they're doing, man.

Yeah.

They want us in a state of fear.

Oh, totally.

Like it's all about it.

The generation of fear in the world today, the deliberate multiplication and generation and spreading of fear, it's horrible to see.

It's horrible, yeah.

But I grew up watching the news every day, going to school like in a state of fear and just getting brainwashed at school.

Yeah.

When did you start realizing all this was kind of planned?

I think I've been an outsider most of my life.

But

initially, it was more in sort of minor rebellions against things in school.

For example, smoking cigarettes.

I went to a boarding school.

They had such a thing as bounds.

You were allowed to leave the school buildings, but you could only go about half a mile and then you were out of bounds.

So I would deliberately go out of bounds and smoke cigarettes.

I actually used to be a 40-a-day consumer of tobacco.

That's a whole pack, right?

Two packs.

Two packs?

And, you know, I was that classic later in my 20s and 30s, I was that classic sort of journalist with a cigarette hanging from my lip as I was driving away.

And then relighting, using that cigarette to relight another one.

But

at the age of 38, I gave up tobacco.

Probably a good move.

It was a very good move.

And that's about the time that I started to find the merits of cannabis

was when I gave up tobacco.

Good transition.

Yeah.

Yeah, those cigarettes are not good for you, man.

Back then, they probably weren't as bad.

I hope that I quit them.

Oh, I think they were just as bad.

I hope that I quit them early enough.

And I think I did.

Anyway, I'm glad that I did.

I don't understand why I ever smoked cigarettes now.

I can't bear the smell of it.

Could have been to deal with trauma or something.

No, it was just

a bit, just something to do.

It was a habit.

I chose my moment.

I was on a research trip in Somalia

with other colleagues.

We were out

of urban areas, completely in the open bush in the savannah for six weeks.

There were no cigarettes available.

I took none with me.

By the time those six weeks were over, I had no craving for cigarettes anymore.

Interesting.

Almost like you fat, like a dopamine fast or whatever it's called.

Nicotine fast.

Yeah, nicotine fast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

I lost the urge.

How do we get onto this subject?

I don't know, man.

We've been all over.

We've been all over.

I'm just fascinated.

You've lived a crazy life, man.

You've traveled the world.

I've been blessed.

I've been blessed.

I've been blessed to have

a wonderful wife and partner and my wife Santha.

I'm blessed to have wonderful children, wonderful grandchildren, blessed to have had the opportunity to travel the world, to live in different cultures, to experience those cultures.

And

I've been lucky to live a life with some adventure in it.

I've not had any kind of full-time job since I was 29 years old.

I'm now 74.

I've been self-employed ever since then.

And because I don't fit into hierarchies.

I don't fit into groups.

That's how we got there.

We got there about fitting into hierarchies.

And when did this first start for me?

It was a process, not a moment.

I was always on the outside.

I wrote an extremely critical book about foreign aid.

Current affairs was mainly what I did.

I used to be a journalist.

I wrote a book called Lords of Poverty, published in 1989, which is a critical book about foreign aid.

At that time, nobody was criticizing foreign aid.

Really?

No, no, it was considered as a universal good.

But what I saw in my travels, particularly around Africa, was the harm and the damage foreign aid was doing.

doing, and it was preventing people from making their own way forward in life, and it was being corruptly misused by governments, and the main beneficiaries were the aid workers themselves.

Not particularly speaking of the small voluntary organizations, I'm speaking of the UN and the World Food Programme and the World Bank and the IMF and institutions like that that are all involved in the aid business.

So I wrote a critical book about foreign aid, Lords of Poverty, the Free Willing Lifestyles, Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the Multi-Billion Dollar Aid Business.

That was one of the first books to to really show the dark underbelly of foreign aid.

But as time went by, even when I wrote that book, I had been traveling frequently in Ethiopia and had come across Ethiopia's claim to possess the lost Ark of the Covenant.

That was what moved me down a track of looking into ancient civilizations.

The first book I wrote about a historical mystery was called The Sign and the Seal, and it was published in 1992.

And it looks into the claim that Ethiopia makes to possess the Ark of the Covenant, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and how it got there.

And although scholars tend to sneer at that claim, it is central to Ethiopian culture.

It's absolutely fundamental.

And I found that they may well be right.

They've certainly got something very, very interesting.

But that led me down the path of writing about ancient civilizations and it led me to Egypt and it put me in front of the Great Pyramid.

And I, again, I started to doubt what I was being told by the academics that this was a tomb and only a tomb, and it had been built in 23 years.

No way, no way was it built in 23 years.

So I've always been an outsider who's not bought into the mainstream point of view.

And it happens that for really since the 1990s, my outsider role has been primarily on the issue of prehistory, of the possibility of a lost civilization in the Ice Age, and secondarily on the issue of the role of psychedelics in the evolution of human culture.

That's incredible that you questioned foreign aid in 1989.

That is way ahead of its time.

It was.

And

I'm very glad I wrote that book.

I would say that everything in that book is still valid today.

Wow.

The only things that have changed are the numbers, which are much bigger today.

Billions now.

I mean, U.S.

with Ukraine.

You got the president buying Lamborghinis and stuff.

It's extraordinary.

It's extraordinary.

No country that's rich ever got rich by another country giving them aid.

Any country that got rich got rich by pulling up its own bootstraps and doing it itself.

I don't think aid is help.

I think it slows down the development of other cultures.

Because people just pocket it, right?

So much of it is lost in corruption and wasted on big, meaningless projects that don't actually help anyone.

So much is just pissed away.

But the psychology behind it is that you need this in order to progress in life.

So it makes you lazy.

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah, you you got to get out and get it on your own like you did.

Yeah.

That's the only way.

I love it.

Graham, where are you traveling to next and where can people keep up with you, man?

Well,

in America,

we're talking on, what date is it today?

Today is the 24th of October.

24th of October.

Going up to Montana

and going to spend a few days amidst that majesty.

And then going over...

We have a son and a daughter-in-law and a grandchild here in Los Angeles.

and we have another son and daughter-in-law and two grandchildren in Concord, Massachusetts.

So, at the end of this trip, we're going to go spend five days with family over in Concord.

Beautiful.

And then back to the UK roughly the sixth or seventh of November.

Work on another book?

Yes,

I do have a new book in the pipeline,

which I won't speak about, but it'll take at least two years

before it's anywhere near complete.

The best way to find out out more about my work is my website, grahamhancock.com.

It's very simple.

And my YouTube channel.

But the website is the place to go.

All my social media links are on there.

I don't do a lot of multiple platforms.

I have Facebook and I have Twitter.

Simple as that.

But the website's very important.

And anything I'm doing, any new event that I'm doing is there.

I am going to do one speaking event in the U.S.

next year.

And it'll be the only one I do because I'm very, very busy next year.

But that speaking event will be 19th to the 20th of April in Sedona, Arizona, which is one of my favorite places in the world.

Same way.

I got engaged there.

Did you?

Yeah.

I love Sedona.

It's just such a fantastic place.

Energy.

Beautiful.

And that's why I accepted that offer to speak there.

And it's going to be called The Fight for the Past.

And it's going to deal with this whole issue with archaeology attempting to control our understanding of the past rather than help us to understand the past better.

Beautiful.

And that's up on my website as well.

Awesome.

We'll link everything below.

Thanks so much for for coming on, Graham.

Thank you.

All right.

Very good to meet you.

Good to talk with you.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Check out his stuff below.

See you next time.