Joe Rogan Experience #2215 - Graham Hancock

Narrator 0:00 (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Good to see you, sir. What's happening?

Graham Hancock 0:14 Good to see you too, Joe.

Joe Rogan 0:16 I watched, uh, episode one and I'm into episode two of your new season. Uh, looks-

Graham Hancock 0:20 Fantastic.

Joe Rogan 0:21 ... fantastic. Looks awesome. Fantastic information. But before we do anything, I think we should probably address what we know now about the debate that you had with Flint Dibble.

Graham Hancock 0:31 Yes.

Joe Rogan 0:31 So that was the last time we were here. Um, it was... I, I appreciate that he came on and I thought that was going to be an interesting discussion, but it turned out he played fast and loose with the truth, um, and, and distorted quite a bit of information that, um, were some key points that you had discussed. One of them being, uh, the amount of shipwrecks-

Graham Hancock 0:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:54 ... that were discovered. He greatly inflated the amount of shipwrecks that have been discovered. And then you released a video, uh, today.

Graham Hancock 1:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01 Um, that went over a lot of this stuff, and one of the things that went over is the oldest shipwreck that we are currently available, it's about 4,000 years old?

Graham Hancock 1:09 About 6,000.

Joe Rogan 1:10 6000?

Graham Hancock 1:11 The Nicos shipwreck, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12 But there's nothing left of the ship.

Graham Hancock 1:14 No, that's right.

Joe Rogan 1:14 And this is what's important. The, you know, what he was trying to say was that it would be preserved-

Graham Hancock 1:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19 ... by the cold water. That turns out to not be the truth at all, and that these ships that are 6,000 years old, there's nothing left of the actual boat itself.

Graham Hancock 1:27 That's right.

Joe Rogan 1:27 The only thing that's left is pottery and coins-

Graham Hancock 1:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31 ... and things of the like.

Graham Hancock 1:32 Yeah. And especially when you consider the possibility of ships having gone through a cataclysm.

Joe Rogan 1:37 Right.

Graham Hancock 1:37 It's not likely. But there's a, there's a more central point than that, which, which really needed to be brought up by the archeologist in this, which is that, which is that archeology universally accepts that human beings were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 1:55 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:55 And I, I put the evidence on this into the, into the video. It's not even in dispute. Like the island of Cyprus, nearest Turkish coast is about 60 kilometers from there. Uh, it's always been surrounded by huge deeps. It's always been an island, even at the peak of the sea, uh, sea level, lowest sea level during the Ice Age. Cyprus was always an island. And yet there's evidence now that it was settled 14,000 years ago, certainly 14,000 to 12,500 years ago. It was settled, uh, in other words, during the Ice Age. And these were large planned migrations. When you're going to migrate to an island, you can't just go two or three people by accident-

Joe Rogan 2:37 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 2:37 ... because you'll become extinct. You have to bring in quite a large population, and they reckon that populations of 1000 or so were being brought across that water, uh, across the ocean, across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus near the end of the last ice age. But not a single ship has survived from-

Joe Rogan 2:53 Right.

Graham Hancock 2:53 ... to, to, to testify to that. Same with Australia. 50,000 years ago, human beings got there, and even at the lowest sea level, they would've had to cross about 90 kilometers of open water, uh, and in large numbers. And again, no ships have been found to testify to that, yet archeologists accept that they got there by ship. So, so to say that we haven't found any ships, uh, from (laughs) , from the Ice Age is not really evidence about anything.

Joe Rogan 3:18 And if we're finding the oldest ships that we, we currently are aware of, which is, as you said, about 6,000 years ago, if you tack on another 6,000 years of decay on top of that-

Graham Hancock 3:30 Sure.

Joe Rogan 3:30 ... like what are the odds you're gonna find anything?

Graham Hancock 3:32 I think the odds are very, very low, yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:33 Now, if we have that evidence and that information when we were confronting Flint, that would've been a very different conversation.

Graham Hancock 3:40 Totally.

Joe Rogan 3:40 But the, the arrogance in which he distributed that fake information-

Graham Hancock 3:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:45 ... was, uh, it's disturbing. It sucks when people just want to win-

Graham Hancock 3:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:49 ... and they don't want to get to the truth.

Graham Hancock 3:51 It does. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:52 And the truth is kind... it's very fascinating. Another thing that was very fascinating that he discussed, uh, I didn't watch your whole video, but it was about seeds. Um, I asked the question, there's, there's a very distinct, um, noticeable difference between domestic seeds and seeds that are wild. And the difference is the seeds that are wild, they break off easier because it, it makes sense that it would, uh, help them prosper, it would help them be able to spread the seed if it broke off the plant easier-

Graham Hancock 4:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:25 ... and so they can recognize that. And then when they start using large scale agriculture, the seeds become more robust and stick to the-

Graham Hancock 4:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:33 ... to the, to the plant because it makes sense that it would, if you're gonna harvest all of the plants and then take the seeds off of it for the, the plant to prosper-

Graham Hancock 4:43 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 4:43 ... you would want the, the seeds to be more robust.

Graham Hancock 4:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:45 So there's these changes. And I said, "Have they ever noticed a, a domesticated seed going back and having the characteristics of a wild seed?" He said no.

Graham Hancock 4:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:56 But that's not true either.

Graham Hancock 4:56 That's not true either, no.

Joe Rogan 4:57 No.

Graham Hancock 4:58 It's not. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's not true. And, and the whole notion of the, of the origins of agriculture, I think archeology has got a great deal more work to do on that. Often I'm misrepresented as saying that survivors of my supposed lost civilization, um, would have, would have brought crops with them. I, I think that's most unlikely in a cataclysmic situation. What they brought with them was the knowledge that crops can be domesticated, and it's precisely during the Younger Dryas that we see that shift from undomesticated to domesticated crops in the archeological record.

Joe Rogan 5:32 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 5:33 And what I'm suggesting is that these were people who had already conquered that problem, they'd already solved that problem. They knew it could be done, uh, and they brought that knowledge with them and shared that, shared that knowledge with, uh, the people that they took refuge amongst, because I don't think we're looking at a, a mass migration. I think we're looking at a few survivors who are taking refuge after a global cataclysm.

Joe Rogan 5:56 Uh, you know, it's just very unfortunate when you have a debate and, uh, one person is an expert and they're not, they're not truthful, and that's just-

Graham Hancock 6:04 I think it's very bad... I think it's very bad for archeology.

Joe Rogan 6:07 It is 'cause it reinforces all the things that you've been saying.

Graham Hancock 6:09 It, it, it does. Uh, I mean, to be honest, I felt beaten up after that, (laughs) after that debate.

Joe Rogan 6:15 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 6:15 But looking back in, in, in retrospect on, on, on the whole thing, I think it actually, it actually makes the point that we have a very arrogant, very controlling discipline in archaeology, which has established a narrative about the past and which will fight tooth and nail to maintain that narrative, uh, including using dirty tricks. And I, I think instead of, you know, smearing people who talk about the possibility of a lost civilization or people who even talk about aliens, I think ev- in- instead of smearing them, archaeology should understand why people are asking those questions.

Joe Rogan 6:47 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 6:48 So people are asking those questions because they're not satisfied with what archaeology is offering. It's not, it's not providing a nurturing, satisfying resolution to many of the problems that, that, that come from the past. And that's what drives me, is, is, is curiosity about anomalies in the past. I'm often misrepresented as saying that somehow I've proved that a lost civilization existed, and, and I don't claim to have proved that. What I do say is, join me on this journey. There are mysteries in the past. Let's see if they're explained by archaeology or if they're not explained. And I've found quite a number that are not explained by archaeology, and that's particularly to do with, uh, astronomical alignments with traditions that are shared all around the world. It's to do with, it's to do with things that archaeologists by and large don't study.

Joe Rogan 7:35 This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Call of Duty. You know, when a new Call of Duty drops, everyone's trying to find a way to squeeze in those extra hours of gameplay. I get it. Life is busy. But sometimes you just need ...

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Joe Rogan 8:35 Man, the replacer always gets it done. Seriously though, if you're hooked on Call of Duty, this is your time to jump in. Head over to callofduty.com/blackops6 to get in the game. Call of Duty Black Ops 6, pre-order now. Well, it's also one of the things that's fascinating is just even with conventional archaeology, the dates keep getting pushed further and further back.

Graham Hancock 9:00 Further and further back. I-

Joe Rogan 9:01 And, uh, this is the, one of the things, uh, the White Sands New Mexico stuff that you have-

Graham Hancock 9:05 Yes.

Joe Rogan 9:06 ... on episode one.

Graham Hancock 9:06 That's right.

Joe Rogan 9:07 Which is-

Graham Hancock 9:07 Which is, by the way, White Sands, have you been there?

Joe Rogan 9:10 Wow. No, I haven't. That's amazing.

Graham Hancock 9:10 What an incredible, ethereal, otherworldly place. And Alamogordo is sitting right in the middle of that. This is where they did the nuclear tests-

Joe Rogan 9:18 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 9:19 ... and, and-

Joe Rogan 9:19 Yikes.

Graham Hancock 9:20 ... the, the, the trinitite-

Joe Rogan 9:21 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 9:22 ... which was, which was created there. And there's gypsum sand. It's not normal. It's just the most amazing, amazing place. And there, yes, they found human footprints dated back more than 23- 23,000 years.

Joe Rogan 9:32 What do they think that environment was like 22,000 years ago?

Graham Hancock 9:36 Well, it would still have been like that.

Joe Rogan 9:38 Really?

Graham Hancock 9:38 It would have been gypsum dunes then in that, in, in that place. Otherwise-

Joe Rogan 9:41 Gypsum dunes.

Graham Hancock 9:42 ... they wouldn't have left the footprints. I'm not exactly sure why the gypsum is there, but there it is.

Joe Rogan 9:46 Is that the same stuff they use for, like, gypsum board for construction?

Graham Hancock 9:48 I reckon so, yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:49 Wow.

Graham Hancock 9:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:51 Wow.

Graham Hancock 9:51 It's a very fine, very white sand.

Joe Rogan 9:53 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 9:54 And, and it just goes on forever. And the dunes are sculpted and massive and huge. We had an amazing time there.

Joe Rogan 10:00 So it looked incredible. So they found footprints there, and these are absolutely human footprints. And there's not just a few of them. There's thousands of them.

Graham Hancock 10:07 There's thousands of them. And what's, what's amazing when you, when you actually see the footprints is you can see the interactions between the human beings and, and animals.

Joe Rogan 10:16 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 10:16 You can see that, you, you can see that somebody is reacting to a giant sloth which has suddenly turned around, and the person who's behind it suddenly turns around as well.

Joe Rogan 10:25 Wow.

Graham Hancock 10:25 There's, there's mammoth footprints overlaying human footprints, and then human footprints overlaying those.

Joe Rogan 10:31 Wow.

Graham Hancock 10:31 Uh, and it goes down for meters under the ground. So you have the, you have a very deep stratification of these impressions that have been left behind by our ancestors, uh, and, and by animals that are now completely extinct. Mammoths and mastodons went, went extinct during the Younger Dryas, but there are their footprints from 23,000 years ago side by side with the footprints of human beings. It's, it's very intimate to see-

Joe Rogan 10:55 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 10:55 ... to see a footprint, to see those, those five toes, to see the heel mark, to see sometimes a child walking beside a mother. That's, that's there in the, in the record as well.

Joe Rogan 11:05 Wow.

Graham Hancock 11:05 It's, it's quite, it's, it's quite something special. And, and it, it opens the door. Archaeology has been very reluctant to accept, uh, a much older peopling of the Americas than previously was held. It was held for a long time that it was about 13,000 years ago. They've abandoned that now. They did cling on tooth and nail for decades, but that's been abandoned. It's accepted that human beings came here long before 13,000 years ago. And White Sands is one of the places which, which provides just absolute definite irrefutable evidence of that, that they were here 23,000 years ago. But we don't know yet how long before that they were here.

Joe Rogan 11:41 Right.

Graham Hancock 11:41 This is, this is, this is part of the problem. I often remember, uh, a site called the Cerruti Mastodon site in San Diego. Um, I went to see ... It's ... The exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum, and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Demare. Uh, and they are convinced that they are looking at human traces there. It was a butcher- butchering of a mastodon, but the way the bones were broken and the marrow was extracted, they don't see any other way that this could have been done except by human beings. And the thing is, it's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old. And-You know, this ape- opens the possibility that human beings have been in the Americas before they were in Europe, uh, and that becomes, uh-

Joe Rogan 12:28 That's crazy.

Graham Hancock 12:29 ... that's a door that opens all kinds of possibilities which have been neglected. I think the- the prejudices- the prejudice that the Americas were only settled very late in the human story, uh, led archeology to not have their eye on the possibility of, what happens if they were here earlier?

Joe Rogan 12:45 Right.

Graham Hancock 12:45 And they tend not to, and they tend not to look to that.

Joe Rogan 12:48 Well, what I was gonna ask is, as they're digging deeper and deeper and they're finding these footprints-

Graham Hancock 12:52 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:52 ... in White Sands, New Mexico, is there a possibility that they could dig deeper still and find things that are even older?

Graham Hancock 12:58 Yes. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 12:59 So-

Graham Hancock 12:59 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 13:00 ... how are they- how do they know where to go?

Graham Hancock 13:02 It was found by accident. Um, the- the- the first footprints were- were found, uh, completely by- by accident. And- and they were found by indigenous local people, uh, who alerted the- the National Park Service to- to them. Um, and- and we have, uh, a number of indigenous spokespeople who- who speak to the- to the White Sands mystery and how it- how it feels for them, the emotional feeling of seeing the footprints of their ancestors from 23,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 13:31 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 13:31 The thing is that the dunes are constantly shifting, and sometimes the footprints will be covered up and then wind'll reveal them again. And they're fragile, they can be easily destroyed and wiped off. And it's- in a way, it's a miracle that they've- that they've survived. But to see the stride of a mammoth.

Joe Rogan 13:45 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 13:45 You see the- how far apart those huge footpaths are, uh, a- a- and- and to realize, this thing was alive.

Joe Rogan 13:53 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 13:53 This thing existed on this planet. Human beings interacted with it. It's very compelling evidence for an earlier settlement of the Americas.

Joe Rogan 13:59 So, America's ... There is some evidence that human beings came across the Bering Land Bridge?

Graham Hancock 14:04 Oh, yeah. There-

Joe Rogan 14:05 So, that m- probably means there was people already here and people came here-

Graham Hancock 14:10 Yes.

Joe Rogan 14:10 ... from Asia.

Graham Hancock 14:11 Almost certainly. And- and the way the evidence is looking, uh, it's most likely that South America was settled first.

Joe Rogan 14:18 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 14:18 Uh, before North America was settled, and that raises all kinds of questions. And we've gone into this in season two of Ancient Apocalypse, uh, primarily to do with, um, the DNA evidence of a direct connection between the peoples of New Guinea and Australia, and the peoples of certain tribes in South America. And that's very ancient, very old DNA evidence in South America, but also to do with archeological sites like Monte Verde. I did bring up the issue of Tom Dillehay the last time we- we were on when Flint was here, and, uh, Tom Dillehay, who found Monte Verde, who excavated Monte Verde in- in South America, realized that it was, uh, plus 14,000 years old, and therefore a lot older than what was then accepted as the model for the first peoples in North America. Uh, when he put that idea forward, he was- he was eviscerated by his colleagues in- in archeology. It took them a decade to come round to accepting that actually he was right. And there are many other sites in South America, uh, going back 30-plus thousand years. They're all controversial because they conflict with an existing model. But I think instead of clinging on to existing models, I think that's one of the problems with archeology, uh, is this territoriality, this kind of control-

Joe Rogan 15:30 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 15:30 ... of the past. I- I think instead of doing that, it would be- it would be nicer if archeology was a little bit more welcoming, a little bit more open to- to new and different ideas, and-

Joe Rogan 15:38 Unfortunately, that's just the thing when people are supposed experts in a subject and someone comes along that's also been studying it, but from a nontraditional perspective-

Graham Hancock 15:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:47 ... people reject that.

Graham Hancock 15:48 I've come- I've come to the point, and I'm gonna say something, some strong words here. I- I- I-

Joe Rogan 15:52 Get crazy. Get crazy, Graham Hancock.

Graham Hancock 15:54 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 15:55 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 15:55 I've- I've come to the point where I- I believe that some archeologists, not all of them, most actually, this- this problem is with a small number of archeologists, but they're extremely vocal. Um, I think what we're looking at is a kind of abuse of power. Uh, archeology- archeologists have a power. They are the official spokespeople for the- for the past.

Joe Rogan 16:16 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 16:17 And they use that power to slap down any point of view that doesn't agree with theirs. So I think that there's- there's an abuse of power there, and at the same time, uh, there's not a realization that that's happening because the mindset that drives it is the feeling that members of the general public are unable to decide things for themselves. This is the arrogance of archeology, that they feel that they have to tell people what to think about the past, and they underestimate the intelligence of the public and- and the ability of the public to discern, to make choices between different possibilities about the past. They think that ... Archeologists seem to think that only one possibility of the past must be considered, uh, by the general public, and that's their possibility. And it reminds me a lot of the heresy hunters back in the 16th century, you know? The- the people who disagreed with their point of view got burned at the stake. Well, you don't get burned at the stake today, but you can get lynched by a mob of archeologists online.

Joe Rogan 17:12 Well, it's also the same thing that we saw during COVID.

Graham Hancock 17:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:15 With medical experts-

Graham Hancock 17:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:16 ... that disagreed with the narrative. It's the same thing.

Graham Hancock 17:18 It is absolutely the same thing.

Joe Rogan 17:19 When you take esteemed professors and doctors and physicians and you- you cast them into this kook label because they disagree with the narrative that the medical establishment is pushing, and then they turn out to be correct-

Graham Hancock 17:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:32 ... which most of them did-

Graham Hancock 17:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 17:34 ... you- you see the same patterns. It's just power.

Graham Hancock 17:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:36 It's just power and people that t- have their identity wrapped up in them being the ones that have access to the actual information.

Graham Hancock 17:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:45 They don't want it to be distributed by some guy on Netflix.

Graham Hancock 17:48 That's right. It's- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:49 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 17:50 It's- it's-

Joe Rogan 17:50 Even though you've been probably studying it more than them.

Graham Hancock 17:53 Well, I-

Joe Rogan 17:53 And certainly studying particular aspects of it.

Graham Hancock 17:56 That's- that's- that's the other thing I noticed, which was the sneering, uh-... attitude to- to- towards me.

Joe Rogan 18:01 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 18:01 They talk about my, you know, my, my wife Santha taking tourist photos of the places that we've been to. Well, we've never been anywhere as tourists. We haven't had a holiday for 20 years. But, but the working trips that we do are very intense.

Joe Rogan 18:13 Your wife's an amazing photographer. Like, who cares if she takes tourist photos?

Graham Hancock 18:17 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:17 The photos are incredible. They're of real sites.

Graham Hancock 18:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:19 They're very pertinent and very interesting.

Graham Hancock 18:21 That's right. The-

Joe Rogan 18:22 The whole, the whole i- uh, criticizing amazing photographs is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

Graham Hancock 18:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:27 Like, why would you criticize amazing photographs of ruins that are perplexing?

Graham Hancock 18:30 Yeah, I know. I know.

Joe Rogan 18:31 Like, how could you?

Graham Hancock 18:32 But it's, it's-

Joe Rogan 18:32 Like, how could you find a, a, an, even an area where you want people to agree with you?

Graham Hancock 18:37 It's part of this desperate search to say we archaeologists know everything.

Joe Rogan 18:40 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 18:40 Uh, and, and we must discredit, uh, in any way we can, uh, anybody who has anything opposite to say.

Joe Rogan 18:47 It's an unfortunate human characteristic.

Graham Hancock 18:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:50 That it, it happens in everything.

Graham Hancock 18:51 But-

Joe Rogan 18:51 You see it in martial arts, you see it in science, you see it in everything.

Graham Hancock 18:55 This reliance on experts, I get it. I would like the pilot of my plane to be an expert pilot.

Joe Rogan 19:02 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 19:03 (laughs) I don't want him to be an amateur.

Joe Rogan 19:05 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 19:05 But I don't think that archaeologists and aircraft pilots are... Can be compared in that sense.

Joe Rogan 19:11 Right.

Graham Hancock 19:11 Archeology is a much more interpretive discipline.

Joe Rogan 19:13 Right.

Graham Hancock 19:13 An aircraft pilot is not really interpreting situations that much. He knows what to do inside situations. Archaeologists are interpreting the past, and yet they seem to get very upset by other interpretations of the past that are offered that don't, that don't agree with theirs. And this is, this is the problem of expertise in our society. Yes, expertise is very important. It's incredibly useful, but we should not pa- place all our faith and trust in experts.

Joe Rogan 19:38 Right.

Graham Hancock 19:39 We need to liberate our own consciousness and freely think about things and make our own decisions about things and resist, resist absolutely being told what to think.

Joe Rogan 19:49 Well, the problem is, uh, these experts are human beings.

Graham Hancock 19:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:52 And human beings have very distinct behavior traits-

Graham Hancock 19:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:56 ... that they exhibit, especially when they're in a position of power and prestige.

Graham Hancock 19:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:00 And they like to hold that and they like to... They... It feels good for them to be-

Graham Hancock 20:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:03 ... the person that looks down upon the people that don't know better-

Graham Hancock 20:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:06 ... and tell them what to do and tell them what to think. And when you're doing that with something like ar-... Look, if you're doing that with something like mathematics and someone's a mathematical expert, math is, uh, very specific and precise science.

Graham Hancock 20:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:19 It's very specific.

Graham Hancock 20:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:20 Archeology is like, who fucking knows what's out there?

Graham Hancock 20:24 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 20:24 Because you haven't searched everything.

Graham Hancock 20:26 No.

Joe Rogan 20:26 It's not possible to. And as we develop more these, these fascinating technologies like LiDAR-

Graham Hancock 20:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 20:33 ... where you have the ability, ground penetrating radar-

Graham Hancock 20:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:36 ... all these different things where you can look-

Graham Hancock 20:38 Yep.

Joe Rogan 20:38 ... into the soil itself and find things that aren't visible on the surface, see them through trees, see them through-

Graham Hancock 20:44 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 20:44 That, we're gonna find more and, and obviously in Brazil they have done, in the Amazon they have done that.

Graham Hancock 20:49 Well, that was part of our adventure with-

Joe Rogan 20:50 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 20:50 ... with season two of Ancient Apocalypse was the, was, was working with, with a really professional team in, in Brazil, uh, uh, led by a- a- an archaeologist, Martti Paasonen from the University of Helsinki, and a geographer from Brazil, Alceu Ranzi. Alceu, years ago, was the first person who noticed that there are these huge geometrical structures emerging out of the Amazon jungle. And he, and he, he noticed it on a, on, on a flight, on a commercial, on a commercial aircraft in an area that happened to have been cleared by local farmers for planting crops, uh, that there was this massive geometrical earthwork there. And that, he, he actually coined the term geoglyphs for these because he compared them in some ways with the Nazca lines, which again, are really only visible from the air. You get the suddenly the, the massive scope and extent of these things. And it's same with the geoglyphs in the, in the Amazon. And, and here's the thing, the ones we know about up 'til now have lar- we largely know about them because of these tragic clearances of the Amazon rainforest, which is a maybe short-term economic gain, but is long-term really not a very good idea. Um, but now with LiDAR, it's possible to find these things without damaging any rainforest at all. And we had a LiDAR expert with us and, and you can fly LiDAR off a drone now. So-

Joe Rogan 22:12 That's amazing.

Graham Hancock 22:13 Yeah, it's in- it's incredible. It's a pretty hefty drone, but, but they can fly anywhere. And, and we found, I say we, it was actually the, the LiDAR expert who found, he found wha- the... You can see the edge of the rainforest where, where the clearances stop and the rainforest hasn't yet been interfered with. And then he flies over there and within a matter of hours, he's found multiple, more of these, of these structures. Several.

Joe Rogan 22:36 That are deep in the rainforest.

Graham Hancock 22:37 That are deep in the rainforest.

Joe Rogan 22:38 Covered completely.

Graham Hancock 22:39 Covered completely. And LiDAR allows him to see through the canopy-

Joe Rogan 22:43 Oh.

Graham Hancock 22:43 ... and to see what's underneath it without damaging it. And there are these huge earthworks. And this raises the question, how much more is there in the Amazon to find? Especially which even, even the archaeologists who are most reluctant are now willing to accept that the Amazon had a huge population before the Spanish conquest. They're-

Joe Rogan 23:00 It's so wild. That is such a shift.

Graham Hancock 23:02 Millions, cities.

Joe Rogan 23:04 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 23:05 A whole different way of life, a whole different kind of civilization from the one that we have today. One that lived in a, a man-made garden, which is what the Amazon really and truly is, and lived in, and lived in harmony with that.

Joe Rogan 23:17 That's an interesting thing, too. We've talked about that before, but for people who've never heard of those other podcasts, they've determined that the, the Amazon rainforest is at least partially man-made.

Graham Hancock 23:27 Definitely. Uh, they've, they've determined that because of the, the preponderance of trees that serve human needs. Uh, they call them hyper dominant. And things like Brazil nut trees, which are, which, which are providing food for human beings are in massive dominance in relation to trees that aren't useful to human beings. Uh, and it's, it's clear that this is the result of a long term human project to make this jungle serve human needs.

Joe Rogan 23:52 What was the other one? The ice cream bean... What was that?

Graham Hancock 23:54 Ice cream bean and, and, uh, I, I, I'm forgetting all of the details, but there's a, there's a bunch of, there's a-

Joe Rogan 23:59 Food plants.

Graham Hancock 24:00 Of food plants, which are, which are, which are hyper dominant in the, in, in the Amazon rainforest. And these, and these food plants show that human beings have been nurturing, have been massaging this natural wonder and turning it into something that really serves human needs.

Joe Rogan 24:15 And there's the other thing that you've discussed, uh, in, in depth, the terra preta.

Graham Hancock 24:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:19 This, this man-made incredibly rich nutrient dense soil-

Graham Hancock 24:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:24 ... that they can grow incredible agriculture off of-

Graham Hancock 24:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:27 ... that we really to this day don't know how they created.

Graham Hancock 24:29 It's a mystery. Uh, uh, again, it was a great privilege to have the opportunity to stand in a pit of terra preta that is being excavated to get down 15 feet into that with a, with a-

Joe Rogan 24:39 Can they recreate it once they get it?

Graham Hancock 24:42 Um, it appears that modern, that... Not modern, but, but-Indigenous communities in the Amazon are still doing this. They're still, they're still doing it, mixing, mixing all kinds of refuse and waste, uh, together an- and enriching the soil with it. So it's- it's- it's not stopped. Terra preta is still being made, but most of it is very old and the oldest that they found so far is about 8,000 years old. Uh-

Joe Rogan 25:05 So it's just large-scale regenerative agriculture-

Graham Hancock 25:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:08 ... using some old lost method.

Graham Hancock 25:10 Yeah. That's right, that's right. And- and making ... See, a rainforest, even when you choose trees that are going to serve human needs, it's not enough. You do need to be able to plant in the rainforest. And- and that is what terra preta has allowed people to do. Rainforest soils are not particularly fertile-

Joe Rogan 25:28 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 25:28 ... by nature. So it's these spots of fertility all over the Amazon, and we- we went into that mystery quite- quite a bit in- in one of the episodes.

Joe Rogan 25:36 It's so interesting, especially when you consider the stories like the Lost City of Z, you know, which they turned into, uh, an interesting film.

Graham Hancock 25:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:43 But the- the book details these records of these incredible cities that these people had visited a long time ago.

Graham Hancock 25:50 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 25:50 And then when they tried to go back, there was nothing there.

Graham Hancock 25:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:53 Because everybody had died off because of European diseases probably.

Graham Hancock 25:56 That's- that's exactly what happened. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:57 Yeah, but those cities-

Graham Hancock 25:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:59 ... were just consumed by the jungle.

Graham Hancock 26:01 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:01 And much like Detroit, if you go to Detroit now, you could see there's a, like, there's a bu- bunch of, uh, neighborhoods in Detroit that are essentially abandoned and trees are growing right through the houses.

Graham Hancock 26:12 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 26:12 And the houses are ... I mean, that's just a few decades ago.

Graham Hancock 26:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:15 And the houses are almost gone in some, in some ways.

Graham Hancock 26:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:17 If you went back 200 years ago, there'd probably be nothing left of them.

Graham Hancock 26:20 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 26:21 And this is probably exactly what happened in the Amazon, except the trees just consume the landscape because it's such an incredible, dense rainforest-

Graham Hancock 26:30 Yes.

Joe Rogan 26:30 ... that things grow so quickly there.

Graham Hancock 26:32 That's what happened. I- I mean, before the Lost City of Z, we have this very interesting report, and, uh, I have mentioned it to you before in a prev- previous episode, the expedition of- of, um, Gaspar de Carvajal and- and his chronicler, Francisco de Orellana, um, which was an accidental expedition. They were just going hunting in a longboat, but the Amazon took them and wouldn't let them go back. And they traveled 4,000 miles across South America and ended up in the ... They started on the Pacific side and ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.

Joe Rogan 27:04 Wow.

Graham Hancock 27:05 And that's in the 1550s, 1560s. And they report seeing enormous, thriving, prosperous cities, highly civilized with advanced arts and crafts.

Joe Rogan 27:16 Wow.

Graham Hancock 27:16 Um, and they were not believed because 100 years later when other Spaniards made that voyage and went into the Amazon, they couldn't find the cities. And the reason they couldn't find them is precisely the reason that you give, which is that the jungle had eaten those cities because the human population had been wiped out by disease brought by the Spaniards. The Spanish didn't have to have direct contact with those indigenous peoples in the middle of the Amazon. The diseases just jumped from population to population and just killed everybody.

Joe Rogan 27:44 It's so wild that that happens. It's so crazy when most people probably aren't even aware, and they're ... Everyone knows there was a genocide of Native Americans in this country, but most people don't know that 90% of them were wiped out by disease.

Graham Hancock 27:56 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 27:57 Which is just unbelievable to think about.

Graham Hancock 27:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:59 Millions of people just wiped out over the course of a few decades-

Graham Hancock 28:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:03 ... or- or 100 years-

Graham Hancock 28:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:04 ... by diseases.

Graham Hancock 28:05 It's an early example of a biological weapon.

Joe Rogan 28:08 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 28:09 Um-

Joe Rogan 28:09 Right.

Graham Hancock 28:10 And to some extent, uh, it was used, uh, deliberately as a biological weapon, uh, like- like those smallpox-infected blankets.

Joe Rogan 28:17 Is that true, the smallpox-inflicted blankets?

Graham Hancock 28:19 Well, there's a l-

Joe Rogan 28:19 Because I've heard that that was, like, a- a- a rumor or a myth.

Graham Hancock 28:22 It- it may, it may well be a rumor, but from what I've looked at from- from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, uh, there was, there was a realization that we can kill these people with smallpox, uh, and- and, uh, and it was-

Joe Rogan 28:34 God, that's-

Graham Hancock 28:34 ... and it was spread. An- and we have some immunity to it that they, that they don't have.

Joe Rogan 28:39 Right, because we had it forever in Europe.

Graham Hancock 28:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:41 It's- it's just so, um, terrible when you read Cabeza de Vaca's, uh, story about visiting the Maya civilization.

Graham Hancock 28:48 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 28:48 And you realize, like, that was ... You guys fucking killed everybody.

Graham Hancock 28:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:53 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 28:53 The disease- the diseases did. Uh, I- I mean, the battles did kill some people-

Joe Rogan 28:57 Sure.

Graham Hancock 28:57 ... but- but not on the order of the diseases.

Joe Rogan 29:00 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 29:00 Mexi- Mexico City fell to the Spaniards, um, primarily because of disease. Uh, and secondarily because the Aztecs weren't popular with their neighbors. So it really wasn't just Cortes and 400 Spaniards. It was, it was Cortes and 400 Spaniards plus smallpox, plus the Tlaxcalans who the Aztecs had used as a sort of farm for human sacrifices for 100 years.

Joe Rogan 29:28 Oh, God.

Graham Hancock 29:28 And the Tlaxcalans looked at Cortes and they said, "We can use this guy."

Joe Rogan 29:32 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 29:33 (laughs) And so they joined him. He had tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors.

Joe Rogan 29:36 Oh.

Graham Hancock 29:37 Uh, otherwise he would not have, uh, he would not have had that victory. Uh-

Joe Rogan 29:40 So what archaeology would like is to be in control of expressing that narrative in its fullest form, and I don't think they know, I don't think they can.

Graham Hancock 29:51 No.

Joe Rogan 29:52 I don't ... Like, uh, nobody can explain the Olmecs. Explain that. Explain those features and those faces.

Graham Hancock 29:57 It's a- it's a very curious thing. And again and again, the moment we start talking about people's facial features, then they jump in with, "You're being a racist. You're being a white supremacist," or whatever, although-

Joe Rogan 30:07 Huh?

Graham Hancock 30:07 ... the Olmec heads- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:09 But why ... This is the thing.

Graham Hancock 30:09 ... don't serve white supremacism.

Joe Rogan 30:10 Not at all. How- how would that be racist as a ... racist if these were the most advanced seafaring people alive 6,000 years ago?

Graham Hancock 30:18 Yeah. Uh, again, the- the-

Joe Rogan 30:19 It would be kind of the opposite.

Graham Hancock 30:20 The racism angle is just being used to shut it down.

Joe Rogan 30:22 Right.

Graham Hancock 30:23 This is something that we, uh, uh, particularly in the w- climate in the world today.

Joe Rogan 30:27 Well, Flint does that a lot.

Graham Hancock 30:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:29 He does that a ... I saw him do that to Jimmy Corsetti online o- over uses of, uh, parentheses or- or brackets. Did you see that?

Graham Hancock 30:37 Yeah, I did, yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:37 That somehow or another that's a code for Jews.

Graham Hancock 30:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:40 Like, I thought it ... I thought what he was doing was avoiding, um, there's- there's certain algorithms that pick up on s- particular words that you use. Like, you- you ever see that people, they- they don't ... Like, if they want their post to be more viral, they don't write the word shooter.

Graham Hancock 30:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 30:57 They write S-H and then they put, like, two asterisks and then T-E-R-S.

Graham Hancock 31:02 I've noticed people doing that, yes.

Joe Rogan 31:04 So ... Yes. So what people are trying to do by blanking out swear words and cutting out different words is that you- you can bypass algorithms-

Graham Hancock 31:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:12 ... that selectively remove or limit the distribution-

Graham Hancock 31:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:16 ... of those kind of posts with those keywords in it.

Graham Hancock 31:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:18 So that apparently was all he was trying to do, was adding brackets to something to, you know, to enhance the algorithm.

Graham Hancock 31:24 To enhance the algorithm, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:25 But it's just like ... Accusing someone of racism, it should be, like ...It should be ... So, it should be very clear what they're saying. There should be-

Graham Hancock 31:33 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 31:33 It, it shouldn't be you have decided through some sneaky code to, to decide that this person's racist. "Oh, I ... This code means this."

Graham Hancock 31:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:42 "This is a commonly used code." Like-

Graham Hancock 31:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:44 From what I understand, that, those use of brackets is just to trick the algorithm.

Graham Hancock 31:48 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:49 Just like those, the two asterisks for shooter.

Graham Hancock 31:52 I think it's, I think it's very, it's very unfortunate that in serious and interesting discussions about the past, that this issue of race immediately gets dumped into it.

Joe Rogan 32:02 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 32:03 Because those who are dumping race into the issue know that that's a way to shut down a conversation.

Joe Rogan 32:08 Well-

Graham Hancock 32:08 Nobody wants to be accused of being a racist.

Joe Rogan 32:10 It's also the dumbest suggestion, because the most sophisticated ancient civilization that's baffling people to this day is in Africa.

Graham Hancock 32:20 Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 32:20 So, shut the fuck up.

Graham Hancock 32:22 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:22 Shut the fuck up. It doesn't make any sense.

Graham Hancock 32:23 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 32:24 Those were the most advanced human beings ever and what, we, we're in disagreement, or there's c- a lot of confusion and debate as to how long ago they were there. According to their hieroglyphs, they were there 30,000 plus years ago.

Graham Hancock 32:35 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 32:35 But at the very least, those were people in Africa.

Graham Hancock 32:38 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:38 Okay? So, all the racism shit should be out the window, because no one's saying that was anybody else.

Graham Hancock 32:42 No.

Joe Rogan 32:43 They're saying it's-

Graham Hancock 32:43 That was an Af- that was an African civilization.

Joe Rogan 32:44 They literally have images of themselves. We know what they looked-

Graham Hancock 32:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:47 ... you know, all these drawings of what they looked like, we have statues of what they looked like.

Graham Hancock 32:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:50 It was an African civilization. They were the most advanced people perhaps ever.

Graham Hancock 32:55 I-

Joe Rogan 32:55 I'm leaning towards ever.

Graham Hancock 32:57 I'm leaning towards ever, too.

Joe Rogan 32:58 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 32:58 Um, because, because, look, uh, can we think of any other (laughs) civilization that has survived for 3,000 years?

Joe Rogan 33:05 Right, that you can go visit right now.

Graham Hancock 33:07 That you can still- Right now.

Joe Rogan 33:08 Tour a site.

Graham Hancock 33:09 But, but ancient Egypt, as a culture-

Joe Rogan 33:11 Right.

Graham Hancock 33:11 ... survived for 3,000 years. It's, uh, it's, it's survived the, the Greek occupation, it survived the previous Persian occupation. It was only the Romans that, that brought it low. The, the, the, the Roman occupation of Egypt was the beginning of the end for, for Egypt.

Joe Rogan 33:24 To put it into perspective, I always use this quote, um, I, I forget who, who came up with this, but it's a perfect analogy. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the construction of the pyramids.

Graham Hancock 33:36 Yep.

Joe Rogan 33:37 Even if you use the conventional 2,500 BC dating of the, the construction of the pyramids, which is also, uh, under debate.

Graham Hancock 33:45 It's under debate, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:46 Well, it's aw- Well, look, even if that's true, even if it is 2,500 years ago, the most baffling thing is how did they do it? There's no simple answers. I don't give a fuck what anybody says. There's no simple answers.

Graham Hancock 33:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:58 How did they do it? How did they have such incredible sophistication in their construction methods? How did they get those massive 80 plus ton stones 500 miles down from the mountains with no equipment, no heavy machinery?

Graham Hancock 34:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:12 Whatever they did, I think it's, it's reasonable to say that in a different way, I don't think they had iPhones, I don't think they had email-

Graham Hancock 34:21 No.

Joe Rogan 34:21 ... but they were probably more sophisticated than us today in their ability to manipulate stone and, and make constructions.

Graham Hancock 34:27 They certainly, they certainly were. And I, I, and I think they had mastery of techniques that we don't, that we don't know about yet.

Joe Rogan 34:31 Right.

Graham Hancock 34:32 The great, the great-

Joe Rogan 34:33 And perhaps equipment.

Graham Hancock 34:34 And perhaps equipment. The, the, the Great Pyramid remains to me, uh, an abiding mystery, which despite probably 100 or more visits to the Great Pyramid and being inside it and spending the night in it and exploring every passage and every chamber, including the relieving, so-called relieving chambers above the King's chamber, I still can't figure it out. I don't, I don't understand how it was possible to do this.

Joe Rogan 34:58 (sighs)

Graham Hancock 34:58 And, and then the, the time span which Egyptology gives us, because e- Egyptology is, is fixed on the idea that the Great Pyramid is a tomb and only a tomb, you know?

Joe Rogan 35:09 And that it was built in about 20 years.

Graham Hancock 35:11 Uh, 23 years.

Joe Rogan 35:12 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 35:12 You know? Because if it's the tomb of Khufu, then it had to be built in 23 years 'cause that was his reign.

Joe Rogan 35:17 Right.

Graham Hancock 35:18 Uh, he would start, in theory, building it at the beginning of his reign and, and it's finished by the, by the end of his reign. That's 23 years. Uh, and then in the broader span, if you look at the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and even go back to the, to the end of the Third Dynasty, the Pyramid of Djoser, the, the, the Step Pyramid, you find that this is a sudden emergence of incredible skills which lasts for about 100 years and then it goes away. It stops. It ... The pyramids that follow the Great Pyramid of Giza, the three pyramids on the Giza plateau, the pyramids that follow them, the Fifth Dynasty pyramids, are really poor. They're very, very poor quality workmanship. They're falling to pieces. You can hardly recognize from the outside that they're a pyramid at all. When you get inside, you do find wonderful chambers and you do find what you don't find in any of the great pyramids, which is huge numbers of hieroglyphs-

Joe Rogan 36:06 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 36:07 ... uh, and, and accounts of the person who was supposedly buried in that pyramid.

Joe Rogan 36:11 What do you think of Christopher Dunn's work? Christopher Dunn came on the podcast-

Graham Hancock 36:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:15 ... and he explained his theory that he thinks the Great Pyramid of Giza was some sort of a power plant.

Graham Hancock 36:22 I think it's a theory which deserves to be taken seriously-

Joe Rogan 36:24 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 36:24 ... along with other theories as to what it is. For one thing I know for sure is that the theory that it was just a tomb and nothing else is bust. That is not a satisfactory theory anymore. So, we should be open to a number of possibilities and Chris comes to this from a background of machine tool making. Uh, he's a very precise guy. He's an engineer. He understands this kind of thing. And when he looks at particularly the ... At Saqqara you have this thing called the Serapeum, which is an underground labyrinth. Uh, and it's got wide corridors through it and then off each side are rooms. And in each room are these gigantic basalt boxes, which appear to have held the corpses of bulls. They're, they're, they're, they're like sarcophagi for human beings, but they're on an enormous, gigantic scale, uh, weighing hundreds of tons and cut out of the hardest possible rock, precisely engineered. Everything is exact. And it's that, amongst other things, that is attracting Chris' attention to the possibility of, of, um, a lost technology in, in ancient Egypt. And then, he asks himself the question, "Well, what was the Great Pyramid? If it wasn't a tomb, what, what might it have been?" And he's come, he's come to the solution that it was s-... some kind of energy generator, some kind of, some kind of power plant, and-

Joe Rogan 37:43 Yeah, using chemicals and creating hydrogen, and-

Graham Hancock 37:45 Yeah. Oddly enough-

Joe Rogan 37:46 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 37:47 ... there, there's a, there's just a recently published archaeological paper, um, concerning the Step Pyramid at Saqqara which is suggesting that they used hydraulics to-

Joe Rogan 37:56 Hmm, I saw that.

Graham Hancock 37:57 ... to lift the big stones up in-

Joe Rogan 37:58 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 37:59 ... up inside there. Um, and that, you know, that begins to come close to the kind of, the kind of technology in some ways that Chris is, that Chris is talking about. I think, I think it's worth taking very seriously. I've always had great respect for Chris. I've traveled to Egypt with him, um, and, um, I think he's done very important work contributing, contributing to this. And also, looking at the stone, (sighs) the stone vases from ancient Egypt, um, I remember the first time I was drawn to this mystery, which was-

Joe Rogan 38:27 You gave us one of them. This is a 3D print of one.

Graham Hancock 38:29 That's a 3D print of one of those-

Joe Rogan 38:30 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 38:30 ... of one of those vases.

Joe Rogan 38:30 This is a 3D print of an actual stone vase.

Graham Hancock 38:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:33 And th- it might be, like, not that exciting to people, like, "Oh, what's the big deal?" What the big deal is the precision in which-

Graham Hancock 38:40 That's right.

Joe Rogan 38:41 ... this was constructed with handles on it.

Graham Hancock 38:43 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 38:43 So it couldn't have been spun on a lathe-

Graham Hancock 38:45 Nope.

Joe Rogan 38:45 ... because it has these two handles that are also cut out of the stone.

Graham Hancock 38:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:49 And everything is precise to within thousands of a human hair-

Graham Hancock 38:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:54 ... which is bananas.

Graham Hancock 38:56 Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense given what we are taught-

Joe Rogan 38:59 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 38:59 ... was the level of technology of Egypt at that time.

Joe Rogan 39:01 Now, there is some dispute of where these came from.

Graham Hancock 39:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 39:07 There is some dispute about the, uh, th- wh- what, what is, uh, have these been made in a modern way, and has someone tried to replace, you know-

Graham Hancock 39:16 Uh, are we looking at fakes or-

Joe Rogan 39:17 Right.

Graham Hancock 39:18 ... or hoaxes?

Joe Rogan 39:18 Are we looking at hoaxes?

Graham Hancock 39:19 Well, perhaps in some cases we are, but, but certainly in others, including those in the, in, in the c- great museums in Cairo, they've now moved a lot of the content of the Cairo Museum out to a big museum at, at, at Giza, and some of it's in, in transition, but they have thousands of these things. And-

Joe Rogan 39:34 The thing is, like, even if this was modern technology, we don't know what they did.

Graham Hancock 39:39 No.

Joe Rogan 39:40 We don't know what modern technology exists that you could take an incredibly hard piece of stone-

Graham Hancock 39:46 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 39:46 ... and cut it into this unbelievably precise-

Graham Hancock 39:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:49 ... little vase-

Graham Hancock 39:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:51 ... with handles on it-

Graham Hancock 39:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:52 ... in some bizarre method that we don't know, and hollowed out the inside of it, and-

Graham Hancock 39:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 39:57 ... and some of them with very thin necks, and then a hollowed out inside. Like, how?

Graham Hancock 40:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:01 How did you do that?

Graham Hancock 40:02 Very thin necks, and then this bulbous-

Joe Rogan 40:05 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 40:05 ... base, base to it. There's a-

Joe Rogan 40:06 And it's all perfect.

Graham Hancock 40:07 There's another piece which (sighs) it's hard to describe, but it's got a, it's got a series of three flanges that come across. It's like a, a wheel, um, but it's a ... (sighs) Nobody knows what it is, um, and it's, it's cut out of incredibly hard rock, or cut or shaped in some way. I've never seen a satisfactory explanation for this, for this thing. I wish I could call up a picture, but I don't know where-

Joe Rogan 40:29 Do you know what it's called?

Graham Hancock 40:31 I can't remember now.

Joe Rogan 40:31 Jamie's a wizard at finding things.

Graham Hancock 40:32 I've, I've written about it in-

Joe Rogan 40:34 I bet he could find it.

Graham Hancock 40:34 ... uh, in Fingerprints of the Gods. Let's have a look.

Joe Rogan 40:36 I bet Jamie's already found it.

Graham Hancock 40:37 Let's see. Let's see if I can find one of these.

Joe Rogan 40:37 Is that it?

Graham Hancock 40:38 (humming) No. Yes! Top left.

Narrator 40:41 Yeah, okay.

Graham Hancock 40:42 That's the one.

Joe Rogan 40:42 That?

Graham Hancock 40:43 When (laughs) I first saw that in the Cairo Museum, I mean, it's cut from schist, you know, this thing is hard. And, and when I first saw that in the Cairo Museum, I, I thought, "How on Earth did they do this? Why isn't this a big mystery? Why isn't this being seen as a mystery?" Because it looks-

Joe Rogan 40:58 That looks like a b- a piece of an engine.

Graham Hancock 41:01 It does, doesn't it? It look like-

Joe Rogan 41:02 That, that looks like something I'd find on my Land Cruiser.

Graham Hancock 41:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:05 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 41:05 It looks like part-

Joe Rogan 41:06 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 41:06 ... of something else.

Joe Rogan 41:07 Yes.

Graham Hancock 41:07 We're, we're, we're, we're finding a bit of something larger.

Joe Rogan 41:09 Wow. That looks like, to, to me, like some part of some kind of machine.

Graham Hancock 41:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:15 That's the only thing that it looks like.

Graham Hancock 41:17 Yeah, that's ex- that's exactly what it looks like.

Joe Rogan 41:18 If you, if you know, like, automobiles and parts-

Graham Hancock 41:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:20 ... and you look at something like that, like, "Oh, yeah, that goes probably in there somewhere."

Graham Hancock 41:23 Exactly. Exactly. And what, what is its function if it isn't-

Joe Rogan 41:27 Right.

Graham Hancock 41:27 ... something else? It's difficult to see what function it could have, how it could be-

Joe Rogan 41:29 What is the conventional explanation of this, what these, this thing is?

Graham Hancock 41:32 Some kind of offering bowl?

Joe Rogan 41:34 Click on that, the disk, the dis- the, that article.

Narrator 41:37 I wanted to look up-

Joe Rogan 41:37 Oh, okay.

Narrator 41:38 ... those four-lettered articles.

Joe Rogan 41:38 The Sabu Disk.

Graham Hancock 41:40 From the first-

Joe Rogan 41:40 An ancient Egyptian artifact from the First Dynasty, 3000 to 2800 BC, found in 1936 in north ... How do you say that? Saqqara?

Graham Hancock 41:48 Saqqara, yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:49 Saqqara Necropolis in, uh-

Graham Hancock 41:51 Mastaba.

Joe Rogan 41:52 ... Mastaba?

Graham Hancock 41:52 Mastaba S311. Those are sort of, uh, tombs which have got two levels.

Joe Rogan 41:57 Hmm. What an incredible piece.

Graham Hancock 41:59 It is an incredible piece, and they-

Joe Rogan 42:00 I had, I had never seen that before.

Graham Hancock 42:01 And there it is, First Dynasty, and of course you can't actually date the object itself, so they're dating it from context. What they're saying is that it was found in a First Dynasty context-

Joe Rogan 42:11 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 42:11 ... but it may have been a legacy even then.

Joe Rogan 42:13 Right.

Graham Hancock 42:13 It may, it may have been an old object even then. We just don't know that.

Joe Rogan 42:15 Right, 'cause you can't carbon date it.

Graham Hancock 42:15 But it's at least ... Exactly, but it's at least that old from the context that it was f-

Joe Rogan 42:19 So it's at least 3,000 years old. They think it was used in-

Graham Hancock 42:22 If I was ... 5,000 years old.

Joe Rogan 42:22 Oh, excuse me, 3,000 BC. They think it was used in brewing beer as a mash rake to mix and even out the mixture of grains and hot water in a big mash turn- ton. I don't know what that means.

Graham Hancock 42:34 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 42:35 Uh, interesting.

Graham Hancock 42:35 I don't know either, but I would have thought that if that was your project, you could do it without carving shift in, schist into that.

Joe Rogan 42:40 Click, click on that thing, what is the mysterious egy- Egyptian disk? What? It says it right there. That's it. Can we click on that? Can we go full scale on that so I can see what that looks like? Wow. That's wild.

Graham Hancock 42:55 Yeah, it really is wild.

Joe Rogan 42:56 That is such a specific shape. Like, if you were gonna just use that to make beer, that seem- it seems weird.

Graham Hancock 43:01 And, and it's a lot of work to make beer.

Joe Rogan 43:03 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 43:04 You could, you could do it another way.

Joe Rogan 43:05 That looks like some kind of a fan to me.

Graham Hancock 43:07 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 43:08 It looks like something that would be on a belt.

Graham Hancock 43:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:10 You know, like on a, on some sort of a-

Graham Hancock 43:13 Something's driving it.

Joe Rogan 43:14 ... an axle or something.

Graham Hancock 43:15 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:15 It looks like a fan.

Graham Hancock 43:16 Yeah. It, it, it, it could be.

Joe Rogan 43:18 It looks like, it looks like those, those things underneath it, it looks like that's wh- how you would funnel water or air through.

Graham Hancock 43:24 Yeah, yeah. It, it, it, it clearly had a function.

Joe Rogan 43:27 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 43:27 Nobody, nobody would go to the trouble of, of creating something as complex and difficult to make as this-

Joe Rogan 43:31 God.

Graham Hancock 43:31 ... unless there was a useful function for it.

Joe Rogan 43:33 What is it made out of?

Graham Hancock 43:34 Schist, which is a hard stone.

Joe Rogan 43:36 That's crazy that that's made out of stone.

Graham Hancock 43:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:38 Like, how did you-

Graham Hancock 43:39 Cut out of one piece of stone.

Joe Rogan 43:40 How did you do that?

Graham Hancock 43:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:41 And what are the, uh, how are the, the measurements of that? Oh, look, it's Giorgio.

Narrator 43:45 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:46 He says it's aliens.

Graham Hancock 43:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:47 I'm just gonna guess. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 43:49 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:49 Is, um ...... uh, this, this thing that's cut out of this in... Oops, lost it there for a second. This thing that's cut out of this in- incredibly hard stone, like, wha- do they have any sort of an underst- or, or a guess of how someone would cut something like that out of stone?

Graham Hancock 44:05 I've never, I've never seen a satisfactory guess. Um, but, but those like Chris Dunn, who are studying the technology of ancient Egypt, uh, are, are, are, are confident that we're looking at the traces of a lost technology.

Joe Rogan 44:16 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 44:16 We don't know how this was done. Like so much else in ancient Egypt, like, we don't know how the 70-ton blocks were raised to become the roof of the king's chamber either, in the, in, in the Great Pyramid. There's so much that we don't know and that's not explained, and that is easily written off by, by, um, abusively arrogant, uh, experts-

Joe Rogan 44:35 That-

Graham Hancock 44:35 ... who say there's no mystery here.

Joe Rogan 44:36 That doesn't look super precise in terms of the, the radius of it, when you're looking at it? It looks like it... It looks handmade, doesn't it?

Graham Hancock 44:44 I'm sure it is handmade. The question is how. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:46 Right. But you know what I'm saying? So are these vases, right?

Graham Hancock 44:49 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:49 But there's something about it that's, like, a little more crude.

Graham Hancock 44:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:52 But it probably didn't have to be precise.

Graham Hancock 44:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:54 Because whatever it did-

Graham Hancock 44:57 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 44:57 ... probably set a spin.

Graham Hancock 44:58 And it survived through at least 5,000 years.

Joe Rogan 45:00 It definitely looks like it was something that spun, right? 'Cause you have that hollowed out piece in the center that you would have an axle on or something-

Graham Hancock 45:06 Feels like that.

Joe Rogan 45:06 ... along those lines. Yeah.

Graham Hancock 45:07 Yeah, yeah.

Narrator 45:07 For sure. It looks like it's welded in certain spots too, but like, how?

Graham Hancock 45:11 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:11 Well, how do they weld stone?

Narrator 45:13 Or how the hell do they hold it... I don't, um...

Joe Rogan 45:14 How... Well, it's apparently they carved that shape out of just one block. That's crazy.

Graham Hancock 45:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:18 Now, that one looks ultra precise.

Graham Hancock 45:20 Yeah.

Narrator 45:20 This one might have been remade off of the original, maybe?

Joe Rogan 45:22 Click on that, see what that is?

Graham Hancock 45:23 I would say that's a remake.

Joe Rogan 45:24 Is it?

Graham Hancock 45:26 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:27 If it's not, it's insane. That's even more insane.

Graham Hancock 45:30 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:30 'Cause that looks so perfect. Why does it look different than the other images?

Narrator 45:35 Uh, I don't know.

Joe Rogan 45:36 Well, go to back to that one where it's spinning around. Yeah, look at it when-

Narrator 45:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:41 ... it spins around. That looks pretty precise.

Graham Hancock 45:43 Yeah.

Narrator 45:44 They do look like they've recreate... Did they only find one and they've recreated it for museums, or is there-

Graham Hancock 45:48 No.

Narrator 45:49 ... just found multiple?

Graham Hancock 45:49 There's, there's, there's, there's one original. I have no doubt people have tried to make copies with, with modern materials. But, but-

Narrator 45:54 Definitely, we're looking at a few different versions of it.

Graham Hancock 45:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:56 Well, also you gotta think, if it is made out of stone, some of the edges have to be beat up just from being in the ground for thousands of years.

Narrator 46:03 That one's not the same.

Graham Hancock 46:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:03 It's not the same?

Narrator 46:04 Nah.

Joe Rogan 46:05 You sure it's not just a different lighting?

Narrator 46:06 It just looks all beat up, like the, the grit.

Joe Rogan 46:07 Right, it does.

Narrator 46:09 It's not smooth. The other one was smooth.

Joe Rogan 46:10 Right, right.

Narrator 46:11 You know, that's smooth.

Joe Rogan 46:12 That one, that almost... That does look like a recreation, doesn't it?

Graham Hancock 46:14 Yeah, it is. I think that's... That we're looking at a recreation there.

Joe Rogan 46:17 Okay. Well, whatever it is, it-

Graham Hancock 46:18 The thing is, when you come, when you come to this, there's, there's thousands of objects that, that defy explanation from, from ancient Egypt.

Joe Rogan 46:24 What are those, Jimmy? Put that back up. What are those things?

Narrator 46:27 Like, you know, wheels?

Joe Rogan 46:27 Do you know what those are?

Narrator 46:29 Is this the first wheels?

Joe Rogan 46:31 Oh.

Narrator 46:31 480...

Graham Hancock 46:32 4000.

Narrator 46:33 ... 700. It's wheels. Fif- 1500 BC, basically.

Joe Rogan 46:37 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 46:38 Uh...

Joe Rogan 46:40 And that's the weird, one of the weirder things about Egypt, right? We don't think they had the wheel.

Graham Hancock 46:44 No, they definitely had the wheel.

Joe Rogan 46:45 They definitely didn't?

Graham Hancock 46:45 Whether, whether they had the wheel in the Old Kingdom-

Joe Rogan 46:48 Right. But there's-

Graham Hancock 46:49 ... uh, is another question. But certainly by, by the New Kingdom, by the time of Ramesses, they had wheels, they had chariots.

Joe Rogan 46:54 They had chariots.

Graham Hancock 46:54 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:54 But I mean, the people that built the pyramids.

Graham Hancock 46:56 Um...

Joe Rogan 46:56 That 2500 BC is not... Like, when do they think the wheel was invented?

Graham Hancock 47:01 Well, I... It's actually not clear to me when the wheel was invented. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 47:04 Let's see what the conven-

Graham Hancock 47:05 I...

Joe Rogan 47:05 I thought the conventional, um, guess of when the invention of the wheel was, was post the construction of the pyramids.

Graham Hancock 47:12 I believe that's the case.

Joe Rogan 47:13 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 47:13 Uh, but the, one of the things about wheel is you have to ask yourself, in what circumstances, in what places, in what conditions are wheels useful?

Joe Rogan 47:21 Right.

Graham Hancock 47:22 Uh, there are some conditions in whi- in which a wheel is not a useful thing, in which it's gonna get bogged down in the sand, in which it's not gonna be helpful.

Joe Rogan 47:28 Right.

Graham Hancock 47:29 Um, so, so, um, the use of sleds was certainly part of how ancient Egyptians moved huge stones.

Joe Rogan 47:37 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 47:38 And I don't dispute that. The problem is how they then get those stones 300 feet in the air. Uh-

Joe Rogan 47:44 Right.

Graham Hancock 47:44 You can slide anything on wet sand on a sled with enough people pulling it, but then-

Joe Rogan 47:47 How do you get it to the top-

Graham Hancock 47:48 How...

Joe Rogan 47:48 ... of the King's Chamber?

Graham Hancock 47:49 How do you get it to the top of the King's Chamber? That's, that's the problem.

Joe Rogan 47:51 How do you fit it perfectly?

Graham Hancock 47:53 Perfectly. Perfectly. And, and, you know, I've, I've, I've been up there, and I've been in every one of the chambers above it, and each one of them is floored with these 70-ton blocks and is roofed with it.

Joe Rogan 48:02 It's so nuts, it doesn't even seem like a thousand years more advanced than us. It seems like thousands of years more advanced.

Graham Hancock 48:08 More advanced in a different way.

Joe Rogan 48:09 Yes.

Graham Hancock 48:09 I think, I think this is part of the problem wh- where I've been perhaps misunderstood by Egyptologists when I talk about an advanced civilization. I- I keep trying to emphasize that we shouldn't look for ourselves in the past, that if we're going to go back 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 years into the past and talk about a civilization, it's not gonna be like us. It's gonna be very different. It's gonna have different priorities, different ways of, of looking at things. But one of the things that the ancient (laughs) Egyptians had, which I'm not aware that any other civilization has had, is the ability to sustain essentially a single culture with a single set of spiritual ideas, and to sustain that for 3,000 years, and, and to keep people happy and fed and well looked after, you know. This is, uh, this is an amazing achievement, amazing stability, uh, when, when you look at it. Our... What our civilization, how old is it really? Can we trace it back to the Romans? Probably not.

Joe Rogan 48:59 Right.

Graham Hancock 48:59 Uh, maybe, maybe, uh, 500 years, the beginning of mechanization and, and so on and so forth in our civilization.

Joe Rogan 49:06 Pretty amazing.

Graham Hancock 49:07 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:08 If you think about... I mean, just there's so many mysteries to it. For anybody to pretend that they have all the answers to something as perplexing as Egypt is nuts.

Graham Hancock 49:16 I think the... You know, this is, this is an area where, where, um, I often, I often get criticized. But, but, uh, I think we... When we look at a civilization and what it is and what's it's achieving and, and why it's so special, when we look at our civilization today, we are fantastic at technology. We, we are brilliant at, at science. We can make the best possible machines. Um, and, and we're a society that is built around production and consumption, and a society in which people define themselves in terms of what they own and what they possess-

Joe Rogan 49:50 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 49:51 ... and what they, what they produce. Um, and, and it becomes a very materialistic-... society, a society that's focused on material things, where we define ourselves by our material possessions. Ancient Egypt had a totally different focus. Yeah, they were great at making material things, but that was secondary. Their, their main thing was, "What are we here for? Why are we living this life?"

Joe Rogan 50:11 Right.

Graham Hancock 50:11 "What, what happens to us when we die?" They, they investigated that mystery more deeply than any other culture that, that I know of, and they were doing so right from the beginning, uh, of, of records. And so they-

Joe Rogan 50:23 And they were documenting this journey to the afterlife...

Graham Hancock 50:26 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 50:27 ... in hieroglyphs, and it's like, wha- what were you documenting? Like, how do you know? Like, what were you trying, why did, how did everyone agree on this particular myth or this story?

Graham Hancock 50:35 I know. Un- unless there was some experience being-

Joe Rogan 50:38 Right.

Graham Hancock 50:38 ... being brought to bear in it. Uh, it's one of the things that, we, we point out in, in season two, um, is, is that the ancient Egyptian notion of a leap to the sky after death, to the Milky Way, of a journey along the Milky Way, of encountering challenges and dangers and risks, there are monsters that would block your path, gates that you had to know the password to get through, that idea is found all over the world. The, the Path of Souls, it's found all over the Americas, that, that-

Joe Rogan 51:06 What do you think that they're trying to say?

Graham Hancock 51:08 Well, I think that, I think first of all, it's, it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea. It's, when it's found amongst cultures all around the world that, apparently, had no contact with one another and are often separated by hundreds or thousands of years, the same idea is found about what happens to us after death. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that they've all inherited this idea and then developed it in their own ways from a remote common source, and that's one of the main reasons that I'm curious about the possibility of a lost civilization, that these spiritual ideas are found all around the world.

Joe Rogan 51:40 Mm.

Graham Hancock 51:40 Uh, and they (laughs) involve the journey of the soul after death, and a leap, a leap to the heavens, and it's sometimes it's called an underworld, but really it's set in the sky, and this journey that, that takes place, where you are judged on what you've done with your life. This is something else that we avoid in the world today, is taking responsibility for our own lives. Uh, the ancient Egyptians required you to take responsibility for your life.

Joe Rogan 52:05 Mm.

Graham Hancock 52:05 Uh, and if you did not do so, the outcome after death would not be good. Uh, you had to, um, you had to celebrate the gift of life. You had to-

Joe Rogan 52:15 Mm.

Graham Hancock 52:16 You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given, um, and one of the opportunities of that gift is the opportunity to accumulate wisdom, uh, and that's one of the things, hopefully, that we all do as we get older, is get a bit more, a bit more wisdom and a bit more s- understanding. But in the case of ancient Egypt, that idea is developed over th- over 3,000 years, and it's essentially the same at the beginning as it is... as it, as it is at the end, uh, that the soul, that... Death is not the end. This is, th- this is the conclusion of a society (laughs) that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem.

Joe Rogan 52:53 Mm.

Graham Hancock 52:53 That death is not the end. We may think it is, scientists may tell us it is, but when a scientist says death is the end, there's nothing more, we're just physical bodies and when the light goes out, it goes out forever, that's actually not a scientific fact. That's, that's not something that's been investigated or can be investigated.

Joe Rogan 53:10 Consciousness i- itself is so confusing.

Graham Hancock 53:13 Very.

Joe Rogan 53:13 Just, just consciousness, just like, what is it and why are we conscious? What, what, what, is it local or are we tuning into consciousness? And, uh, when you die, where does that go? What, where does that energy go? Is that... Is the soul a real thing? Like, w- what is the essence of life? What is the essence of human life and human consciousness? Those are perplexing questions.

Graham Hancock 53:33 They're, they're very perplexing que- qu- questions which, which, uh, actually are of great significance (laughs) to every one of us.

Joe Rogan 53:40 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 53:41 Yeah. I mean, suppose death just is the end. Then that's a, that's a way not to have to take too much responsibility for our lives.

Joe Rogan 53:48 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 53:48 For the impact that we've had on others, for the pain that we may have caused, or for the joy that we may have caused.

Joe Rogan 53:55 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 53:55 If, if, if, if death's the end, there's, there's no up or downside to that, whatever, whatever we do. But from the ancient Egyptian point of view, death's not the end, and you have been given the precious gift of life. What did you do with it?

Joe Rogan 54:08 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 54:08 And there are, there are moral aspects to that question. There, there's these 42 assessors, they're called the negative assessors, who ask the soul of the deceased questions-

Joe Rogan 54:17 Hm.

Graham Hancock 54:17 ... about what they did in life, and those are all moral questions. They bear some relationship, actually, to the, to the Ten Commandments.

Joe Rogan 54:24 Mm.

Graham Hancock 54:25 Um, but, um, there's another question, which is called the weighing of words, and, and that question is, "What did you do with the gift we gave you?"

Joe Rogan 54:32 Wow.

Graham Hancock 54:32 "We gave you the gift of a human life. We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate, uh, your choice. We gave you the gift to live in a human body, to have this incredible consciousness, to be able to integrate all kinds of information from all kinds of spheres. What did you do with it?"

Joe Rogan 54:49 Hm.

Graham Hancock 54:50 "Did, did you leave the world a better place or a worse place than when you came into it? Did you hurt and damage and cause pain to others consistently out of wicked intent, not accidentally, but deliberately causing pain?" And there are human beings who do that. F- for the ancient Egyptians, that kind of behavior meant an introduction to Ammit, the eater of the dead, and-

Joe Rogan 55:12 Mm.

Graham Hancock 55:12 ... and Ammit is displayed in, in the judgment scene. He's a, he's a creature, part hyena, part lion, um, and he sits there and certain souls do not go on.

Joe Rogan 55:22 Oh.

Graham Hancock 55:22 Their journey ends, and it ends because of the choices they made during life and because they never took responsibility-

Joe Rogan 55:30 Wow.

Graham Hancock 55:30 ... for what they did.

Joe Rogan 55:31 Well, it kind of makes sense, a natural selection of the souls.

Graham Hancock 55:34 In a way, yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:34 That if, if there's natural selection of humans and natural selection of animals that allows them to, to prosper-

Graham Hancock 55:41 Mm.

Joe Rogan 55:41 ... like, and, and to get better and to evolve, li- it makes sense that that would, that would happen with the soul as well. I'm just so confused as to what the environment was like that allowed these people to keep this re- this insane civilization developing and innovating for so long.... that they were so more advanced than anyone else that was alive back then that we're aware of, at least as far as, like, what we've uncovered-

Graham Hancock 56:06 The beautiful-

Joe Rogan 56:07 ... what they left behind.

Graham Hancock 56:07 The beautiful art that they made.

Joe Rogan 56:09 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 56:10 The perfection of their geometry, their incredibly advanced astronomy. Uh, all of these things are the, are the hallmarks of a very sophisticated, very advanced civilization. Sure, they didn't have iPhones, but-

Joe Rogan 56:21 Yeah, but just the sophistication of the, the symmetry of the facial s- structure of the statues.

Graham Hancock 56:26 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:27 In- incredible.

Graham Hancock 56:28 Beautiful things. Beautiful.

Joe Rogan 56:29 Just bizarrely, bizarrely technologically advanced.

Graham Hancock 56:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:35 Bizarrely.

Graham Hancock 56:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:36 Because to, to perform something like that, you need incredible tools of measurement, enormous statues that have faces that are absolutely perfectly symmetrical.

Graham Hancock 56:45 Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:45 How did you do that?

Graham Hancock 56:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:47 How'd you... How d'you stand that up? (laughs)

Graham Hancock 56:49 Well, the answer is we-

Joe Rogan 56:50 We don't know.

Graham Hancock 56:50 We don't know.

Joe Rogan 56:51 We don't know.

Graham Hancock 56:51 There's so much that we don't know, and, and, and it's that, it's that attitude towards the past which I think would be more helpful, is that we have, we have this mysterious background to we human beings. As you said earlier, anatomically modern humans, we think that they first appeared about 300,000 years ago, Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, 310,000 years ago. Now, I can remember a time not so long ago, back in the 1990s, when, when it was f- thought that the first anatomically modern humans were as recent as 50,000 years ago.

Joe Rogan 57:26 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 57:27 And then they shifted it, new finds were made, to 110,000 years ago, now 310,000 years ago. We don't really know how far into the past that goes, and we don't know about the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, who were also human beings. Uh, certainly they were human, the same species as us, because they could interbreed with us.

Joe Rogan 57:46 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 57:46 Uh, you can't breed with another species, uh, so, so, and that takes the journey back even further, and that's one of the reasons why I have a problem with the notion that civilization just emerges 6,000 years ago. Uh, because we had the same kit, the same wiring, the same brains for at least 300,000 years, and we weren't doing any of this stuff, apparently. Uh, I, I suspect we were, but it's not made the record.

Joe Rogan 58:12 Well, it seems that, that what they were dealing with in terms of the resources in the Nile Valley was unbelievably bountiful.

Graham Hancock 58:19 It was bountiful.

Joe Rogan 58:20 And that's probably one of the reasons, before the climate shifted-

Graham Hancock 58:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:25 ... and changed, and it became a lot of desert. Before that, it was probably incredibly bountiful, and that allowed them to stay there for a long period of time and not have to worry about food.

Graham Hancock 58:35 It certainly did. Uh, the bounty, however, goes back much further. Uh, this is one of the reasons why I kept on trying to talk about the Sahara during the debate.

Joe Rogan 58:44 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 58:45 Uh, this vast area, uh, which frankly has not been studied properly by archeology at all, uh, hardly a fraction of it has been studied, uh, this vast area... I'm often accused of creating a, what they call a god of the gaps argument. I'm saying, "You haven't looked enough in the Sahara. You haven't looked enough in the submerged continental shelves. You haven't looked enough, uh, in the Amazon rainforest." And, and the argument is that I'm, I'm trying to put my lost civilization into these gaps. But these are very special gaps. The (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 59:18 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 59:18 ... the, the submerged continental shelves were prime real estate during the Ice Age. That was the, that was the place to be, just as it is today, to be, to be near coastlines. The Amazon rainforest w- was a bountiful, was, it was a bountiful place. And the Sahara Desert was green and rich for thousands of years during the Ice Age, with lakes, with rivers. Uh, it was the kind of place where a civilization might well have emerged, had-

Joe Rogan 59:44 They find whale bones there.

Graham Hancock 59:46 Whale bones. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:46 Whales.

Graham Hancock 59:47 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 59:48 So anybody who doesn't think there's a mystery in the Sahara Desert-

Graham Hancock 59:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:51 ... and anybody who really tries to dismiss the notion that most of it hasn't been really excavated.

Graham Hancock 59:58 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 59:58 But it really hasn't been.

Graham Hancock 1:00:00 No, it hasn't. It's, it's, it's-

Joe Rogan 1:00:01 It's too vast.

Graham Hancock 1:00:02 It's too vast, and it's too expensive to excavate that-

Joe Rogan 1:00:03 And excavation, like, you would have to... Y- you're dealing with a place where how many people even lived there?

Graham Hancock 1:00:13 Nobody knows 'cause it's not been investigated properly. It's a desert. Uh, and, and, uh, it's had relatively little attention. We do know there's some amazing rock art from the Upper Paleolithic, uh, in, in Tassili in Algeria, in, in the Sahara, um, but not enough has been done. This is, this is the, this is the problem for me with saying archeology's basically got the story of the human past nailed down, is that there's huge areas which have not been investigated. And I reject the idea that that is a god of the gaps argument, because that's not why I'm proposing there was a lost civilization. And that's all I'm doing. I'm not insisting. I'm not demanding that people believe me. I'm just, I just want to inject this idea into the discussion-

Joe Rogan 1:00:56 Well s-

Graham Hancock 1:00:57 ... so that it can, can be considered... W- when... Taken out of context was a little clip where you asked me, eh, eh, is, eh, eh, in, during the debate, um, "Is there any evidence for your lost civilization in what they've found?" Uh? And I said, "In what they've found, no." And then I went on to say, um, "But that brings us to the point of what they've looked for and what they've not looked for, what they've found and what they've not found." Um, that has been taken again and again as, as me saying that there's no evidence-

Joe Rogan 1:01:27 Right.

Graham Hancock 1:01:27 ... for my lost civilization, whereas what I'm actually saying is there's no evidence in what archeologists have studied, uh, for a lost civilization, because I'm not studying what archeologists study. I am very happy to use material from archeologists, and I could not do what I do if I didn't use material from archeologists. It's a very important basis to my work. However, it's the astronomy, it's the astronomical alignments, it's the precision, it's the precision of the Great Pyramid. It's the myths, it's the myths of a global flood all around the world. This is a- th- it's a universal story of a massive cataclysm with a few survivors who bring their knowledge to others. The story... This is one of the reasons why I think the Atlantis story, which, which Flint Dibble is so opposed to, uh, deserves to be taken seriously, uh, because...It's part of a global tradition. It's yet another flood myth, in fact. It's the story, it's just like those 150 or 200 other flood traditions that come from around the world. And it's not enough for archaeologists to say, "Oh, people experienced a little local river flood, uh, or, or there was a tidal wave that day, and so they decided that the whole world was submerged with water." That doesn't satisfy me at all. The fact that this is found all around the world, to me, is a memory of something that happened to our ancestors, something so traumatic, something so huge, that it's been preserved better than almost anything else from our past.

Joe Rogan 1:02:54 What do, what is your take on the Richart struc ... Am I saying that right? Richart structure?

Graham Hancock 1:02:57 Richart, Richart Structure.

Joe Rogan 1:02:59 Richart.

Graham Hancock 1:02:59 Mauritania. Um, I, I would not like to say one way or the other, because I've not been there. Um, I've not, I've not had boots on the ground there. I've not been able to look at it. Yes, it's very intriguing.

Joe Rogan 1:03:11 Very.

Graham Hancock 1:03:12 I, um-

Joe Rogan 1:03:13 Also, the salt all around it?

Graham Hancock 1:03:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:15 Where it shows that at one point in time, it was probably submerged. Like, something happened.

Graham Hancock 1:03:19 Pro- probably was, but you might have to go back many millions of years to get, to get to that point. The honest answer to that question is I don't know. I'm, I'm open-minded on the Richat Structure. It's something that I would like to, I would like to study, um, but I have not, uh, had had time to yet. In, in future work, it's something that I may, that I may study, and after studying it, I may come to the conclusion that it's just a remarkable natural phenomenon, of which there are many. Or I may come to a different conclusion. It depends what the, what the evidence shows me. But I try not to, to spout off on things that I'm not personally acquainted with and don't really know about.

Joe Rogan 1:03:50 Well, good for you.

Graham Hancock 1:03:52 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:03:52 I like to spout off. Uh, it's also, like, there's so many of those things that people thought were myth, like Troy.

Graham Hancock 1:03:57 Troy, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:58 Then they find it, and they go, "Oh, it's from a place."

Graham Hancock 1:04:00 Found by, fr- found by an amateur. Turns out to be, turns out to be a real place.

Joe Rogan 1:04:03 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:04:04 I think the myths are the memory banks of our species, uh, and I don't think archaeology takes them seriously enough. There's a tendency to just dismiss them as fantasies, uh, as, as things that were made up-

Joe Rogan 1:04:15 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:04:15 ... by, by the ancients for some bizarre reason of their own. But they're the memories we have from the time before writing, from the time before documents were kept, uh, and they're a precious resource in, in understanding our past. So, it's, it's things like that, and then at the end of the day, (laughs) to say, to twist what I said, uh, that in, in what archaeologists have studied there's no evidence for my lost civilization, uh, is, is, uh, is completely wrong, because I've, I've, I've written thousands of pages of books. This is, this is one of the issues. Like, in that debate, I was supposed to prove everything about a lost civilization. I didn't even come here to prove it. I came here to explain why I'm interested in it, and why I want to share my interest and my curiosity about the past, uh, with others. But if, if I'm asked to prove it, I would say, "Don't refer to what I managed to say during a three-hour debate." I'd say, "Refer to, to the, the eight or so major books that I've written with thousands of pages and thousands of documented footnotes." That's where my, my argument is in place, and you'll find that that argument is not based on what archaeologists have studied. It's based prec- precisely on what they've not studied about the past.

Joe Rogan 1:05:27 Well, re- regardless of the argument that Flint tried to put forth, that there's, uh, no evidence of what you're saying, the, the, the exaggeration of the shipwrecks, the, the stuff about seeds, the, the fact is this resonates with a lot of people. This, this mystery is perplexing.

Graham Hancock 1:05:47 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05:47 It, it's confusing, and there's a lot of it out there.

Graham Hancock 1:05:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:51 It's not, like, one site, like Egypt. There's a ton of sites.

Graham Hancock 1:05:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:55 The, uh, Sage Wall in Montana.

Graham Hancock 1:05:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05:58 What do you think of that thing?

Graham Hancock 1:05:59 Again, I will withhold judgment until I have my boots on the ground there and have a look at it. And even then, that might not be enough. Uh, I do know that the property owners there are doing a lot of ground-penetrating radar, uh, and there may be results from that. But at the moment, I would not say, "That's definitely a manmade structure," nor would I say, "That's definitely a natural structure."

Joe Rogan 1:06:18 Right.

Graham Hancock 1:06:18 I would say, "That's an intriguing structure," uh, but it is in a geological context where other things like that are found. If I, if I were asked to put money on it-

Joe Rogan 1:06:25 There it is.

Graham Hancock 1:06:26 Yeah. (sighs)

Joe Rogan 1:06:27 Oh, that looks manmade.

Graham Hancock 1:06:28 I mean, it really is hard, it is hard (laughs) to resist the conclusion-

Joe Rogan 1:06:31 I mean, it's super hard to resist the idea that that's manmade.

Graham Hancock 1:06:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:34 And especially if it goes deeper under the ground, and they think it does. They think it goes as deep as-

Graham Hancock 1:06:37 Oh, it does. It, it goes, it goes deeper. That's what the, what the ground-penetrating radar-

Joe Rogan 1:06:41 How far?

Graham Hancock 1:06:42 ... is about. Uh, 30 feet.

Joe Rogan 1:06:44 30 feet.

Graham Hancock 1:06:44 Um, in, in fact, I was, I was yesterday-

Joe Rogan 1:06:47 That looks so manmade.

Graham Hancock 1:06:48 Yeah, it really does. It, it, when I look at that photograph, to me, that is a, that is a manmade structure. But I realize now, in the environment in which I live surrounded by archaeologists (laughs) who are extremely hostile to my work-

Joe Rogan 1:07:02 Right. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:07:02 ... that I'd better, uh, it, it's not in my interests to leap to a conclusion about anything-

Joe Rogan 1:07:08 Of course.

Graham Hancock 1:07:09 ... before I've, before I've studied it, and I do intend to go to Sage Wall. I was, yesterday with, with Michael Collins, who's the guy who's done a lot of the videography on Sage Wall. He doesn't know whether it's or manmade either. More work needs to be done, but it's an intriguing issue, and it may be part of the lost history of the Americas. We just don't know yet.

Joe Rogan 1:07:27 And what's crazy is if that is, how old is that thing?

Graham Hancock 1:07:30 How old is it? Who knows?

Joe Rogan 1:07:31 Yeah, who knows? And if you're talking about footprints of people that lived 22,000 years ago-

Graham Hancock 1:07:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:37 ... like, what, were they making things? Like, what-

Graham Hancock 1:07:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:39 ... what was going on?

Graham Hancock 1:07:40 What are they go-

Joe Rogan 1:07:40 Did they build something like that?

Graham Hancock 1:07:41 Yeah. Or, or, or even earlier.

Joe Rogan 1:07:43 Right.

Graham Hancock 1:07:44 Um, is it-

Joe Rogan 1:07:44 Or even earlier, which is crazy.

Graham Hancock 1:07:45 Is it part of the, part of the lost story of the Americas? There's so much that's been lost, particularly in, in North America, um, with the, the massive destruction that took place during the 19th and 18th and, and early 20th century. Um, it's reckoned that there were a million mound sites in North America, uh, if you go back to 1500. Uh, there's about 100,000 left, uh, which is a lot actually (laughs) , um, but most of them are massively destroyed and the other 900,000, uh, have gone, uh, just plowed under, turned into, into far- into farmland. And how much else of the, of the pre-history of North America has been lost as a result of a process where we're, first of all, there was a conviction that the Indigenous inhabitants had only been here for a very short time, whereas we now know they've been here for a very long time? Uh, and, and secondly, uh-... there was a propagandistic desire not to give too much credit to them. So, let's get rid-

Joe Rogan 1:08:43 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:08:43 ... of, let's get rid of some of their stuff.

Joe Rogan 1:08:45 Wow.

Graham Hancock 1:08:45 I was very disappointed when we were shooting season two of Ancient Apocalypse that, uh, we were not allowed by the authorities to film in Cahokia, which is one of the great, uh, the great mounds that still survive, um, because they've been told that I'm a pseudo-archaeologist and that I'm going to mislead the public if I go there. So, so the best way is-

Joe Rogan 1:09:05 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:09:05 ... just to stop me going there. We, we tried to film in Moundville in Alabama as well, and again, w- we were denied permission to, to film there. There's no doubt that archaeology has joined ranks, uh, to do their best to prevent me doing what I do.

Joe Rogan 1:09:20 Th- That's so awful to deny anyone the ability to s- especially when you're gonna put something like this on Netflix where millions of people are gonna see it.

Graham Hancock 1:09:28 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:09:29 Deny people the, just the access through video of experiencing-

Graham Hancock 1:09:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:34 ... this site and the mystery that's attached to it. Like, who are these people?

Graham Hancock 1:09:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:38 Why, why did they build this? What, what artifacts haven't been discovered-

Graham Hancock 1:09:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:43 ... that are in- inside of this thing?

Graham Hancock 1:09:44 Yeah. And, you know, here's what archaeologists say.

Joe Rogan 1:09:47 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:09:47 Here's an alternative point of view.

Joe Rogan 1:09:48 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:09:49 You're an intelligent member of the public. Make up your own mind.

Joe Rogan 1:09:51 What do you mean, being reasonable? That's outrageous. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 1:09:55 (laughs) It's, it's, it's a most unfortunate thing.

Joe Rogan 1:09:58 Well, um, it's, it's not unfortunate that there's a lot of people that are interested in it, though.

Graham Hancock 1:10:04 More and more.

Joe Rogan 1:10:05 Yes, yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:10:05 It's an, it's a fascinating phenomenon. I, I, I do see it as an extension of our, of our interest in our own genetic origins, for example. A lot of people are... I haven't done it yet, but I, I'm kind of keen to do 23andMe or whatever it's called.

Joe Rogan 1:10:18 I wouldn't do it.

Graham Hancock 1:10:19 Nope.

Joe Rogan 1:10:19 Not now. No.

Graham Hancock 1:10:20 No.

Joe Rogan 1:10:20 They sell all your data away.

Graham Hancock 1:10:21 They'll sell your data. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:10:23 Now, someone's gonna know your exact DNA.

Graham Hancock 1:10:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:26 The whole thing's nuts. Like, I didn't know that they could do that, but apparently they have. Not only that. Databases get breached and they find your information.

Graham Hancock 1:10:33 My eld- my eldest son, uh, who is half Somali and half, half English, had his DNA done with 23andMe. And, um, he found... What it showed was that he's 50% African and 49% British and 1% Spanish.

Joe Rogan 1:10:54 Oh.

Graham Hancock 1:10:55 And we tried to figure that out, and the answer is that my ancestors came from Cornwall in the Southwest of England, and that's where the Spanish Armada washed up.

Joe Rogan 1:11:04 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:11:05 And the survivors of the Spanish Armada washed up and then integrated with the local community and contributed their genes.

Joe Rogan 1:11:10 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:11:10 So, you know, there is an interest-

Joe Rogan 1:11:12 Sure.

Graham Hancock 1:11:12 ... in the past. There is interest in our personal past, our personal origins, our ancestors, who we are, and there's a much broader interest in the story of humanity that has brought us to where we are today. And this haunting feeling that something's missing and that we, that we have a, we have a civilization today... I, I often com- I, would like to compare it to a, a sort of furious... In, uh, in terms of the level of consciousness, our civilization today is like a furious, petulant teenager. But in terms of what it can do, in terms of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, it's a god. So, we have god-like powers with the consciousness of, uh, uh, an immature teenager.

Joe Rogan 1:11:54 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:11:54 That's what we're looking at in the world today. And maybe by understanding our past better, by understanding our unity that comes down from the past, maybe we can learn something that will be helpful to us in not carrying on in this way, because we do live at an inflection point just now. This is one thing I'm pretty sure that, quote, unquote, "my lost civilization" didn't have, and that was nuclear weapons. But we have nukes today. And we have them in, in an enormous scale. And behind each of those nukes is a fragile human being with his own or her own ego and complexes and fears-

Joe Rogan 1:12:29 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:12:29 ... and paranoia.

Joe Rogan 1:12:30 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:12:30 Uh, and, and we're reaching a point where those buttons are gonna be pressed. We are, as far as I know, the first human civilization that, uh, has the capacity to actually wipe itself out completely. We don't need a comet impact. We don't need a solar outburst. We can do it to ourselves. And that requires humanity to make a major step forward in consciousness. And I think making that major step forward in consciousness will be helped by better understanding our own past.

Joe Rogan 1:12:58 Mm-hmm. I, I agree. I, I mean, it's just disturbing how many times we can travel to ancient places like Greece or any, any place where... You go to Rome and realize, oh, there was a thriving civilization here at one point and-

Graham Hancock 1:13:11 You were in Greece recently.

Joe Rogan 1:13:12 ... now it's gone. Yeah, with Brian Muraresky.

Graham Hancock 1:13:13 You went with Brian Muraresky. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:15 Yeah. Fascinating.

Graham Hancock 1:13:17 Brilliant, brilliant guy.

Joe Rogan 1:13:17 Amazing. Brilliant guy.

Graham Hancock 1:13:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:18 But it, uh, what a treat it is to have a tour of the Parthenon and the Acropolis with him.

Graham Hancock 1:13:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:23 And, you know, we went to, uh, to see the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries-

Graham Hancock 1:13:27 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:13:28 ... and all that. It was very, very, very interesting, but just also sobering because you realize, like, this civilization did not make it. You know, this, this insane, fascinating, complex civilization crumbled.

Graham Hancock 1:13:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:42 And the idea that ours can't is one that we kinda hold dear.

Graham Hancock 1:13:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:46 Like, we're different. We got it figured out. We're better. But there's so much evidence that that's just a normal pattern of human history.

Graham Hancock 1:13:53 Yep. Civilizations come and go.

Joe Rogan 1:13:54 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:13:55 We could be gone in 20 years.

Joe Rogan 1:13:56 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:13:57 I'd love to take you on a trip to Egypt at some point.

Joe Rogan 1:13:59 I want to go. I wanna go. I'll tell you about a, an, an idea that, uh, was