Joe Rogan Experience #2051 - Graham Hancock

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) Hello, Graham Hancock.

Hello, Joe Rogan.

Good to see you, my friend.

Good to be back with you.

Hey, congratulations on the success of your show. It's been, uh, it's very awesome to see, and it's been, uh, really awesome to hear from so many people about it that know that I'm really fascinated by the subject. And the reviews have all been super positive from my friends, so I'm real excited about it.

Well, thank you for appearing on, on Ancient Apocalypse as well.

My pleasure, my pleasure.

Uh-

It's a, a subject to me that is so unbelievably fascinating and so bizarre that it's controversial.

(laughs)

I do not understand. I mean, we, we were just talking about this, and I said, "Let's stop talking when we're about, when we're getting coffee."

(laughs) Yeah.

It's, to me, it seems like there's things that are concrete, right? We know when Genghis Khan lived.

Yeah.

We know when they built the Sistine Chapel. We know, we know a lot about the Parthenon, the Acropolis. We know about 2,000 years ago. We know... When you start going way, way, way, way, way back, things get real sketchy. And to not admit that-

Hmm.

... seems so crazy. When they find things when they're making apartment buildings sometimes-

Yeah.

... they're digging into the ground, they go, "Oh, hold on a second, what is this? D- doesn't it happen in Mexico City all the time?"

Yeah, it does.

Yeah.

And, and, and actually, that's how a lot of archaeology happens. Um, somebody's building a road or building a, uh, apartment buildings or building a dam, and they call in archaeologists to see if there's anything, any interesting archaeology there.

Hmm.

And this is, this is part of the problem I have with, with archaeology as a discipline. It likes to think of itself as scientific, but what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past.

Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates?

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a complicated (coughs) it's a complicated mixture, uh, of, of things. Fir- first of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo. You know, anything, anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with, and then it c- takes the next step and, and, and really seeks to attack out-on-the-edge, uh, ideas. Now, I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out-on-the-edge idea. Uh, we've had lost civilizations before. The Indus Valley civilization, uh, in, in, today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s. It was found by accident, and, you know, every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal new information. But, uh, their, their, their... The reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. But with Ancient Apocalypse, much bigger platform, reaching a much wider audience, the, the reaction was just hysterical, and it went on for a very long time. And it appeared to be, it appeared to me... I don't think it's a conspiracy. I don't think archaeologists are involved in a conspiracy. I think the people who are attacking me genuinely believe in what they're saying and they genuinely think I'm harmful. But that's like calling it the most dangerous show on Netflix. (laughs)