EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,003 words- 0:00 – 15:00
Here we go. And…
- JRJoe Rogan
Here we go. And boom, we're live. Graham, great to see you again.
- GHGraham Hancock
Nice to be-
- JRJoe Rogan
Always.
- GHGraham Hancock
... back with you, Joe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, and we were just talking about your, your new book, America Before, that there's two versions of it. There's one version and then there's a newer version that's a Barnes & Noble version that's specific to Barnes & Noble that has an extra whole chapter in it.
- GHGraham Hancock
That's correct, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And so they can get that at Barnes & Noble. I'm just trying to keep bookstores alive, man. They're on the way out.
- GHGraham Hancock
I think it's, I think it's really important-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
... and that's, and that's one of the reasons that I did this, because, because I, I had finished the book and then Barnes & Noble came to me through my publishers and, and said they would like to do a special edition of the book, but in order to do that, I needed to write them some extra material. Uh, and, and I had a lot of material that I hadn't put in the book, and I thought, "Well, this is an opportunity to, to put that out there."
- JRJoe Rogan
Beautiful.
- GHGraham Hancock
So it's there.
- JRJoe Rogan
So if people want that, it's a little bit different and there's a small gold square-
- GHGraham Hancock
Well, okay, so th- first of all, my website, graemehancock.com, has a page about America Before, and the link to the Barnes & Noble edition is there, as well as the link to the standard edition, which is on Amazon and iTunes and all kinds of, all kinds of other places. So graemehancock.com and the America Before page, the link to the Barnes & Noble edition is right there.
- JRJoe Rogan
All right, there it is. So, um, how is this... Oh, b- before we even get into the book-
- GHGraham Hancock
Oh, go to-
- JRJoe Rogan
What is it?
- GHGraham Hancock
Go to Talks & Events.
- NANarrator
Right here?
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, we're on the Graham Hancock website.
- GHGraham Hancock
Oh, no. No, go to Books. (laughs) Go to Books. Go to America Before.
- JRJoe Rogan
Bam.
- GHGraham Hancock
Bam. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
There it is.
- GHGraham Hancock
Go to United States. You can see Amazon, Barnes &... And there's Barnes & Noble.
- JRJoe Rogan
Special edition.
- GHGraham Hancock
Special edition. Click on that.
- JRJoe Rogan
There you go, and then the e-book as well. The, the e-book-
- GHGraham Hancock
The e-book is available.
- JRJoe Rogan
... is the special edition as well.
- 15:00 – 30:00
And I would encourage…
- GHGraham Hancock
is gone completely." There can't be anything left of it at all. Utterly, utterly destroyed.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I would encourage people that are interested in this to please watch the YouTube videos of it, 'cause Randall provides all sorts of, uh, video and photographic evidence-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... where you can take a look at the landscape and you get a perspective of how immense this destruction was.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes. Yeah. It's, it's really, it's really important to, to see that, because it's easy enough to talk about floods and, and, and cataclysms, but actually to see its effect on the landscape, uh, directly, um, is, uh... it has an emotional... an, an emotional impact. I felt, I felt emotional trav- traveling across the Channeled Scablands, real- realizing that this was, was the heart of an event that changed the world, uh, completely. And the evidence, uh, continues to build. I haven't... in America Before, I've not gone over old ground that I went over in Magicians of the Gods, um, that we covered in the various, um, interviews and podcasts, and which it's really a good idea that people take a look at. But, uh, what I have done is added the new information published since 2015, uh, which further supports the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and the notion that multiple fragments of a giant comet, uh, hit the Earth and, and created a absolute global catastrophe.
- JRJoe Rogan
So what was the motivation behind creating this book, America Before?
- GHGraham Hancock
It's a curious mixture of things. I have been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization for more than 25 years. That was the essence of my book, Fingerprints of the Gods, that was published in 1995, that there has been a huge forgotten episode in human history. I continued to follow that in a series of other books, and by the time I got to 2002, when I published a book called Underworld, that followed seven years of scuba diving on continental shelves looking for structures that were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age, I really felt I'd done it. I felt I'd walked the walk, I'd-... put f- put out to the public a massive body of information, and I thought, "My role in this is over and I can (inhales deeply) breathe a sigh of relief 'cause it's hot in this particular kitchen-"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
"... and I can go do something else." And I ended up writing a book about psychedelics. I ended up writing Supernatural Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, about the role of psychedelics in, in the origins of the, of the human story. But then new information started to come out that touched on the lost civilization idea, and I couldn't just stand by and ignore that information. That's why I published Magicians of the Gods in 2015. And then, as I was researching that book, I became aware of something I hadn't realized before, that there's a mass of new information from the Americas, specifically from the Americas, which completely rewrites the story of human history, that the Americas, um, have been misrepresented, uh, for a very long time, uh, by archaeology. And archaeologists will be annoyed with me for saying that. They have a way of forgetting their own errors, uh, of saying, "Oh, well, we knew that all along. It wasn't, it wasn't the case." But the fact of the matter remains that for a best part of 50 years, from the 1960s through until about 2010, American archaeology was locked in a dogma that they actually had a name for, which was Clovis First, uh, that they invented a name for a, a culture. They called them the Clovis culture. We don't know what they called themselves. They were hunter-gatherers. Uh, they first appear in the archaeological record 13,400 years ago, and they vanish from the archaeological record 12,600 years ago. And for a very long time, it was maintained adamantly that these were the first Americans, that no human being touched the soil of the Americas until 13,400 years ago, just animals, but no human beings present at all. And any archaeologist who attempted to dispute that dogma, and I use the word deliberately, there should be no room for dogma in science, but any archaeologist who challenged that would face severe problems with his or her career. They would be mocked and humiliated at conferences, like an archaeologist called Jacques Cinq Mars from, uh, from Canada who excavated in the, in the, in the Yukon. Humiliated at conferences, insulted, accused of making stuff up. Uh, their research funding would be withdrawn. Basically, to challenge Clovis First was the end of your archaeological career. So naturally, (laughs) very few archaeologists wanted to challenge Clovis First.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was this gentleman in the Yukon? What was his history?
- GHGraham Hancock
He's called Jacques Cinq Mars, uh, and interestingly, the Smithsonian, just in 2017, uh, did a big kind of mea culpa, a big admission about this, that everybody had got things wrong, that Jacques Cinq Mars had been ruined by the Clovis First lobby, but he'd been right all along. The site he excavated in the Yukon was re-excavated in 2017 and every single thing he said was correct, even though they had just sneered at him and dismissed him.
- JRJoe Rogan
And what year was he, um, what year did he-
- GHGraham Hancock
He, he, he was excavating in the 1980s and the 1990s.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is he still alive?
- GHGraham Hancock
He's still alive. He's still alive, yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is he bitter? (laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
Well, I think he's vindicated, you know? And it's kind of, it's kind of nice to be vindicated.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
That, that, th- th- th- th there's almost a place in folklo- folklore for the, for the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... for the individual who is scorned and humiliated, you know, by, by others, but who turns out to be, to be right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
And he, and he was right. But my point about this is that what it meant was since it was the dogma that Clovis was first, that the oldest dates were 13,400 years ago, there seemed to be no logic to archaeologists in digging deeper. You know how it is with archaeology, that the, the upper levels are the youngest and the deeper you go, the older it gets. That's why we say Upper Paleolithic for the Late Ice Age and Lower Paleolithic for, for the Late Stone Age and Lower for the older S- S- St- Stone Age. And the feeling was, no need to dig below the Clovis layer because we already know that there were no human beings there-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... before that. And then a few archaeologists, I've mentioned Jacques Cinq Mars, but a, but a, a another is Al Goodyear from the University of South Carolina, uh, who excavated a site called Topper in South Carolina. Now, now, Topper is an incredibly rich Clovis site. It's full of their tools, their points. They made these special, special flint points that were used as arrowheads and spears. A great Clovis site. He finished excavating the Clovis level, and then he did something that was supposed not to be done. He decided to dig deeper, and he carried on deeping down, digging down, and there was a, a layer of about a meter and a half of, of barren soil, and then beneath that, more human artifacts, and they finally date those back to more than 50,000 years ago. And then in 2017, published in Nature, um, by Tom Demere, who's the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, uh, and a bunch of other very high-level, uh, paleontologists, published in Nature magazine, evidence for human presence in North America 130,000 years ago. Now, this has really put the cat amongst the pigeons. Now, if humans were present (laughs) in North America 130,000 years ago and archaeologists have been telling us for 50 years that they were only present from 13,000 years ago, that's 10 times as long that we've had humans in North America capable of doing stuff, and the archaeological dogma has prevented any search for what they were doing-
- JRJoe Rogan
W-
- GHGraham Hancock
... until, until very recently.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was the evidence from 130,000 years ago?
- GHGraham Hancock
Okay. So what ... It's not the e- Let me be clear about this bec- (laughs) because this is, this is something that is often misrepresented in, in my views. It is not the evidence for an advanced civilization that we find 130,000 years ago in America. The evidence that we find is evidence for human presence, and what they were doing was very much Stone Age stuff. It's a mastodon. It's a mastodon skeleton, uh, that was, that was excavated. It was actually found by accident during road construction near, near Sa-
- JRJoe Rogan
San Diego?
- 30:00 – 45:00
Mm-hmm. …
- GHGraham Hancock
from place to place, depending on, on soil deposition-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... and stratification, the stratification of the soil, but what the... the key, the key point is that what you need to do is go deeper than 13,400 years ago, and you need to do so with, um, dedication and vigor, uh, and, and with some kind of funding. And at the moment, archaeology doesn't, uh, doesn't see the point of that. If, um, the paper in Nature, uh, by Tom Demaré was alone, if there were nothing else than that, uh, I wouldn't place so much trust in it. But I've spent a lot of time during the researching of this book with archaeologists who dig- did deak-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
... did (laughs) dig deeper, and what those archaeologists all confirm is that there have been human beings in the Americas for tens of thousands of years-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... and it's not surprising that that could be pushed back to 130,000 years ago because part of the argument about the peopling of the Americas has to do with a place that we now call the Bering Straits, between Alaska and Siberia, which during the Ice Age were, at times, a land bridge. They were exposed because of, because of lowered sea levels. But migrants who crossed that land bridge from Siberia, on many occasions, over periods of tens of thousands of years, would find themselves confronted then by the North American ice cap, which oddly wasn't at the tip of Alaska but began further in. So there was living space in a bit of Alaska, but you couldn't get through the ice mountains, these, these literally ice mountains, two, two miles deep, covering the whole of North America and preventing access to the unglaciated, uh, parts of America. The thing is that what happened around 13,400 years ago, there had been a period of global warming, and the ice sheets began to melt, and a corridor opened up between what's called the Cordilleran ice sheet and the Laurentide ice sheet, the two major ice keeps in North America. And it's thought that the migration came through that corridor. Well, the thing is that exactly the same thing happened between 140,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago. There was an episode of global warming, an ice-free corridor opened up, and the same opportunity to enter the Americas was there at that period than it was at the later period. And Tom Demaré's point and mine is that we have to pay much more attention to that ear- earlier period, and that's really why I've gone ahead and, uh, and, and written this book, is to try to put before a, a, a broad general audience, hopefully in, in language that, that, that makes sense, an, an assembly of all the latest information that casts doubt on the story we've been told. Because my goodness, if archaeology is wrong about the story of the peopling of the Americas, if it's radically wrong, as it now appears to be, then our whole understanding of human history has to change. It's not just the history of the Americas. It's the history of the entire world. It has been an absolute article of faith amongst archaeologists that civilization began in the Old World. And, uh, indeed, I have a, I have a book in my, my library called History Begins at Sumer, and it's by Samuel Noah Kramer, a very renowned archaeologist, uh, and it's, it's a good book, actually. But the argument is that this is where civilization began, in the culture that we call the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, and that it began about 6,000 years ago, and that civilization is entirely an invention of the Old World and has nothing to do with the New World at all because the New World was populated so late. This is, this has been the, this has been the argument, and this is the argument that now radically and suddenly begins to change, that the Americas, this enormous landmass, resource-rich, f- bountiful in, in every way... South of Minnesota, south of the ice cap, vast land areas that are, that are bountiful. Get into South Amer- Central America, South America, the Amazon, just huge areas of land that were very, very... offered great potential for, for, for human occupation. Dogma has said there were no humans there. Now the first bits of evidence are coming out that says there were humans there. And if that's the case, then we must consider the possibility that the story of civilization might have begun in the Americas, not in the Old World at all. It might be a New World invention, not an Old World invention.
- JRJoe Rogan
Some of the more, uh, fascinating pieces of evidence in South America have come out recently-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... about these, uh, channels and pathways that they've found in the Amazon-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that could not have been created any other way but by humans-
- GHGraham Hancock
Absolutely.
- JRJoe Rogan
... creating irrigation, humans creating th- th- like, it appears like grids, like a city grid.
- GHGraham Hancock
Definitely. The Amazon is a colossal mystery, and, uh, it's one of the subjects that I explore in depth in America Before. First of all, to give some basic figures, the Amazon basin is huge. The Amazon basin is seven million square kilometers in area, um, and within it, five-and-a-half million square kilometers, uh, remains almost entirely unstudied by archaeologists, and that's the five-and-a-half million square kilometers that is still covered by dense rainforest. And to put that into perspective, five-and-a-half million square kilometers is the size of the entire Indian subcontinent. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- GHGraham Hancock
... it's like saying, "We've done world archaeology, but we've just ignored India."You know-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
... we've done world archaeology, but we just ignored the Amazon. It's the same, the same 5,500,000 square kilometers. The view was, again, there was a dogma. There was a preconception. Human beings couldn't have flourished in the Amazon. It's a r- i- i- it's not a resource-rich area. The soils are poor. Um, it's a difficult area, challenging to get to, very far from the Bering Straits. So, the view was that humans hadn't entered the Amazon until about a thousand years ago, and then gradually, little by little, that view has begun to change, and it's begun to change because of the tragic clearances of the Amazon. Because the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut down and turned into soybean farms and, uh, and cattle ranches, and in that cutting down process has emerged things that shouldn't be there at all. Uh, for example, evidence that large cities flourished in the Amazon, enormous cities, which were larger than the... There was a Spanish explorer who went down the Amazon River system in 1541 to 1542. He was the first European to cross the entire length of South America from west to east, uh, along the Amazon, and he reported seeing incredible cities, advanced arts and crafts, millions of people, a thriving culture, uh, and 100 years later when other Europeans got into the Amazon, they couldn't find these cities. So they said, "Oh, Francisco Orellana," that was his name, "made it all up. It was just a, it was just a fantasy." And then in the last decade as the clearances of the Amazon have proceeded, we've begun to see the traces of those cities. What happened was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into the Amazon.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- GHGraham Hancock
Smallpox devastated the local population because there was no immunity to it. There was a massive die-off. The cities were deserted. Within a 50 years, they were completely overgrown by the jungle and that's why they were not seen by the explorers who came in 100 years later. But now the jungle's being cleared, those cities are emerging, and we can say that, uh, a city like London, which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century, there were cities of that size all over the Amazon.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- GHGraham Hancock
Huge numbers of them. And a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people.
- JRJoe Rogan
What?
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes, 20 million. This is the, the latest, uh, evidence from the Amazon. And then you ask yourself, how did they do that? How did they feed 20 million people in the Amazon? Because it's a fact, rainforest soils are poor. It's one of the reasons these soybean farms are a really stupid idea, because once you clear the rainforest, the land is largely infertile and you can't grow stuff on it for very long. So how did they feed all these people? The answer was, they invented a soil, and that soil has a name, it's called terra preta. Archaeologists refer to it as Amazonian dark earths or Amazonian black earth. It's a manmade soil. It's thousands of years old. It's full of microbes that are not found in adjoining soil. It's based around biochar. Uh, and you can take a handful of 8,000-year-old terra preta and you can add it to barren soil, and that soil (snaps fingers) will instantly become fertile. It's highly sought after in the Amazon and it explains how they fed these people. There was science in the Amazon. They-
- JRJoe Rogan
How'd they create this?
- GHGraham Hancock
Well, this is something that's not understood. It's still not understood by soil experts to this day, as to how that was done, but it's one of many intriguing evidences, pieces of evidence of much higher, uh, development in the Amazon than it has been given credit for, and of a kind of science in the Amazon.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jamie's got an image of it up there. So this is it?
- GHGraham Hancock
This is terra preta, yeah, yeah.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
It's crazy that they…
- GHGraham Hancock
embankment inside that and a circle, and a circle inside that.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's crazy that they made a road right through that. What assholes. (laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
Well, a modern road, yeah, you know, because, because there's no respect for-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
... there's no respect for the ancient, for the ancient world, unfortunately.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, uh, there's still, and there's another one. Look at that. Wow.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's incredible. Now, now-
- GHGraham Hancock
So there, there are thousands of these things.
- JRJoe Rogan
... how have they found... The, the, the stuff that they found in the Amazon, what imaging technology were they using to find all this-
- GHGraham Hancock
Initially, initially, it was entirely found because areas of the rainforest had been cleared. Economic interests said, "We wanna make a cattle ranch here," or, "We want to make a soybean farm here, so we're just gonna clear the rainforest." In the process of clearing the rainforest, they start discovering these earthworks that had previously been completely overgrown by the jungle. Then the next step was to say, uh, "What can we, what could we do to find out more about this?" Obviously, they don't want to destroy more jungle, and luckily we have a technology which is, which is LiDAR, as I mentioned, which u- u- u- uses radar, and using LiDAR they've been identified, able to identify many more of these sites. And then to get to the sites without destroying the jungle, and to begin excavations on them, and to find that they go back, in the cases of the ones that have been explored so far, at least 3,000 years. Uh, this is an intriguing development, completely unexplained in our understanding of the Amazon, and what it suggests is a heritage of extremely ancient knowledge. You don't wake up one morning and, you know, create a perfectly geometrical square or circular earthwork that's perfectly aligned to true north, south, east, and west on an enormous scale. There has to be a background to that. There has to be a reason for doing it, and the evidence is none of these sites were lived in. There's no habitation, uh, refuse, uh, found in them whatsoever. They were, they, we d- we don't know what they were used for. I make the case, uh, in America before, that they're connected to a system of ideas which is found all around the world, which, which is to do with death and the afterlife destiny, uh, of the soul. Uh, and I go into the issue of ayahuasca, uh, in, in this book because, um, I... First of all (laughs) ayahuasca is itself another example of Amazonian science, um, as you and I and many of the, the, the listeners and viewers know, uh, the active ingredient of ayahuasca is DMT, uh, dimethyltryptamine. But dimethyltryptamine is not normally accessible through the gut. Uh, we have to smoke it or, or vape it to get that rocket ship to the other side of reality, and the journey lasts, what, 10, 12 minutes, not much more than that, and sometimes, sometimes quite a lot less.What ayahuasca does is it makes DMT available through the gut. The reason it's not available through the gut is because of an enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase, and that switches off DMT on contact. The ayahuasca vine, which is one of the two ingredients of the ayahuasca brew, the other ingredient is leaves that contain DMT, the ayahuasca vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor which switches off the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT to be accessed, uh, orally, which produces a rather different journey from the smoked or vaped DMT trip. It's a much longer journey, it's four or five hours, it allows you to integrate and to, and to interrelate with the strange landscapes in which you find yourself amongst, and the entities that you encounter. I'm not making any claims about the reality status of those entities, but what I am saying, (laughs) and it's a fact, is that people who work with DMT and ayahuasca do encounter what they construe to be entities, uh, who, who communicate with them intelligently. So somebody in the Amazon, out of 150,000 different species of plants and trees, selected two that are not psychoactive on their own, but when put together create an extraordinary, uh, vis- vis- visionary brew. Uh, and ayahuasca means the vine of the dead, and what it's connected to, uh, in South American religious and spiritual thinking, uh, is what happens to us when we die. Uh, and, and, uh, the Tukano, who are an Amazonian people who work regularly with (laughs) ayahuasca, I mean, the Tukano actually will give a teaspoonful of ayahuasca to a newborn infant. They feel ayahuasca is so important, that there is a hidden realm around us which we are not normally aware of and we need to be aware of it, and, and, and ayahuasca is an important part of that. In their ayahuasca journeys, the Tukano shamans experience visions, and they will then come back to an alert, n- normal problem-solving state of consciousness and they will paint and depict their visions. And what's intriguing, and I, I go into it in the book, is that quite a number of the Tukano paintings of the other world, of the afterlife realm, of the entrance to the other world, are geometrical, and they look, uh, exactly like the geoglyphs. So I'm beginning to wonder whether these geoglyphs were part of a system of spiritual ideas, uh, concerning what happens to us after death, and what we need to do in this life to ensure a beneficial outcome. And oddly enough, that same system of ideas is found in the Mississippi Valley. In the Amazon, it involves, uh, particularly ayahuasca and the belief that the ayahuasca journey takes you to the afterlife realm, and a journey along the Milky Way. In the Mississippi Valley, um, the Mound Builder sites up and down the Mississippi Valley, particularly Moundville in Alabama, exactly the same system of religious ideas associated with geometrical constructions, that on death, the soul, they're very specific, ascends to the constellation of Orion, transits from the constellation of Orion to the Milky Way, makes a journey along the Milky Way which they call the Path of Souls, and encounters challenges and ordeals where the soul must account for the life that it has lived. Then we go to Egypt, and what do we find? The same system of ideas. The soul must rise up to the constellation of Orion, there's a narrow shaft cut through the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza which targets directly the lowest of the three stars of Orion's Belt. Widely accepted as a star shaft or a soul shaft. The soul would rise up through that shaft, get to the constellation of Orion which stands by the banks of the Milky Way, it would then transit to the Milky Way, which the ancient Egyptians called the Winding Waterway, and it would make a journey along the w- Milky Way, where it would be confronted by challenges and ordeals. Very similar idea to the Tukano, very similar idea to the Mississippi Valley. As far as we know, none of these cultures were in contact with one another. Either we're dealing with a huge, unbelievable, extraordinarily detailed coincidence involving architecture and ideas, or we're looking at a legacy that was inherited in all of these different places from a remote common ancestor, and, and I believe that that's what we're looking at.
- JRJoe Rogan
What do we think the people from the ancient Mississippi Valley, th- that culture, what do we think they were using, if they weren't using ayahuasca, or do we think th- they, that's what they were using?
- GHGraham Hancock
Well, that's, that's, that's an interesting question, uh, whether, whether visionary substances are the only way, uh, to get into altered states of consciousness, and, and, uh, I would say they, they, they are definitely not. Uh, of course there are visionary substances which are, which are used in Native American, uh, vision, vision quests. I've, I've, I've had the privilege of p- peyote ceremony, uh, with the Native American Church. Um...
- JRJoe Rogan
I've never done that. What is that like?
- GHGraham Hancock
I, I loved it, actually. I thought, I thought it was, I thought it was amazing. It w- it, it doesn't overpower you in the way that DMT or ayahuasca does. Uh, it's, it's, it's much gentler, it's much more, you feel much more integrated and connected with, with, with nature, your thought processes are quite, are, are quite clear. It felt, it felt just like a very beautiful and healing experience, and I loved the ceremony, that I'm in, I'm inside a, a teepee with, with 30 or 40 other people and that there are, there are specific roles that are assigned to those different individuals. One will keep the door, another will be responsible for the fire, which is a work of art in itself, just gazing into that fire and the glowing, the glowing embers is enough to induce an altered state of consciousness, uh, on its own. Incredible drumming, which, which drives your state of consciousness into a, a kind of peak, peak experience. This is a technology for accessing other levels of experience, and other levels of reality, and it's clear that the Native Americans had a number of adv- advanced technologies in, in this area. The Sun Dance doesn't use a substance, but it uses austerity, it uses pain to drive an altered state of consciousness. The objective in every case seems to be let's, just for a while, get ourselves out of the narrow, rigid frame of the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness. We all need that, it's incredibly useful, hunter-gatherers need it just as much as people in, in cities need it, but it's not the only state of consciousness available to human beings, and maybe that's one of the big mistakes that we're making in our culture, um, and was not made, uh, in, in shamanistic societies.
- JRJoe Rogan
That, that is, uh, a, a really interesting breakdown, that maybe that is one of the big mistakes we're making in our culture. When people point to the problems that we have in this country, one of the problems we have is o- our inability to connect with each other-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... or to recognize that we're all sharing this space and time together, and instead wanting to uphold our own r- religious or ideological ideas as being the only one way to get going.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
The only one way to get through. And one of the things that I've found with these psychedelic experiences, it, it, it really makes ideologies seem, uh, if not preposterous, at the very least, insignificant in comparison to human experiences.
- GHGraham Hancock
Absolutely.
- JRJoe Rogan
The experience of, of c- camaraderie and friendship and, and love. It, it, you realize like, oh, this is what's important. What, what's important is-
- GHGraham Hancock
This is what it, what this is really about. Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... yes, not, not enforcing your ideas or pushing them on other people and forcing people to behave the way you behave, but instead love.
- GHGraham Hancock
And think about religious ideas, which cause so much division, so much chaos, so much hatred, so much fear, so much suspicion in the world today. Um, is it really what we want to do as human beings simply to accept a package of ideas that were believed in by our ancestors, to accept them whole without question as absolute fact, which we regard as such authoritative fact that in some cases, we're willing to be deeply unpleasant to people who hold different views or perhaps even kill them? Uh, we've had this, you know, this recent event in, in, in, in Sri Lanka-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
... ar- primarily a religiously motivated terrorist event. It, it happens, it happens all over the world that people feel so convinced that the inherited package of ideas that they had nothing to do with creating and that they have never questioned, they're so convinced that those ideas are right, that in extreme cases, they're actually prepared to kill other human beings who hold different ideas. They... are they so insecure in their own, in their own beliefs that, that they're prepared to go to that level of actually murdering another human being who holds... th- they're so threatened by the other beliefs that other human beings hold. So it's an abnegation of our responsibility as human beings. We should be questioning things. We should not be accepting packages of ideas intact, fully formed and using them to drive the way we behave towards one another. That was part of the human story, but we need to move on from that. I mean, it's a very dangerous situation in a very complex modern world with billions of human beings on the planet to have these kind of energies being generated where certain groups of people are saying, "We are absolutely right, and you are absolutely wrong. We are superior. You are inferior." This is a very, very dangerous path that we're, that we're on, and it needs to be changed. Personally, I know this is not a, a comment that will go down well with many people, but I am strongly opposed to nationalism. I don't, I don't see any virtue in nationalism. It is an accident of birth which nation you were born in. It was nothing that you did for your own merit. You didn't earn that. You were born by accident in, in a particular nation. Why should we automatically feel that other people who were born by accident in that particular nation have something special in common with us and that we together are a group who are much more important than other groups of people? I've been privileged to spend my life traveling around the world, living with communities all over, over the world, and one thing that really (laughs) comes across to me strongly, it's, it's, it should be a cliché and yet it's not, is that we are all one family, that humans are intimately interconnected all around the world, that you can go to the remotest area of the Amazon jungle and find the same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams that we have in industrialized cities shared by the hunter-gatherers in the, in, in the middle of the Amazon. So our similarities as human beings and what we share in common at the emotional level and the level of love and at the level of heart are far more important than our differences that are defined by the nation or the political group in which we, in which we grew up in. And when I, when I say I'm against nationalism, I need also to make clear that does not mean, and I hope I'm not taken out (laughs) of context by others who are listening to this, that does not mean I'm in favor of world government. I detest governments. That's another thing we need to grow out of. We don't need governments anymore. Uh, if we have them, they should have a very minimal role, uh, in our society. I think it's possible for the human race to relate as one family without leaders and governments who are exploiting the worst aspects of our character, the lowest common denominator of our society, deliberately encouraging fears and hatreds and suspicions. What responsible leaders should be doing is encouraging love and unity. And their failure to do that, in my view, disqualifies them from the leadership role entirely. And that's why I've often said I would not... uh, I would like to see a situation (laughs) in which no head of state can be appointed to that position unless he or she has first had 12 sessions of ayahuasca.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
That would be the condition. Don't even bother applying for the job-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Yes. …
- JRJoe Rogan
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's, that's the whole idea behind it. And I would hope that this idea of being able to just, if you wanna do better, that you can-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... anywhere in the world.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That this could eventually spread out.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's, this is, uh, my hope.
- GHGraham Hancock
I believe it can spread out. And, and, um, you know, I see many signs of hope, uh, in, in, in America. Uh, America has become a big part of my life, not just because I wrote this book, but because I have children who are now living in America. I have a son and daughter-in-law who, who live in LA. I have another son and daughter-in-law who live in Boston. America, I'm, I'm British, but America has become a very central part of my life-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... and it's a fascinating and amazing country, and it's been my privilege to travel thousands of miles across America, across many, many, many different states. And I, I love this country. It's an, it's a, it's an amazing place. Only in America could we see happening what has happened with cannabis. You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
The, the fact that at a, at a local level, individuals have got together, mobilized petitions, organized votes, and changed the law, changed the law, def- literally stuck a finger up at central government and said, "Fuck off. This is none of your business. What I do with my consciousness in the inner sanctum of my own life is not the business of the state." That's a very American feeling. It's, it's something that you don't find often in other countries where the state is granted much more power and much more authority than it perhaps should be. Americans are naturally questioning of government authority and that has, that is what has led to the, uh, l- legalization, increasing legalization of cannabis, which is going to change the world in lots of ways. But then ironically, at the same time, see, the thing about democracies is that in order to, um, get things done in a democracy you need to persuade people of your point of view, so information becomes very important in, in democracies and information can be abused. People can be misled with information. They can be told that what they're receiving is the truth, whereas, in fact, it's not the truth. And you can end up with a kind of dictatorship that, that people have given their ascent to on the basis of, of false information. And frankly, I'd rather have a real dictatorship which is, which is out in the open-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... and, and clear, rather than one that has been subtly manipulated into position through manipulating the, the, the views of the, of, of the voters. But I am, and remain, enormously encouraged by America. It may seem like a trivial issue, but the fact that state by state, cannabis is being legalized and that is resulting from a grassroots movement, that this enormous change is being made, even... It's ironic, it's strange that at the federal level, even though, what, eight states now totally legal for recreational, uh, 23, 24 states leg- legal for, for medical use, that at the federal level, it's still a Schedule 1 control- controlled drug. This is a (laughs) huge state of dissonance that exists, and America's gonna have to put it right. What it says to me is that people can change things, people can get together at the local level, and they can make a better world. Because there's no doubt that the cannabis laws were vicious and wrong and cruel and evil and ruined people's lives for, for, for decades, and it's people who've changed that. It's not government that's changed that, it's the people at the grassroots level, and America's a country where that can happen, and I, I, I remain encouraged about, about the role of the American people, while often in despair about the role of the American state.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I'm encouraged as well, and you know, it's interesting, Ben & Jerry released something yesterday, which is really, or on 4/20 I should say-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... which was, uh, talking about the drug laws in this country-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and, and talking about how many... It's real- really opening this, uh, the, uh, the idea of, like, how unjust these laws were and how many of these laws targeted people of color and how many people-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
... who are white people have profited off of this-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and how many people are still in jail-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... for, for crimes that they committed, you know, qu- air quote, "crimes"-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that are no longer crimes.
- GHGraham Hancock
That are no longer crimes, yeah.
- 1:15:00 – 1:15:53
Well, it's pure speculation…
- GHGraham Hancock
science regards consciousness as- as local to the brain and doesn't see how it can exert itself, uh, ou- outside of that. But maybe we should open up to those possibilities, that we're dealing with a very different kind of culture that used techniques that we have allowed to lapse, and maybe we could wake those techniques up again. Maybe the ability of human beings to do almost superhuman things is resident within all of us, but sleeping.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's pure speculation that they used some sort of a telekinetic power, but it's absolute-
- GHGraham Hancock
Pure speculation.
- JRJoe Rogan
... but it's absolute that they did something that we don't understand.
- GHGraham Hancock
Hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
If- if you think about the distance between us and the construction, just the modern accepted construction dates of the Great Pyramid, it's more than 5,000 years ago, or close to 5,000 years ago, 4,000-
- GHGraham Hancock
Great Pyramid's supposed to be about 4,500 years old, yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's really old. (laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
(laughs) It's incredibly old, yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, to f- to think that someone back then could do something that would perplex us today-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... with modern machinery.
Episode duration: 2:45:28
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