Joe Rogan Experience #1284 - Graham Hancock

Joe Rogan 0:02 Here we go. And boom, we're live. Graham, great to see you again.

Graham Hancock 0:07 Nice to be-

Joe Rogan 0:07 Always.

Graham Hancock 0:08 ... back with you, Joe.

Joe Rogan 0:09 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.

Graham Hancock 0:21 That's correct, yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:22 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.

Graham Hancock 0:27 I think it's, I think it's really important-

Joe Rogan 0:28 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 0:28 ... 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."

Joe Rogan 0:50 Beautiful.

Graham Hancock 0:51 So it's there.

Joe Rogan 0:51 So if people want that, it's a little bit different and there's a small gold square-

Graham Hancock 0:54 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.

Joe Rogan 1:15 All right, there it is. So, um, how is this... Oh, b- before we even get into the book-

Graham Hancock 1:19 Oh, go to-

Joe Rogan 1:20 What is it?

Graham Hancock 1:20 Go to Talks & Events.

Narrator 1:22 Right here?

Joe Rogan 1:23 Okay, we're on the Graham Hancock website.

Graham Hancock 1:25 Oh, no. No, go to Books. (laughs) Go to Books. Go to America Before.

Joe Rogan 1:29 Bam.

Graham Hancock 1:30 Bam. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:31 There it is.

Graham Hancock 1:32 Go to United States. You can see Amazon, Barnes &... And there's Barnes & Noble.

Joe Rogan 1:37 Special edition.

Graham Hancock 1:37 Special edition. Click on that.

Joe Rogan 1:39 There you go, and then the e-book as well. The, the e-book-

Graham Hancock 1:41 The e-book is available.

Joe Rogan 1:42 ... is the special edition as well.

Graham Hancock 1:42 The audiobook, which I read myself-

Joe Rogan 1:44 Excellent.

Graham Hancock 1:44 ... is available there. Then if you scroll down, um... Oops, that shouldn't be there.

Joe Rogan 1:50 Damn pop-ups.

Graham Hancock 1:51 Damn pop-ups.

Joe Rogan 1:51 Sons of bitches.

Graham Hancock 1:52 Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:52 I am so happy you read it yourself. I get angry when someone else reads someone who I... I'm like, "Come on, he can talk."

Graham Hancock 1:58 Yeah. I, I enjoy reading my books myself, and, and what I've, what I've learnt from feedback I get from audiences at presentations is people like me doing that.

Joe Rogan 2:07 Oh, yeah, for sure.

Graham Hancock 2:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:09 Yeah, no... 100%. It's just weird when someone else is talking in your voice, like, "Hey, man, I know you're not Graham."

Graham Hancock 2:13 You know that I write fiction as well as-

Joe Rogan 2:15 Yes.

Graham Hancock 2:15 ... non-fiction.

Joe Rogan 2:15 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 2:16 And the one thing I can't read is my fiction, because-

Joe Rogan 2:18 Really?

Graham Hancock 2:19 Well, n- yeah, because fictions requires accents. You really need an actor-

Joe Rogan 2:21 Yes.

Graham Hancock 2:21 ... to read a fiction book, who can get into the different characters, but for a non-fiction book like America Before, it's very straightforward for me just to read it myself.

Joe Rogan 2:29 I agree. I'm a tremendous Stephen King fan, but when I read Stephen King's books where he reads 'em, or listen to him when he reads them, they're terrible.

Graham Hancock 2:37 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:38 He's awful at it. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 2:39 I don't think a novelist should, should read their own, their own novels. I think that's a, that's a job for, for an actor. Oddly enough, I've just been reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I just-

Joe Rogan 2:47 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 2:47 ... very near the end of the seventh volume of that.

Joe Rogan 2:49 Yeah, I'm just a giant fan of his-

Graham Hancock 2:51 Me too.

Joe Rogan 2:51 ... but, man, when he reads it, he reads it like he's just reading it.

Graham Hancock 2:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:55 It's like, oof, this is rough. It's hard to get behind. Anyway, um, America Before, um, uh-

Graham Hancock 3:01 So there's-

Joe Rogan 3:01 Give us the-

Graham Hancock 3:02 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 3:24 Excellent.

Graham Hancock 3:24 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-

Joe Rogan 3:31 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 3:31 ... uh, I'll be, I'll be doing those events.

Joe Rogan 3:33 And are, do you, are you doing these at theaters, and do you allow Q&As? Like, how, how do these work?

Graham Hancock 3:37 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-

Joe Rogan 4:00 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 4:00 ... 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) -

Joe Rogan 4:11 Wow.

Graham Hancock 4:12 ... signing and taking, and taking pictures. But it's a joy. It's an-

Joe Rogan 4:15 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 4:15 ... it's really an opportunity for me to interact with the, with, with the people who actually make my work matter, so...

Joe Rogan 4:19 That's fantastic.

Graham Hancock 4:20 ... yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:20 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-

Graham Hancock 4:31 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 4:32 ... 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-

Graham Hancock 4:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:51 ... by actual evidence, particularly Gobekli Tepe and-

Graham Hancock 4:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:54 ... I mean, the, the, the... All the water erosion stuff on the Sphinx-

Graham Hancock 4:58 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 4:58 ... and I've since had Dr. Robert Schoch-

Graham Hancock 5:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:00 ... on the podcast to talk about that as well. But all this stuff, um, was, at one point, very controversial-

Graham Hancock 5:06 Yes.

Joe Rogan 5:06 ... and now far less.

Graham Hancock 5:08 Yes.

Joe Rogan 5:08 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.

Graham Hancock 5:19 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.

Joe Rogan 7:01 Well, I'm so happy for you, because I know that for a long time, you were out there on your own-

Graham Hancock 7:05 Very-

Joe Rogan 7:05 ... with a lot of these theories.

Graham Hancock 7:07 Very, very much so. And, and, uh, al- al- also sub- subjected to the most, the most b- blistering and deeply un- unpleasant criticism-

Joe Rogan 7:17 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 7:17 ... 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.

Graham Hancock 7:47 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.

Joe Rogan 8:30 Yes.

Graham Hancock 8:30 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-

Joe Rogan 9:42 And I think we can thank the internet for that.

Graham Hancock 9:44 We can thank the internet for that, yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:45 Yeah. You... I'm sure you've seen the more recent evidence of a crater that they just discovered, like fairly recently.

Graham Hancock 9:51 Greenland.

Joe Rogan 9:51 Yes.

Graham Hancock 9:52 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:52 Enormous, enormous crater.

Graham Hancock 9:53 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.

Joe Rogan 13:07 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.

Graham Hancock 13:16 Yes.

Joe Rogan 13:17 Where it really goes into depth about the impact, the evidence of these impacts-

Graham Hancock 13:21 Yes.

Joe Rogan 13:21 ... the evidence of the very quick demise of the Ice Age, and what may-

Graham Hancock 13:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:26 ... 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.

Graham Hancock 13:39 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-

Joe Rogan 13:48 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 13:48 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 13:56 Yes.

Graham Hancock 13:56 ... an account of, of real events. It's been my privilege to work very closely with Randall Carlson.

Joe Rogan 14:01 Yeah, he's amazing.

Graham Hancock 14:01 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.

Joe Rogan 15:05 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-

Graham Hancock 15:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:14 ... where you can take a look at the landscape and you get a perspective of how immense this destruction was.

Graham Hancock 15:20 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.

Joe Rogan 16:15 So what was the motivation behind creating this book, America Before?

Graham Hancock 16:21 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-"

Joe Rogan 17:10 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 17:10 "... 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.

Joe Rogan 19:24 What was this gentleman in the Yukon? What was his history?

Graham Hancock 19:26 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.

Joe Rogan 19:51 And what year was he, um, what year did he-

Graham Hancock 19:53 He, he, he was excavating in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Joe Rogan 19:56 Is he still alive?

Graham Hancock 19:57 He's still alive. He's still alive, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:59 Is he bitter? (laughs)

Graham Hancock 20:00 Well, I think he's vindicated, you know? And it's kind of, it's kind of nice to be vindicated.

Joe Rogan 20:03 Yes.

Graham Hancock 20:03 That, that, th- th- th- th there's almost a place in folklo- folklore for the, for the-

Joe Rogan 20:07 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 20:07 ... for the individual who is scorned and humiliated, you know, by, by others, but who turns out to be, to be right.

Joe Rogan 20:13 Yes.

Graham Hancock 20:13 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-

Joe Rogan 20:49 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 20:49 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 22:13 W-

Graham Hancock 22:13 ... until, until very recently.

Joe Rogan 22:15 What was the evidence from 130,000 years ago?

Graham Hancock 22:17 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-

Joe Rogan 22:47 San Diego?

Graham Hancock 22:48 ... near San Diego.

Joe Rogan 22:48 Right.

Graham Hancock 22:48 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)

Joe Rogan 24:08 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 24:08 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.

Joe Rogan 24:41 What is the challenge of it? What is the challenge?

Graham Hancock 24:42 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.

Joe Rogan 24:59 And this is just evidence of the first human beings.

Graham Hancock 25:01 Yes.

Joe Rogan 25:01 Uh, we have to point out how difficult it is to find evidence of human beings.

Graham Hancock 25:03 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.

Joe Rogan 25:22 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 25:22 Just one single skeletal remain from that period.

Joe Rogan 25:25 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-

Graham Hancock 25:34 Yeah, I saw-

Joe Rogan 25:34 ... or the excavation machines.

Graham Hancock 25:36 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-

Joe Rogan 26:08 Sure.

Graham Hancock 26:09 ... can I just r- read you something that I responded to on this?

Joe Rogan 26:13 Sure.

Graham Hancock 26:13 Um, which is that, uh-

Joe Rogan 26:15 Just do it into the microphone, though, so-

Graham Hancock 26:15 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.

Joe Rogan 27:07 They didn't look at the bones? (laughs)

Graham Hancock 27:08 (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.

Joe Rogan 27:18 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 27:18 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."

Joe Rogan 27:46 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 27:46 I think it's very sloppy, very weak, and, uh, it's certainly not the answer. We can expect ongoing debate, and that is, uh, that is healthy, but this is not a strong case at all.

Joe Rogan 27:55 So this points to the first evidence that we've found, and is there any effort underway to try to uncover more evidence that, uh ... from a similar time period?

Graham Hancock 28:04 Well, I'm, I'm going to cite, uh, Tom, Tom Demere, the, the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. That's what he would like to see.

Joe Rogan 28:11 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 28:12 He makes the point to me. I interview him. I, I spen- I spent a day with him at the Natural History Museum. He was very generous with his time. I did an extended interview, and I quote from it in, in America, uh, before, and his wish is that archaeologists, instead of spending all their time trying to find ways to dismiss and get rid of his findings, his wish is that they would spend a little bit of that time looking at deposits older than 13,400 years, and even being willing to go back as far as 130,000 years. That's, that's would be a proper scientific response. Here is this thorough body of work put forward by a very senior group of scientists who hesitated before they published it. They had the information back in the 1990s, but it wasn't until refined dating techniques later than in, in, in the 21st century that they finally were sure what they had and that they published it in, in Nature in 2017. It's, uh, it's, it's a, it's an important study, and, and, um, I think what's gonna happen, uh-... uh, is that we're going to find much more evidence of a very ancient human presence in the America- Americas, and that's what Tom Demaré thinks as well. Um, and as he points out, if we don't look, then we're never going to find. If we allow dogma to stop us looking and saying, "Oh, it's impossible that humans were in the Americas 130,000 years ago, so we won't bother to look," what a failure of science that is. And, and, and to spend all the time instead trying to get rid of the evidence th- that, uh, doesn't fit the current paradigm.

Joe Rogan 29:37 Well, it's so fascinating that just this fortuitous discovery during a construction site could change the way people perceive things-

Graham Hancock 29:43 Yes.

Joe Rogan 29:43 ... and you just... you gotta wonder how much of that stuff is un- I mean, how deep did they have to go to find these mastodon bones?

Graham Hancock 29:49 Well, so this is a, this is a road cut that's being made.

Joe Rogan 29:52 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 29:52 So those would be, those would be pretty deep down, 10, 15 feet down. The, the grader is going through and, and, and flattening them. It varies from place to place, depending on, on soil deposition-

Joe Rogan 30:02 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 30:02 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 30:37 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 30:37 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 30:46 Mm.

Graham Hancock 30:46 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 34:17 Some of the more, uh, fascinating pieces of evidence in South America have come out recently-

Graham Hancock 34:22 Mm.

Joe Rogan 34:22 ... about these, uh, channels and pathways that they've found in the Amazon-

Graham Hancock 34:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:26 ... that could not have been created any other way but by humans-

Graham Hancock 34:30 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 34:30 ... creating irrigation, humans creating th- th- like, it appears like grids, like a city grid.

Graham Hancock 34:36 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-

Joe Rogan 35:14 Whoa.

Graham Hancock 35:15 ... it's like saying, "We've done world archaeology, but we've just ignored India."You know-

Joe Rogan 35:20 (laughs)

Narrator 35:20 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 35:20 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 36:54 Oh.

Graham Hancock 36:54 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.

Joe Rogan 37:19 Wow.

Graham Hancock 37:19 Huge numbers of them. And a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people.

Joe Rogan 37:26 What?

Graham Hancock 37:27 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-

Joe Rogan 38:23 How'd they create this?

Graham Hancock 38:25 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.

Joe Rogan 38:41 Jamie's got an image of it up there. So this is it?

Graham Hancock 38:43 This is terra preta, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:44 Wow.

Graham Hancock 38:45 Exactly, and-

Joe Rogan 38:46 So was that done by burns? Did they use controlled burns?

Graham Hancock 38:49 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-

Joe Rogan 39:17 So, do they, what are the theories? Composting? Some sort of advanced composting or-

Graham Hancock 39:20 Yeah, some sort of, some sort of advanced composting, but again, what has not been explained-

Joe Rogan 39:25 Wow.

Graham Hancock 39:25 ... is the mi- is the mi- microbial, uh, content of these soils. So there, there, first of all, is an issue of how, uh, two things, how large populations get fed in the Amazon, and evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon that was capable of manipulating the environment in such a way that it could support large populations with the invention of terra preta. Secondly, new evidence, previously not recognized, the Amazon is basically a garden. The Amazon is a manmade rainforest. Uh, there are certain trees like Brazil nut trees or the ice cream bean tree, which are food crops, which are very, very valuable and they dominate the, uh, the, the tree regime in, in the Amazon. They're what's, what's referred to as hyperdominant species. In other words, people living in the Amazon over thousands of years selected certain trees, which they then cultivated and grew. So the whole thing is not simply a wild, pristine rainforest. It's a very ancient, manmade environment. And emerging from that manmade environment, as well as evidence of large cities,

Graham Hancock 40:26 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.

Joe Rogan 40:38 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 40:39 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.

Joe Rogan 41:45 What is LiDAR?

Graham Hancock 41:46 Uh, light imaging and detective re- radar.

Joe Rogan 41:48 Oh.

Graham Hancock 41:48 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-

Joe Rogan 41:55 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 41:55 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 42:14 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 42:14 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.

Joe Rogan 43:27 What are the dates?

Graham Hancock 43:28 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.

Joe Rogan 44:53 Wow.

Graham Hancock 44:53 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.

Joe Rogan 45:03 It's crazy that they made a road right through that. What assholes. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 45:05 Well, a modern road, yeah, you know, because, because there's no respect for-

Joe Rogan 45:08 (laughs) Yeah.

Graham Hancock 45:08 ... there's no respect for the ancient, for the ancient world, unfortunately.

Joe Rogan 45:11 Well, uh, there's still, and there's another one. Look at that. Wow.

Graham Hancock 45:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:14 That's incredible. Now, now-

Graham Hancock 45:15 So there, there are thousands of these things.

Joe Rogan 45:16 ... how have they found... The, the, the stuff that they found in the Amazon, what imaging technology were they using to find all this-

Graham Hancock 45:22 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

Graham Hancock 46:53 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.

Joe Rogan 51:39 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?

Graham Hancock 51:49 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...

Joe Rogan 52:13 I've never done that. What is that like?

Graham Hancock 52:14 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.

Joe Rogan 53:43 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-

Graham Hancock 53:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:55 ... 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.

Graham Hancock 54:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:05 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.

Graham Hancock 54:20 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 54:21 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-

Graham Hancock 54:29 This is what it, what this is really about. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:30 ... yes, not, not enforcing your ideas or pushing them on other people and forcing people to behave the way you behave, but instead love.

Graham Hancock 54:38 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-

Joe Rogan 55:12 Yes.

Graham Hancock 55:13 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 58:37 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 58:37 That would be the condition. Don't even bother applying for the job-

Joe Rogan 58:43 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 58:43 ... if you haven't done this.

Joe Rogan 58:43 And we have to be there while you have it. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 58:45 And we have to be, we wanna see that you're drinking every drop.

Joe Rogan 58:49 Yes.

Graham Hancock 58:49 And we want an experienced shaman present-

Joe Rogan 58:51 Yes.

Graham Hancock 58:52 ... 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?

Joe Rogan 59:11 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-

Graham Hancock 59:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:22 ... 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.

Graham Hancock 59:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:31 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-

Graham Hancock 59:47 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 59:47 ... 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.

Graham Hancock 59:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:54 That's why I'm here, you know, and it's what-

Graham Hancock 59:56 That's the, that's the essence of America-

Joe Rogan 59:57 Yes.

Graham Hancock 59:57 ... a free-

Joe Rogan 59:58 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 59:58 ... and open society.

Joe Rogan 59:59 Come here and do better.

Graham Hancock 1:00:00 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:00:00 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-

Graham Hancock 1:00:09 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:00:09 ... anywhere in the world.

Graham Hancock 1:00:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:10 That this could eventually spread out.

Graham Hancock 1:00:12 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:00:12 That's, this is, uh, my hope.

Graham Hancock 1:00:14 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-

Joe Rogan 1:00:39 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:00:39 ... 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?

Joe Rogan 1:00:56 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:00:56 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-

Joe Rogan 1:02:14 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:02:14 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:03:24 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-

Graham Hancock 1:03:31 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:03:31 ... which was, uh, talking about the drug laws in this country-

Graham Hancock 1:03:35 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:03:35 ... 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-

Graham Hancock 1:03:47 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:03:47 ... who are white people have profited off of this-

Graham Hancock 1:03:50 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:03:50 ... and how many people are still in jail-

Graham Hancock 1:03:53 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:03:53 ... for, for crimes that they committed, you know, qu- air quote, "crimes"-

Graham Hancock 1:03:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:57 ... that are no longer crimes.

Graham Hancock 1:03:58 That are no longer crimes, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:59 Yeah, and th- this is ridiculous and, uh, these, these records should be expunged-

Graham Hancock 1:04:03 They should be completely expunged.

Joe Rogan 1:04:04 ... they should be completely released.

Graham Hancock 1:04:04 I see that California has made some steps in that direction-

Joe Rogan 1:04:07 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:04:07 ... there has been some expunging of records.

Joe Rogan 1:04:08 Yes. Well, we can only hope that also what, what opens up next is psilocybin is now going to be on the ballot.

Graham Hancock 1:04:15 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 1:04:15 And when that opens up, I mean, what, you really think marijuana's a gateway drug? Well, guess what? It is if psilocybin gets in.

Graham Hancock 1:04:22 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:04:22 Because psilocybin can legitimately change the world.

Graham Hancock 1:04:25 It certainly can.

Joe Rogan 1:04:25 And it really, I mean, I think marijuana can change the world and I really do think that cannabis is changing people's perceptions and making people more calm and friendly-

Graham Hancock 1:04:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:34 ... and, and even the, what they talk about with paranoia, I welcome that.

Graham Hancock 1:04:39 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:04:39 And the reason why I welcome that is I think people are entirely too cocky.

Graham Hancock 1:04:42 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:04:42 The like, the, the life we live is bizarre as you could ever imagine-

Graham Hancock 1:04:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:46 ... in a book and we're just accustomed to it-

Graham Hancock 1:04:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:48 ... because it's our day-to-day existence.

Graham Hancock 1:04:49 Take it all for granted, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:51 Marijuana removes those blinders-

Graham Hancock 1:04:53 It does.

Joe Rogan 1:04:53 ... and it, and it really makes you understand that this is a strange, strange life and these, a lot of these w- pitfalls and problems that we have in our society are due to fear, and they're due to i- ignorance-

Graham Hancock 1:05:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05:06 ... and they're, they're due to this, this lack of connection with each other, and cannabis and many of these other psychedelic drugs, they encourage this connection with each other.

Graham Hancock 1:05:14 Absolutely, they absolutely do.

Joe Rogan 1:05:15 Which is, I think, what we need.

Graham Hancock 1:05:16 It's, it's, it's certainly what we need-

Joe Rogan 1:05:18 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:05:18 ... and, and, and it's an aberration in human culture that we've created a society that demonized these, these substances-

Joe Rogan 1:05:23 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:05:23 ... and made them illegal. It's, it's a relatively recent thing, it's really just the last, the last 100 years, it's a, it's a, it's a tiny part of the human story-

Joe Rogan 1:05:30 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:05:30 ... and yet we're so arrogant as a society that we can set aside thousands of years of human tradition and experience and wisdom working with the plant medicine. We just set it aside, turn them into criminal substances, and say, "We know everything." What a, what a huge and stupid mistake that is. Um, on cannabis, uh, as a-... quote-unquote gateway drug. It absolutely is in this sense, that the legalization of cannabis is going to open the doors to the... as- as you say, to the legalization of- of psychedelics. Because what's happening is that the population is completely waking up to the fact that they have been bullshitted and lied to about cannabis for the best part of a century. And once that dawns on people, the re- the realization at a direct personal level, "Here's this herb I love. I have been lied to, systematically misinformed by central government, uh, about this, about this herb." That leads to questioning of everything that central government does. And so in that sense, it is a gateway to a questioning society. The psychedelics are different (laughs) in that, in that psilocybin, um, actually does lead you to question stuff.

Joe Rogan 1:06:40 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:06:41 It leads you to really ask questions about, about everything, about your role in the world, about you as a person, about how you relate to other people, and about the whole system on this planet, and the- the beautiful, gorgeous planet that we, that we have and what we're doing to it. That- that also enters, e- enters awareness. So...

Joe Rogan 1:06:57 It- it erodes confidence in authority, and it also erodes confidence in authority that doesn't have experiences that you've experienced.

Graham Hancock 1:07:03 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 1:07:04 That's the part of the problem, is that these people that are holding people back from these psychedelic experiences, they've never had them.

Graham Hancock 1:07:10 They've never had them.

Joe Rogan 1:07:10 So they don't even know what they're rallying against.

Graham Hancock 1:07:13 They're coming to it from a place of fear and prejudice.

Joe Rogan 1:07:15 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:07:15 Uh, they're simply accepting stuff that they've been told without really thinking it through and- and- and examining it, and again, it's a failure of- of what human beings, uh, should- should be doing. We have to get, we have to get rid of this fear.

Joe Rogan 1:07:27 And ironically, it's bad for them as well.

Graham Hancock 1:07:29 Of course.

Joe Rogan 1:07:29 It's bad for the people that are actually encouraging this- these laws to be enforced.

Graham Hancock 1:07:34 Yes. It's- it's- it's bad for the- it's bad for the whole of, the whole of society-

Joe Rogan 1:07:38 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:07:38 ... because it is healthy for a, for a society where adults become self-realized individuals, where they make their own responsible choices about their own lives, where they don't say, "Oh, government m- m- must make this choice for me." That's the next step for humanity. We start, we need to start becoming our own leaders and making our own choices, and that is, that is what's being revealed now that we're getting to the skull beneath the smile of the war on drugs. We're realizing that it's part of a big program of lying that has been about keeping people's minds closed down, not wanting free thinking. I've made this point s- several times, but our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such. Uh, our society will allow big pharma to make billions of dollars with drugs that alter consciousness like Seroxat and Prozac, uh, antidepressants, which, in my opinion, having had some experience of them, are amongst the most horrible drugs on the planet. They are very harmful, very dangerous drugs, but they're completely legal and they're encouraged with our system. Likewise, alcohol, very dangerous drug, causes fights, causes drunk driving accidents, leads to cirrhosis of the liver, completely legal and open. Our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such, it's against particular kinds of altered states of consciousness-

Joe Rogan 1:08:52 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:08:52 ... that lead to questioning of the existing control system. That's what's, that's what's going on here.

Joe Rogan 1:08:59 Hear, hear. Well said.

Graham Hancock 1:09:01 And as you know, I have my own story with, uh, with- with cannabis, and-

Joe Rogan 1:09:05 Yes, well, you and I had a- a moment. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:09:07 We had a moment, which was, which was, uh, quite a life-changing moment for me, because I, if I may just rehearse a little bit-

Joe Rogan 1:09:13 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:09:13 ... of this for- for- for- for the audience. Um, in 2011, uh, I had a series of ayahuasca sessions, uh, in which it was shown to me that I was using cannabis completely wrong, uh, that it had become a dominant force in my life, that it was making me ... You were speaking about paranoia, and I agree with you. Paranoia is a, is a useful thing, if- if only to overcome it, that it was making me paranoid, that it was making me suspicious, that I approached everybody around me in a state of suspicion. And I was shown this by ayahuasca and ve- given a very strong message, "You need to quit cannabis." What I didn't realize at the time is that the problem was not cannabis, the problem was me, uh, that I needed to fix those aspects of myself before I could have a proper relationship with cannabis.

Joe Rogan 1:09:58 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:09:58 So after that ayahuasca session, having smoked cannabis for decades, uh, literally 16 hours a day, seven days a week, I quit. I quit for three years. And then I'm on your show.

Joe Rogan 1:10:10 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:10:10 And we're sitting, we're sitting opposite one another as we are now, and you ask me a question, um, "Are you still off the cannabis?" And I- and I say, "Well, I'm thinking of dipping my toes back in the water," at which point you produce a joint.

Joe Rogan 1:10:21 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:10:22 (laughs) And- and we smoke it together. Uh, first of all, after three years, your tolerance is way down on cannabis.

Joe Rogan 1:10:29 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:10:29 So I got really stoned.

Joe Rogan 1:10:31 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:10:31 I did listen to that interview back and somehow I held it together and-

Joe Rogan 1:10:34 Oh, you held it together brilliantly. You opened up and it was like a- a wave of information came pouring out of you. It was-

Graham Hancock 1:10:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:40 ... it was wonderful to watch.

Graham Hancock 1:10:40 It was a liberation for me.

Joe Rogan 1:10:42 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:10:42 And what it said to me is, "It's time to go back to cannabis, uh, but perhaps in a different way."

Joe Rogan 1:10:47 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:10:47 It doesn't, it, I- I need a different relationship with this amazing medicine, and- and if I can forge that, if I can make that different relationship happen, then it can be a constructive and positive part of my life, and I can say definitely that that has been the case, and that it-

Joe Rogan 1:11:00 That's excellent.

Graham Hancock 1:11:01 ... and so it's all thanks to you, Joe. I probably would still be off cannabis if it hadn't been for that joint.

Joe Rogan 1:11:05 Well, I think, uh, people can develop these patterns of behavior that are destructive with anything, whether it's with alcohol or cannabis or, you know-

Graham Hancock 1:11:12 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:11:12 ... sex or anything. People get, they get in ruts-

Graham Hancock 1:11:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:16 ... and, you know, it doesn't mean that the cannabis is bad, it means that you are on a bad mental path.

Graham Hancock 1:11:20 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:11:21 You know?

Graham Hancock 1:11:21 Exactly. We-

Joe Rogan 1:11:22 And we, I mean, I'm not encouraging it for everybody-

Graham Hancock 1:11:24 No.

Joe Rogan 1:11:24 ... because some people, it genuinely, biologically doesn't jive with them.

Graham Hancock 1:11:27 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:28 You know?

Graham Hancock 1:11:28 But the fundamental thing is w- we as adult human beings need to take responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions.

Joe Rogan 1:11:35 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:11:35 Uh, and we need not hand that responsibility over to governmental institutions, especially when it concerns something as intimate and personal as our consciousness, and, uh, my view is the ancient world had the right attitude to this kind of thing-

Joe Rogan 1:11:50 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:11:50 ... and the modern world, uh, does not, and that we can sit down and learn a lot from the ancient world. A lot of people ask me...You know, Hancock, you've been arguing that there's a lost- there's been a lost civilization in the- in the- in the human story, but what- what sort of civilization do you think it was? Well, one of the things I think is it was a civilization that used psychedelics. I think it was a civilization that emerged from shamanism, but did not stay at the hunter-gatherer stage, but that took the essence of shamanism and integrated it into a very different kind of civilization from our own, which pursued things in different ways. A lot of archaeologists have said to me, "But we don't find any plastic bottles from the Ice Age. That means there was no advanced civilization during the Ice Age." Well, hang on, maybe an advanced civilization might have decided never to get involved in plastic in the first place. Maybe there would have been a clear choice not to make plastic, maybe they did things in completely different ways. Maybe they cultivated powers of the human mind that, uh, we dismiss and regard as, uh, completely, completely unimportant, you know, woo-woo.

Joe Rogan 1:12:55 Yeah, this is the thoughts about Egypt, correct? In-

Graham Hancock 1:12:57 It's, uh, about- about Egypt-

Joe Rogan 1:12:58 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:12:58 ... 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)

Joe Rogan 1:14:07 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:14:07 And the answer is, you need a fucking long ramp.

Joe Rogan 1:14:10 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:14:10 (laughs) Which- which should still be there-

Joe Rogan 1:14:12 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:14:12 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:15:24 Well, it's pure speculation that they used some sort of a telekinetic power, but it's absolute-

Graham Hancock 1:15:28 Pure speculation.

Joe Rogan 1:15:29 ... but it's absolute that they did something that we don't understand.

Graham Hancock 1:15:32 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:15:32 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-

Graham Hancock 1:15:43 Great Pyramid's supposed to be about 4,500 years old, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:45 That's really old. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:15:46 (laughs) It's incredibly old, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:47 Like, to f- to think that someone back then could do something that would perplex us today-

Graham Hancock 1:15:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:52 ... with modern