EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,003 words- 0:02 – 3:02
Book launch details: special edition, audiobook, and keeping bookstores alive
- 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.
- 3:02 – 4:20
Touring and meeting readers: Q&A-heavy live events
- GHGraham Hancock
... on the website there's, there's details about the book. There's a page where there are links to the book. And also, the other thing I would like to take this opportunity to mention is I'm in America and Canada for the next seven weeks, and I'm going to be doing something like 25 presentations in something like 20 American cities, and then three Canadian cities in, in Vancouver, uh, Montreal, and Toronto.
- JRJoe Rogan
Excellent.
- GHGraham Hancock
And that's all on the Talks & Events page of my website, so if anybody wants to come along and, uh, meet this old man in person-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
... uh, I'll be, I'll be doing those events.
- JRJoe Rogan
And are, do you, are you doing these at theaters, and do you allow Q&As? Like, how, how do these work?
- GHGraham Hancock
Absolutely, absolutely, I allow, I allow Q&As. I, I encourage that. I, I feel as an author that, frankly speaking, I'm nothing without my audience. I owe my audience, my readers, big time. And what I try to do at events is to give back as much as I can. So if people wanna take pictures with me, I am absolutely up for that. I don't understand why anybody would want to do that, but it's fun, it's kind of fun. And when-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... people want to come to the desk where I'm signing and ask me personal questions, I'm ready to do that. Sometimes, on the British book tour, which I just finished, I was behind in the, in the event space for four hours after the event finished (laughs) -
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- GHGraham Hancock
... signing and taking, and taking pictures. But it's a joy. It's an-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... it's really an opportunity for me to interact with the, with, with the people who actually make my work matter, so...
- JRJoe Rogan
That's fantastic.
- GHGraham Hancock
... yeah.
- 4:20 – 7:47
Why Hancock’s ideas gained traction: Göbekli Tepe and a forced rewrite of timelines
- JRJoe Rogan
Beautiful. So what inspired this? Uh, I know there's, there's always been... Well, you w- first of all, we should just say, for people who don't know, you have been at the front of the line-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... um, for decades, talking about these lost civilizations and w- what I... From reading your work, I mean, I think I first read your work in the '90s, you exposed me to a lot of these what were, at the time, controversial ideas that have now been substantiated-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... by actual evidence, particularly Gobekli Tepe and-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... I mean, the, the, the... All the water erosion stuff on the Sphinx-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and I've since had Dr. Robert Schoch-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... on the podcast to talk about that as well. But all this stuff, um, was, at one point, very controversial-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and now far less.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, whatever-... traditional academics and traditional historians that are trying to, I guess it's archaeologists, that were trying to resist. They've let go a lot of that. They've had to with things like Gobekli Tepe.
- GHGraham Hancock
They've had to 'cause the evidence has, has overwhelmed them. And, and Gobekli Tepe is an, an excellent example. Prior to the discovery and excavation of Gobekli Tepe, uh, it... which is a site in Anatolia in Turkey, it was the view, very firm view of archaeologists that there had been no megalithic architecture anywhere on Earth. And when I say megalithic, I mean literally big stones, stone circles, huge constructions, nothing like that before at the very, very earliest 6,000 years ago. And they would point to sites in, for example, Malta, a site called Ġgantija, which is about 5,800 years old. That's, that's the oldest megalithic architecture in the world. And they could understand how that was because these were agricultural societies. They generated surpluses, you could free up people who could become specialists in architecture, in astronomy, in geometry, and they could apply their skills to the construction of these sites. But what they never considered possible was that a society that was hunter-gatherers would have created a gigantic megalithic site. And then suddenly, Gobekli Tepe is discovered, it dates to 11,600 years ago, it's more than 5,000 years older than the supposedly oldest megalithic architecture in the world, and it is in a center where there had been no previous evidence of agriculture. But the moment Gobekli Tepe appears, agriculture appears as well. Um, and this is just something that's really hard for archaeology to explain. They've suddenly got 5,000 years of missing, of missing history that they've just never taken into account. And what I see them doing is largely avoiding the problem, rather than getting, getting to grips with it directly. And, and in fact, there have been, there have been a great number of changes in the last, uh, 20 years, which, which, uh, have worked generally in favor of the arguments that I've, that I've proposed.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I'm so happy for you, because I know that for a long time, you were out there on your own-
- GHGraham Hancock
Very-
- JRJoe Rogan
... with a lot of these theories.
- GHGraham Hancock
Very, very much so. And, and, uh, al- al- also sub- subjected to the most, the most b- blistering and deeply un- unpleasant criticism-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
... from, uh, from the archaeological fraternity and from their friends in the, in, in the media, like, "How dare this, uh, journalist, uh, propose that history might be different or that we might have a forgotten chapter in the human story." It was regarded almost as offensive that I would put this material out there, and archaeologists felt it was their responsibility to show the public that I was full of shit, and that was, and that was the whole way my work was, was greeted. And in... to a certain extent, still is greeted by archaeologists, but things have changed.
- 7:47 – 16:15
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: Greenland crater, global proxies, and flood memories
- GHGraham Hancock
Central to my work was the notion of a global cataclysm roughly 12,500, 12,800 years ago. There was... it made sense to me in 1995 when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, but there was no compelling evidence for a global cataclysm then. I just... uh, all the evidence seemed to point to that time and a massive global event. And then from 2007 onwards, you know, more than, uh, a decade after I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, we get a group of more than 60 major scientists who are seriously proposing that the Earth was hit by multiple fragments of a giant comet 12,800 years ago, and that this caused a huge rise in sea level and extinctions of mega faunas. They are not saying that it also wiped out, uh, a lost advanced civilization of pre-history, I'm saying that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
Um, but, but what, what has changed is that we now have compelling hard scientific evidence. I'm not saying every scientist accepts it, it's the nature of science to dispute findings, but we have a group of 60 major figures who have seriously proposed this in all the leading mainstream journals, and it's changed the balance of power in this, in this argument, because one thing that they used to say is, "Hancock can't be right because there was no global cataclysm, you know, 12,000 or 13,000 years ago." Well, now we know there was, and there are various explanations for it, so that's moved things along. And the other thing that's changed a lot is the attitude of the man in the street to authority. That has changed. Back in the '90s, authority figures were the gatekeepers, they controlled everything. If an authority figure in a discipline like archaeology said, "Hancock is completely wrong, he's made all this stuff up," that would generally be believed, not by everybody, but by the majority of people. Today, to have a, a, a mainstream authority figure say that to me is actually an advantage, because people are, are so distrustful of authority, and rightly so, because we've been lied to by authority figures in all fields for so long, the bullshit has been so enormous that people are finally waking up, that we can't trust what authority figures say. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
And I think we can thank the internet for that.
- GHGraham Hancock
We can thank the internet for that, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. You... I'm sure you've seen the more recent evidence of a crater that they just discovered, like fairly recently.
- GHGraham Hancock
Greenland.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Enormous, enormous crater.
- GHGraham Hancock
It's an enorm- it's an enormous crater. Uh, it's, um, 18 miles wide. Uh, it had not been discovered before because it's under ice, it's under a lot of ice. At the end of the Ice Age, Greenland was one area which never lost its ice cover completely, whereas North America, everywhere north of Minnesota was covered in ice a mile, sometimes two miles deep. Europe the same, Northern Europe. But Greenland kept its ice, whereas the other parts of the world lost their ice at the, at the end of the Ice Age. Um, and what's interesting about Greenland is there's a ready evidence of a comet impact in Greenland, which goes back to papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, that they found what are called impact proxies in Greenland. Uh, in other words, nano diamonds, um, carbon spherules, and ev- evidence of a lot of platinum and, and iron, uh, was found, uh, in a layer in the ice dated to 12,800 years ago. But the next development, that you're absolutely right, and this was just a few months ago, (laughs) was the discovery of this humongous crater in Greenland and, and evidence that it was caused by an iron, uh, impacter of, of some kind. Now, dating of it, I would be irresponsible to say that that crater definitely dates to 12,800 years ago because the work has not been done to prove that yet. But what I can say and what the...... specialists who have explored and excavated the crater are saying, is that it's recent. Uh, they can say for sure that it happened during the last Ice Age. Under it, under the crater, is nothing but massively disturbed and destroyed and r- completely wrecked ice from the Ice Age, from the Pleistocene. Above it is smooth, perfect ice from our epoch, which is called the Holocene, which began about 11,600 years ago. So, all the evidence suggests that this crater dates to that period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, but to absolutely confirm that, more work needs to be done. But it's part of a growing pattern. The Younger Dryas, uh, impact, uh, scientists, they... it's... They call themselves... Th- th- they call this the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and it's because there was a period in, in the Earth's, uh, geological history that geologists call the Younger Dryas, which lasted for 1,200 years, from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. It's a very mysterious period. We see all the megafauna dying off suddenly and rapidly. We see rises in sea level, we see a huge collapse in, in global temperature. It's a, it's a cataclysmic, uh, epoch. And, and what, what, what is becoming clearer and, and clearer, uh, is that the evidence that a comet behind it... was behind it is ex- is extremely strong, and as more and more evidence comes in, we realize how widespread it was, so they found evidence of the impacts as far south as Antarctica now. Previously, they were focused very much on North America, now as far south as Antarctica, as far east as Syria. This was truly a global, a global event, and, and it changed the world. And I think, and it's my case, that it wiped our memory of a previous episode of, of human civilization, that right at the epicenter of this cataclysm was a civilization that we would regard as advanced, not a simple hunter-gatherer civilization, which was utterly wiped out, uh, in this cataclysmic event.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I should say, for anyone who's really fascinated right now, please m- maybe pause and go listen to the one that... the two that you did with Randall Carlson.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where it really goes into depth about the impact, the evidence of these impacts-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... the evidence of the very quick demise of the Ice Age, and what may-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... have resulted in all these floods that you read about in the Epic of Gilgamesh, that you read about in Noah's Ark, and that all these things are p- probably tales th- of stories that people passed down from generation to generation that survived this time.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, because we now know that at that time, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, truly global cataclysmic events involving rapid rises in sea level-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
... uh, did occur, and suddenly, the, the worldwide tradition of a, of a global flood stops being just a myth and starts being a memory-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
... an account of, of real events. It's been my privilege to work very closely with Randall Carlson.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, he's amazing.
- GHGraham Hancock
Randall is absolutely amazing. He is a total genius. He's also a gentle giant and such a kind, generous-spirited person. It's a joy to work with him, and every minute spent with him is an education. I had the privilege of traveling across the Channeled Scablands in Washington State with Randall, and seeing things through his eyes really opened my eyes to the scale of this disaster. You know, you could look at these giant boulders called glacial erratics and they just look odd sitting there in the landscape, but when you really consider how they got there, that they got there in icebergs the size of oil tankers, that were carried on floods that were at least 500 up to a thousand feet deep, that were tearing through the Channeled Scablands l- literally ripping the landscape apart. Then the icebergs would ground on valley sides, the floodwaters re- would recede, the icebergs would be left there, giant icebergs, and as they melted away, they revealed the rocks that they had enchained that were caught up within them, and they're scattered all over the landscape. And you look at that and you think, "Anything that was underneath that 12,800 years ago 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.
- 16:15 – 22:15
‘America Before’ motivation: from earlier books to the ‘Clovis First’ dogma collapse
- 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.
- 22:15 – 30:46
130,000-year-old human presence claim: Cerutti Mastodon evidence and the pushback
- 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?
- GHGraham Hancock
... near San Diego.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- GHGraham Hancock
Um, and- and th- th- an archaeologist was attached to the road construction crew and immediately stopped construction, and they investigated it thoroughly. And what they found was so much dynamite in the early 1990s when they found it, that they decided not to publish at the time. Because what they found was evidence that those mastodon bones had been cracked open by human beings using tools, and that the marrow had been extracted, that one tusk had been left standing upright in the ground and another had been left beside it that-... femur had- a femur of the animal had been taken away completely from the site, uh, and there was assemblages of, of, uh, instruments that were used to smash and break the bones, and the conclusion of the team was that only one kind of creature could have done that work using tools on a mastodon, and that's human beings. That's classic, classic human behavior. So this sets the goalposts in a totally different place. Suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for 130,000 years. We already know that a dogmatic approach of archaeology has rather refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago, and what it does is it generates an engine of demand that we need to be looking at those missing 100,000 plus years. We need to be looking at it hard. Of course, the immediate reaction has not been to go looking for stuff in the other 100,000 years. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
Most archaeologists have responded by saying, "This is impossible. It can't be, it can't be so," but that's precisely what they said to Jacques Cinq Mars, who said that humans were in Bluefish Caves in the Yukon 25,000 years ago, and it's precisely what they said to Al Goodyear, who said humans had been at Topper 50,000 years ago, and they were both right. And I believe that Tom Demere and his team, you don't get a big article published (laughs) in Nature unless it's already pretty solidly based and pretty much peer reviewed. It has produced a reaction. I would be wrong to say that it's universally accepted. It's very much challenged, but it's intriguing.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the challenge of it? What is the challenge?
- GHGraham Hancock
The challenge fundamentally comes from, we archaeologists know that there were no human beings in the Americas that far back. To put it in perspective, it's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Europe. Uh, it's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Australia.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is just evidence of the first human beings.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, we have to point out how difficult it is to find evidence of human beings.
- GHGraham Hancock
It's extremely difficult to find. You know, sometimes we imagine that archaeologists are working with masses of skeletal material. No, they're not. Th- they're, they're not. I mean, the whole (laughs) , this is one of the ironies, the whole Clovis first dogma, you would think that they had masses of material to work with. They did have the tools, but in terms of skeletal remains, just one.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
Just one single skeletal remain from that period.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, uh, one of the things that Michael Shermer had sent me was this, uh, dispute that perhaps the bones had been cracked open by the excavation material-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, I saw-
- JRJoe Rogan
... or the excavation machines.
- GHGraham Hancock
I saw Michael's, uh, e- email, email last night, and I, I appreciate that Michael wants to continue to, uh, en- engage with this subject, and that's his job. He's a pr- he's a professional skeptic, and, and it's his, his role to do so, but what he, what he misses out, it's true that a new paper has been published, which raises questions over the, uh, s- what's called the Ceruti Mastodon site, which is the site that Tom Demere at San Diego Natural History Museum, uh, excavated. And what's interesting, uh, since I can ... since Michael took the trouble to write the questions, can I just-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- GHGraham Hancock
... can I just r- read you something that I responded to on this?
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- GHGraham Hancock
Um, which is that, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Just do it into the microphone, though, so-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, yeah base- basically, this, this, this paper, um, was in no way a refutation of the original paper in Nature. As a matter of fact, the gentleman who wrote that paper never even looked at the archaeological remains that are in th- now in the San Diego Natural History Museum. Um, what it is, what he based it on is reference, I'm quoting from the abstract of the paper itself, "reference to a freeway right-of-way map and construction plans, contemporary road building practices, and work site photographs available on the internet." In other words, the site was not visited. They simply looked at secondary references. They did not look at the archaeological material, and they ignored the entire argument of Tom Demere and his colleagues who had already addressed that issue.
- JRJoe Rogan
They didn't look at the bones? (laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
(laughs) They did not look at the bones. When you, when you break a fresh bone, it has a characteristic kind of spiral fracture that does not happen when you break a fossilized bone.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
And Tom Demere and his team specifically ruled out road-making machinery as responsible for this breaking pattern because they actually carried out experiments on, uh, modern elephants, deceased elephants, and they broke their bones, and the kind of fracture that you get in a fresh, green bone is completely different from the kind of fracture you get in a, in a, in a fossilized bone. So unfortunately, this paper pays, pays no attention to that. It just looks at road plans and says, "There was road work there. It must have been done by road work."
- 30:46 – 34:17
How early could migration be? Beringia, ice-free corridors, and earlier warm periods
- 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.
- 34:17 – 40:25
The Amazon as an archaeological blind spot: cities, terra preta, and a ‘manmade rainforest’
- 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- GHGraham Hancock
Exactly, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
So was that done by burns? Did they use controlled burns?
- GHGraham Hancock
They, they did, they... Uh, one way that it was achieved was, uh, was to do wet burning, um, of middens. They would be, they would be burned and smolder. They wouldn't burn fiercely, which just produces charcoal. They would, they would burn and smolder, um, and, and that b- what is called biochar would result, and that's part of the fertility of the soil, but the mystery is the microbial content of the soil, which is completely different from the microbes, uh, in neighboring soils. And that's, remains unexplained, as to how-
- JRJoe Rogan
So, do they, what are the theories? Composting? Some sort of advanced composting or-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, some sort of, some sort of advanced composting, but again, what has not been explained-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- 40:25 – 46:53
Geoglyph ‘henges’ and LiDAR: geometry, astronomy, and unanswered purpose
- GHGraham Hancock
large populations, and this mysterious dark earth, are huge geometrical structures. Um, and again, I, I go into this at length (laughs) in America before because I love this mystery.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
We have, in the UK, structures that are called henges. Um, I, I live in the city of Bath, and about, uh, 30 miles away there's a beautiful site called Avebury, uh, and another more famous site called Stonehenge. And what a henge is, is a ditch which has been dug deep, and then an embankment has been pushed up outside the ditch. When people first saw these structures, they wondered if they'd been built for defense, but then it became obvious they hadn't been built for defense because if you want, uh, to ha- to create a moat, you put it outside your embankment, not inside your embankment. So an e- a henge is an earthwork which consists of a deep moat with a large embankment outside it, and it can be circular, it can be square, and in the UK and other parts of Europe, it often contains stone circles, megalithic, uh, stone circles as well, but the henge itself is entirely an earthwork.... what we find in the Amazon are thousands of henges that are now beginning to emerge from the cleared area of the jungle, and others that have been identified for the first time with LiDAR. LiDAR technology is being employed in the Amazon. It's non-destructive. You can see what's under the trees.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is LiDAR?
- GHGraham Hancock
Uh, light imaging and detective re- radar.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- GHGraham Hancock
They bounce laser beams down into the jungle. There's a whole pattern of them. You need helicopters and they, they... But it doesn't damage the rainforest-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... and you can strip away and see what's, see what's there. If I'm- if this isn't too much of a diversion, let me give you the example of, uh, Guatemala. Guatemala is a small country. If I remember correctly, it's not much more than 100,000 square kilometers in size. Um, it is filled with intriguing Mayan ruins. Uh, everybody has heard of, uh, Tikal.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
What archaeologists didn't know was that literally within walking distance of Tikal, surrounding that whole area were more than 60,000 structures that they hadn't identified, and these have all been identified by LiDAR, in a country that's just 100,000 kilometers in area. So you have to ask yourself, in that five and a half million (laughs) square kilometers of the Amazon, if LiDAR technology could be applied comprehensively, what would we find beneath there? And the evidence already is extremely tempting and extremely tantalizing, and I'm intrigued by these huge geometrical figures, uh, which involve primarily, uh, circles and squares, and they are classic henges in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded by huge embankments. They're extremely geometrical. For example, you can find an octagon surrounding a square. Uh, at a place called Jacosá in the Amazon, you can find a square perfectly enclosing a circle. Now that is an exercise called squaring the circle that our arche- our, our academics (laughs) have given to the Greeks. They said the Greeks were the first pers- people who performed that exercise. But now we find in dated sites in the Amazon that this was being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks.
- JRJoe Rogan
What are the dates?
- GHGraham Hancock
Uh, the earliest dates that have been found in these sites now are about three and a half thousand years old, about three and a half thousand years old. But the evidence is that the sites have been constantly remade, and what intrigues me is what remains in that five and a half million square kilometers that has not been investigated yet. We are just, I think, looking at the edges of a mystery. The archaeologists involved, who are mainly from Finland and also from Brazil, feel the same. Their, their estimate is that there are thousands of these structures remaining in the jungle, and they're open as to how old they may ultimately prove to be. The investigation needs to be done. But what's fascinating about them is this very powerful geometry and astronomy. So a number of the sites are perfectly aligned to true north, true south, true east, and true west. I'm not talking about magnetic north, I'm talking about true astronomical north. To do that, there's only one way to do it and that's with, uh, with astronomy. So that tells us that astronomers were at work in the Amazon. The geometry is very complex and very precise. That tells us that people with geometrical skills were at work in the Amazon. And thirdly, the scale of the sites of hundreds of meters, gigantic earthworks on the scale of hundreds of meters, uh, tells us that this was highly organized, uh, project that was undertaken, uh, on a very large scale by very large numbers of people. It's a wonderful mystery and, and it deserves much further, much further attention. And I'm, I'm... Yeah, that's Jacosá, exactly, the squares.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- GHGraham Hancock
Squaring the circle. So you can see the, the, the outside embankment, and then inside it is the square ditch, and then there's another 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
- 46:53 – 53:43
Psychedelics, afterlife ‘Path of Souls,’ and cross-cultural Orion–Milky Way traditions
- GHGraham Hancock
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.
- 53:43 – 1:12:55
From spirituality to politics: nationalism, government distrust, and drug-law reform
- 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.
- GHGraham Hancock
... if you haven't done this.
- JRJoe Rogan
And we have to be there while you have it. (laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
And we have to be, we wanna see that you're drinking every drop.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
And we want an experienced shaman present-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
... who's really gonna guide you through the, through the journey. And I suspect that that would be a transformative experience for many of our political class, and that they would start to question why they do what they do, why they exploit fears in order to magnify their own position. They'd start to question that and to wonder about a different destiny for humanity. But that's a dream. I guess it's not gonna happen, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Very, very, very well said, and I couldn't agree more. My hope is that, uh, what you were saying and what we were discussing earlier about how the internet has sort of eroded our faith in many institutions-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... as being the only or the primary source of knowledge, that I hope that that takes place globally in terms of the way we view government.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that we do... the, and that your idea of, like, I love what America stands for, and what America stands for is kind of a nation that's, uh, where people go to. You know, this is one of the more insidious problems with this idea of building walls-
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and keeping people out and making it incredibly difficult to get here.... the reason why I'm here is 'cause it was pretty easy to get here.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- 1:12:55 – 1:15:53
Lost technologies and hidden histories: pyramids, ancient maps, DNA anomalies, Denisovans, and cosmic risk
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, this is the thoughts about Egypt, correct? In-
- GHGraham Hancock
It's, uh, about- about Egypt-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
... and- and- and- and about other things. I mean, for- the spec- specific example I give is above the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid are five further chambers, and these chambers are roofed and floored with granite beams that weigh about 70 tons each, and there are hundreds of them. And these 70-ton granite beams, which to put in context, a 70-ton beam is equivalent in weight to 35 large SUVs, these 70-ton granite beams have been elevated to a height of more than 350 feet above the ground and carefully and precisely, uh, placed in position. It is very hard for archaeologists to explain how that was done using purely leverage and mechanical advantage. You can say, "Oh, perhaps they built a ramp and- and- and hauled the stones up the ramp," but then you have to confront basic laws of physics. You can't haul a s- a stone weighing tens of tons up a slope that exceeds 10 degrees. Then you start doing the calculation. How long a ramp do I need with a 10-degree slope to get to 350 feet above the ground? (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
And the answer is, you need a fucking long ramp.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
(laughs) Which- which should still be there-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
... because not o- it couldn't have been a sand ramp, it would have collapsed under the weight of those stones. It had to be as massive as the pyramid itself. So this begins to seem like an absurd idea, the- the- the idea that is foisted on us by archaeology. Maybe the idea that they regard as absurd, namely that psychic powers were cultivated by ancient civilizations, that they could use powers of the human mind that we have allowed to lapse, maybe that idea deserves further consideration. Um, we have gone down a path of leverage and mechanical advantage, we're used to relying on machines, but we hear anecdotal reports of people who have telekinetic powers, who can move things with their minds, of people who have telepathic powers, and our automatic reaction is to just dismiss all of that because science says it's impossible, um, be- be- be- because, uh, 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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Transcript of episode Rxmw9eizOAo
