The Joe Rogan Experience - May 23, 2013


Joe Rogan Experience #360 - Graham Hancock


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 41 minutes

Words per Minute

179.58469

Word Count

28,973

Sentence Count

2,330

Misogynist Sentences

25

Hate Speech Sentences

44


Summary

In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, I talk about a certain piece of technology that's been around for a long time, and then I get into a heated debate about whether or not it's a good or bad thing. I also talk about the fact that I don't think I've ever read a book that was written about cannabis, and I think that's pretty cool. And then I go on a little rant about how I'm not a fan of the Green Goddess, but I think she's a wonderful human being and I love her for being a woman, so why not have her write a book about it? Also, if you use the code "JRE" at checkout, you'll get 10% off your entire purchase with code "Rogan" and I'll give you a discount on Onnit, too. Onnit is a human performance website that sells stuff you can use to improve your health and performance. I think you're going to love it. I'm also going to like Onnit and I can't wait to try Onnit's stuff, so let me know what you think! Tweet me if you like it and what you thought of it! Timestamps: 3:00 - What do you think of Onnit? 4:30 - Is it a good thing or bad? 5:15 - What are you think? 6:00- What's your favorite cannabis strains? 7:30- Is it better than cannabis? 8:20 - What is your favorite plant? 9: What are your favorite type of cannabis strain? 10:00: What kind of plant you like to grow? 11: Which one do you like? 12:15- How do you use it the most? 13:00 16:40 - How powerful are you? 15:40- Are you a mystery ally? 17:10 - Are you in a good mood? 18:20- How powerful? 19:00 | How powerful is your cupcake? 21:10 | How much do you need to grow your own pot? 22:40 | What's a mystery bench? 23:30 | Which plant you're a mystery? 26:30 27:20 | How are you better than me? 25:00 + 22:00 & 27:10 28:20 // 27:40


Transcript

00:00:09.000 That's hilarious.
00:00:12.000 This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by Stamps.com.
00:00:17.000 If you go to Stamps.com and click on the upper link, there's a photograph of an old school microphone.
00:00:22.000 You know, the kind that everybody likes to use in photographs.
00:00:25.000 Nobody likes to use those stupid things in practice because they suck.
00:00:28.000 But for whatever reason, there's a certain piece of nostalgia.
00:00:32.000 That's connected to one of those old-school microphones, like the birth of the beast.
00:00:38.000 That's the origin of it.
00:00:40.000 So for whatever, talking into a microphone, people love that.
00:00:42.000 But click on that thing, it's an icon, and enter in the code word JRE, just for Joe Rogan experience, and you will get a $110 bonus offer.
00:00:53.000 It includes a digital scale and up to $55 free postage.
00:00:57.000 Stamps.com is an awesome thing to have if you are running a personal business, if you have a small business.
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00:01:07.000 Going to the post office is a huge drag for people.
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00:01:48.000 We're also brought to you by Hover.
00:01:51.000 Hover is a domain name company that's owned by the same people that own Ting, and you know how much we love them.
00:01:57.000 Hover has the same sort of principles.
00:02:00.000 Hover is a really easy website to use, very intuitive.
00:02:04.000 I actually have domains that I have personally registered So I have actual experience doing it, and if a monkey like me can pull it off with no hitches, you can too.
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00:02:53.000 All right, so go there, you freaks.
00:02:55.000 And we're also brought to you by Onnit.com, as always.
00:02:58.000 I've always searched for a way to describe what Onnit's supposed to be, and it's like a human performance website.
00:03:06.000 What we sell is all stuff that we find to be beneficial, whether it's for Fitness, like kettlebells and battle ropes and weight vests and medicine balls and chin-up bars and all sorts of things that I think are very beneficial for fitness to get your body in shape to do things.
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00:03:30.000 We try to just sell you a bunch of healthy shit.
00:03:33.000 Whatever hemp protein bars, which are really delicious and nutrient-dense, And I think the idea behind the company is just sell shit that you would use.
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00:03:54.000 See, quick, I can get through that shit, Jamie.
00:03:57.000 Boom.
00:03:58.000 That was quick.
00:03:59.000 That was like professional.
00:04:01.000 All right, ladies and gentlemen, Graham Hancock is here.
00:04:03.000 And I can't tell you how fucking pumped I am to talk to you, sir.
00:04:07.000 And cue the music.
00:04:08.000 Let's get this party rolling.
00:04:13.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.
00:04:21.000 Powerful Graham Hancock.
00:04:23.000 How are you, sir?
00:04:24.000 I'm good.
00:04:25.000 Just fine.
00:04:26.000 You've kicked the green bench.
00:04:30.000 Yes, yes.
00:04:32.000 After a 24-year intense relationship with the green goddess or the green bitch, depending on what mood she's in, I had to stop.
00:04:43.000 And I've come in for some criticism for this, and I feel it's important to say That I hugely value and love cannabis.
00:04:58.000 I think it's a wonderful herbal ally.
00:05:01.000 And I don't think that I would ever have written my books of historical mystery if I had not I encountered cannabis rather late in life.
00:05:09.000 I did not smoke any dope until I was 37 years old, and I'm now 62. Wow.
00:05:15.000 And roughly around about the age of 38, that's when I started getting into historical mysteries.
00:05:21.000 Before that, it was all...
00:05:22.000 Of course, it's total stoner stuff.
00:05:24.000 Absolutely.
00:05:25.000 Before that, it was all current affairs, you know?
00:05:28.000 Right.
00:05:28.000 But suddenly, something opened up for me, and I'm very grateful to the herb for that.
00:05:36.000 Again, I need to emphasize this.
00:05:38.000 I think the problem I eventually ended up having with cannabis, it's not the fault of cannabis, it's the fault of Graham Hancock.
00:05:44.000 I think my relationship became abusive with the herb.
00:05:48.000 It was not initially.
00:05:49.000 Initially it was something I would do evenings and weekends.
00:05:52.000 I would not try to write while I was actually stoned.
00:05:56.000 I would do my day's work and then chill out in the evening with a pipe or a joint.
00:06:01.000 That was how it was for me.
00:06:03.000 For quite a while.
00:06:04.000 And I went through my first big historical mystery book, The Sign and the Seal, which was published in 1992, with that pattern.
00:06:11.000 In other words, I would be smoking only after I downed tools at the end of the evening and I was ready to chill.
00:06:19.000 And that worked fine.
00:06:20.000 But then, when I started writing Fingerprints of the Gods, which was the biggest book I've ever done, a five million copy bestseller all around the world, when I started writing that, I thought I'll experiment.
00:06:33.000 Let's see if I can be stoned and write.
00:06:37.000 And I discovered that I could.
00:06:39.000 I could be stoned and write.
00:06:41.000 And I like being stoned so much that, in a way, It urged me to just write all the time because then I had this incredibly good reason to be stoned all the time.
00:06:53.000 I took away all the physical boredom of sitting there in my chair in front of my computer screen.
00:07:00.000 Just everything went away and I drifted into this space where I could explore ideas and manifest those ideas down on the page.
00:07:10.000 That's when I began What was to become, ultimately, an abusive relationship with cannabis.
00:07:16.000 That I would fire up, in those days, my joint or my pipe at 9 or 10 in the morning, and I'm a hard worker.
00:07:25.000 I work 16 hours a day very often when I'm writing, so come 2 o'clock the next morning, I'd still be there smoking away.
00:07:32.000 And as the years went by, this became a permanent daily pattern for me.
00:07:39.000 Whether I was writing or not, I would be stoned From the moment I got up until the moment I went to bed.
00:07:45.000 And most people who came by my house or talked to me on the phone, they would have had absolutely no idea because I was completely in control.
00:07:52.000 I didn't seem high.
00:07:54.000 I could hold a rational conversation.
00:07:56.000 I was just fine.
00:07:58.000 And I just felt really good.
00:08:01.000 And this is how it went on for many years.
00:08:03.000 And later on, around about 2005, actually, I think, perhaps a little earlier, one of my kids told me that, you know, this stuff, this smoke is You don't need to have combustion products.
00:08:13.000 Why don't you use a vaporizer?
00:08:14.000 So I bought myself a volcano on the internet.
00:08:20.000 And then I heard that the British government was going to ban all peripherals.
00:08:26.000 So I bought myself two more volcanoes.
00:08:28.000 Volcanoes are quite expensive, but that shows how dedicated I was.
00:08:31.000 You had to make sure that you covered your bases.
00:08:33.000 I had to make sure that I covered my bases.
00:08:35.000 And then I would be vaporizing from 9 in the morning until 2 o'clock the next morning, seven days a week.
00:08:41.000 And increasingly strong strains.
00:08:42.000 And this is one thing that I would say.
00:08:44.000 If we lived in a regime, an irrational regime, where there was no attempt by the government to police our states of consciousness, we could have much more choice in the kind of cannabis we get hold of.
00:08:54.000 For example, I would have liked to have cannabis with much more CBD and maybe less THC. But the varieties I was smoking were very, very THC loaded.
00:09:06.000 What's the difference in effect?
00:09:08.000 Well, okay.
00:09:09.000 I mean, it depends how much you buy into the research on this, but a lot of good science has been done and the suggestion is that THC can promote or reveal...
00:09:21.000 I don't want to blame the herd for anything.
00:09:24.000 It can reveal certain psychotic tendencies in oneself.
00:09:28.000 And this is the well-known paranoia which many people associate with smoking cannabis.
00:09:35.000 The CBD Is an anti-psychotic agent.
00:09:38.000 So the natural herb is balanced with CBD and THC. And it looks after you very well.
00:09:44.000 But where we go into intensive breeding of the herb, focusing on the element that makes you really high, which is the THC, then we get a herb that is somewhat unbalanced as a result of the interference of humanity.
00:09:58.000 But you get more bang for your buck, you know.
00:10:00.000 That's a very...
00:10:00.000 That's a very strong herb.
00:10:02.000 And I began to like a particular variety called cheese.
00:10:07.000 I think it's called cheese because it smells like old socks or like a blue cheese.
00:10:15.000 I found a grower who lived local to me who just had amazing green fingers and I would buy from him and I would sometimes have five or six ounces of the herb in my house because I was blazing through this stuff at a tremendous rate.
00:10:32.000 That's enough to you where you could get in trouble for dealing.
00:10:35.000 So that's where the paranoia starts to become legitimate, you know, because actually they can break down your door and they can confiscate your home and take away your liberty and fuck you up forever.
00:10:45.000 You know, they can do that.
00:10:47.000 And so every time I heard a ring at the door or, you know, a car came up the street, I would, you know, get paranoid.
00:10:55.000 And you were high, so that didn't help.
00:10:56.000 And I was high.
00:10:58.000 Did you get paranoid when you were high?
00:11:00.000 Well, this is one of the reasons why...
00:11:02.000 Look, what happened to me was that around about 2003, I started, for reasons of research initially, working with ayahuasca, the vine of souls.
00:11:18.000 This is the powerful psychedelic brew which has been consumed by shamanistic cultures in the Amazon for thousands and thousands of years.
00:11:26.000 And it's not called the vine of souls for nothing.
00:11:30.000 It's an extraordinary portal into other realms, and in some ways those realms are associated with death and perhaps what waits for us after death.
00:11:40.000 Nobody knows the answer to that, but in ayahuasca you have certain experiences relating to that.
00:11:45.000 And right from the beginning when I started to drink ayahuasca, I mean, this sounds nuts to anybody who hasn't done DMT or who hasn't drunk ayahuasca, but you do meet intelligent entities.
00:11:56.000 And more and more around the world, people drinking ayahuasca are meeting this goddess figure.
00:12:00.000 She might appear as a serpent.
00:12:01.000 She might appear as a woman.
00:12:03.000 She might appear as some kind of panther or jaguar.
00:12:06.000 A very powerful, tough love kind of lady who reveals to you the truth about yourself and just says, you know, you fucking deal with it because that's how you are.
00:12:18.000 And the truth that was revealed to me from quite early on was my relationship with cannabis had got out of balance and I needed to get it back into balance.
00:12:25.000 And of course, I ignored those messages completely because I was so...
00:12:30.000 I was so much in love with my cannabis relationship.
00:12:33.000 In fact, my wife said that really it was like I had a mistress, you know, who I spent all my time with was the cannabis rather than her.
00:12:40.000 And this went on for many, many years.
00:12:42.000 Now, the paranoia aspect, okay, I'm going to bare my heart here, and, you know, I believe in being honest.
00:12:50.000 The paranoia aspect began to affect my relationship with my beloved partner, Santa, who I just love from the bottom of my heart, and she is the The best, the most pure-hearted, generous-spirited, loving lady it's possible to imagine.
00:13:05.000 I started to develop all kinds of suspicions about her, which were completely groundless.
00:13:11.000 I started to imagine all sorts of stuff were going on, and then I started to act towards her as though those suspicions were real.
00:13:18.000 And all of this was also Related to my consumption of cannabis.
00:13:23.000 It was not caused by my consumption of cannabis.
00:13:25.000 I think this is a latent aspect of my own personality.
00:13:28.000 It was being revealed.
00:13:30.000 By this over-abuse of the cannabis herb.
00:13:34.000 And therefore, I was making my beautiful partner's life a misery sometimes.
00:13:40.000 Not every day, but sometimes.
00:13:42.000 And she was patiently putting up with this, but she was suffering.
00:13:45.000 And we went down to Brazil in October 2011. And if I had been told when we got on that plane and went down to Brazil that when I came back two weeks later, I would probably never smoke cannabis again, I would have laughed in the face of the person who told me that.
00:14:00.000 But the encounters that I had with the spirit of ayahuasca, whatever that is, I'm willing to accept that there is no spirit of ayahuasca, that it's all something we generate out of our brains.
00:14:10.000 But for me, she manifests like a goddess.
00:14:13.000 And the encounters I had with that, and I do think she's real.
00:14:16.000 That's just my personal belief system.
00:14:18.000 And those encounters that I had were incredibly powerful.
00:14:21.000 And she took me to a place that was something like hell.
00:14:24.000 And she took me to a place that was something like the judgment scene.
00:14:28.000 In the ancient Egyptian religion.
00:14:29.000 Now, the judgment scene is a place where your heart is weighed in the scales against the feather of truth and harmony and cosmic justice.
00:14:38.000 And you do not want your heart to be heavy in those scales.
00:14:41.000 You want to be able to look back on your life and say, I did good.
00:14:45.000 I did not add to the misery in the world.
00:14:47.000 I did something worthwhile with this incredible gift of life that the universe gave me.
00:14:52.000 And everything you've done, every second, every minute of your life is completely transparent.
00:14:57.000 Every thought, every action, everything you did from the moment you became conscious until the moment of your death is laid out before you and there's no hiding from it.
00:15:07.000 We're great at creating illusions about our own behavior and persuading ourselves that we're behaving just fine.
00:15:14.000 In the Judgment Hall of Osiris, which is also called the Hall of Mart, where the scene takes place, all of that's stripped away, and you confront the truth.
00:15:20.000 And I was put there, and I confronted the truth about myself, and I saw the way that I was behaving towards my partner, and I was shown that this had to stop.
00:15:30.000 Otherwise I was going to pay a huge price for it.
00:15:35.000 I had a series of terrifying, terrifying experiences which my partner Sanseth shared with me because we were drinking ayahuasca together and at a certain point entities came to her and she had the experience of her heart being pulled out of her chest and the entity said to her and she thought she was going to die and the entity said to her We're going to do this to you to teach Graham a lesson,
00:15:59.000 and Santa communicated that to me, and I would rank that as probably the single most terrifying night of my entire life, and I've had some terrifying nights.
00:16:09.000 That was just absolutely Scared, rigid.
00:16:14.000 And I came out of that with a feeling, a very clear feeling.
00:16:19.000 In Ayahuasca, we have sharings.
00:16:21.000 The next day after you've drunk the brew, you share with the rest of the group who you've drunk with, the experiences you had the night before, as much as you want to share.
00:16:28.000 And what I shared, because I still didn't believe that I could stop smoking cannabis, what I shared was that I was going to change my relationship with cannabis and to get to a place where cannabis was serving me again rather than me Serving her.
00:16:43.000 And that's what I believed.
00:16:45.000 But when I got back to England, long flight, What's the first thing I do?
00:16:50.000 I get out my vaporizer, get out my stash, fire up the vaporizer, and fill a nice bag of vapor.
00:16:58.000 You say it so nostalgically.
00:17:00.000 Well, I miss it.
00:17:04.000 Cannabis is such a beautiful, sensual ally, if she's used right.
00:17:08.000 So do you think it's just an imbalance issue with the CBD-THC ratio?
00:17:12.000 Let me just finish with what happened to me.
00:17:15.000 So I fill up the bag, and I'm down there in my basement.
00:17:18.000 And I take the first draw and I'm suddenly filled with the most intense feelings of horror and loathing.
00:17:25.000 And it is exactly like I'm back in that space that Ayahuasca took me to.
00:17:29.000 And I try a second puff and I can't do it.
00:17:32.000 I physically could not continue.
00:17:34.000 I knew that I just could not continue.
00:17:37.000 I expressed the vapor out of the bag.
00:17:39.000 I crumpled up the bag.
00:17:41.000 I put it away and the next day I got rid of several ounces of cannabis.
00:17:47.000 I know, I know it's terrible.
00:17:49.000 It's a terrible thing to do, but for me it was the right thing to do.
00:17:52.000 24 years, non-stop relationship with cannabis, definitely abusing the herb.
00:17:57.000 I had got to the point where the only rational course of action was what I was shown in Ayahuasca, which was to stop.
00:18:03.000 And I don't know whether it was because There was way too much THC and not enough CBD, or whether it was just me not being responsible for my own behavior.
00:18:12.000 I go around saying that I believe in adult responsibility, and I do, but I don't think I was being responsible.
00:18:18.000 I don't think I was using the herb in a responsible way.
00:18:20.000 I don't think I was using it in a respectful way, and I paid a price for that.
00:18:24.000 Well, that's very honest and forthcoming of you to talk about it.
00:18:28.000 And it's very uncomfortable for people to discuss mistakes they've made or paths they've gone down that they didn't, for whatever reason, they got caught up in the momentum.
00:18:37.000 They didn't see where it was headed until they hit the wall.
00:18:42.000 It sounds like you have a legitimate chemical reaction to it.
00:18:46.000 It doesn't just sound like...
00:18:49.000 It doesn't just sound like an abusive relationship because the effect that it was having, the extreme paranoia effect and the unease.
00:18:57.000 Do you take care of your body?
00:18:59.000 Do you work out?
00:19:00.000 Do you do any exercise?
00:19:01.000 Not enough.
00:19:02.000 Not enough.
00:19:02.000 I do some calisthenics.
00:19:04.000 I don't do a whole lot of exercise.
00:19:06.000 You should do yoga.
00:19:07.000 How do you not do yoga?
00:19:09.000 You should do yoga, man.
00:19:10.000 Graham Hancock, yoga has your name on it.
00:19:12.000 Oddly enough, somebody's come up to me recently and suggested I join a yoga A yoga class.
00:19:19.000 Listen, man, you have to.
00:19:20.000 Join it yesterday.
00:19:21.000 For real.
00:19:22.000 It's for a guy like you.
00:19:24.000 Because it's a way to get high without doing any drugs.
00:19:28.000 I've gotten...
00:19:29.000 There's only one time in my whole life I did it, but I got so high after a yoga session that it was like I just smoked weed.
00:19:36.000 Like I felt exactly like I just smoked a lot of weed.
00:19:40.000 I was sitting there in a hotel room and I was like, this is incredible.
00:19:42.000 I would swear I'm high as fuck right now.
00:19:45.000 I hadn't smoked in days.
00:19:46.000 Okay, okay.
00:19:48.000 And it gives you, it's a reset.
00:19:51.000 It gives you a reset.
00:19:52.000 It gives you like, to me, like, it gets rid of the excess and balances things out.
00:19:58.000 Like, you can, the reason why people have road rage and they're reacting so strongly to nothing, what a guy got in front of you and it's going to take you three extra seconds to get where you're going.
00:20:07.000 And you go crazy.
00:20:08.000 Fuck you!
00:20:09.000 And fucking, that is not him.
00:20:11.000 And that is not this.
00:20:12.000 The guy, yes, maybe he shouldn't have done that, but does it even bother you?
00:20:15.000 Does it mean anything?
00:20:16.000 Massive overreach.
00:20:16.000 People make mistakes.
00:20:17.000 The guy got in front of you.
00:20:18.000 What's the big deal?
00:20:20.000 It's built up.
00:20:21.000 It's built up and there's imbalance.
00:20:22.000 There's energy imbalances in people.
00:20:26.000 We're stuck in cubicles or doing jobs that we don't appreciate and people blow up.
00:20:32.000 The best way to avoid that kind of stuff to me is yoga.
00:20:36.000 Yeah.
00:20:36.000 Well, but what about all the stretching and the, you know, the joint, like my knees and my hips?
00:20:42.000 I had my hip replaced six weeks ago.
00:20:44.000 Oh my god.
00:20:45.000 Six weeks ago?
00:20:46.000 Yeah, six weeks ago.
00:20:48.000 You're walking around like you're fine.
00:20:49.000 Yeah, six weeks ago I was in hospital.
00:20:51.000 I got a massive scar down the outside of my right thigh.
00:20:53.000 They went in there and replaced my hip.
00:20:56.000 But I guess one could start gently and just sort of build up.
00:20:59.000 Now, you would have to talk to an expert about that because I don't know what physical limitations.
00:21:03.000 Currently none.
00:21:04.000 None.
00:21:05.000 The surgery's gone well and I'm all set.
00:21:08.000 So they told you you could go running?
00:21:09.000 I can go running, I can go swimming, I can do anything, yeah.
00:21:12.000 Wow, that's incredible.
00:21:14.000 That's incredible.
00:21:15.000 And it's a serious operation.
00:21:18.000 It's a serious operation.
00:21:18.000 I know it's a serious operation because I opted to stay awake during it.
00:21:21.000 Well, I'm a writer, you know, I have stuff to write about.
00:21:24.000 Oh, that's hilarious.
00:21:25.000 Did you tell them that?
00:21:27.000 Yeah, I did, yeah.
00:21:28.000 So what they do is they give you a spinal.
00:21:31.000 An epidural.
00:21:32.000 It's a bit like an epidural that women get when they're giving birth.
00:21:36.000 It's slightly different, but that's basically what it is.
00:21:39.000 And that freezes the lower half of your body.
00:21:41.000 You use the use of your legs, you're paralyzed, and there's no pain whatsoever.
00:21:46.000 But then, because they regard the surgery as a kind of scary procedure, They then give you a massive dose of sedatives, and you kind of go off into dreamland.
00:21:55.000 So I declined those.
00:21:57.000 They wouldn't actually let me look.
00:21:59.000 They put some kind of curtain device between my face and my hip, but I heard the sawing, and then I heard the hammering, and I felt like a piece of furniture on a carpenter's bench.
00:22:11.000 I heard them talking.
00:22:13.000 It was interesting.
00:22:14.000 It was an interesting experience.
00:22:16.000 But then very nice to come out of it, be fully awake afterwards and gradually the feeling comes back to your legs and I spent four days in hospital and initially I thought it was going to be very tough and I thought I'd be on sticks for a long time but I did the physio and I just carried on working at it and I'm okay.
00:22:33.000 I stayed awake for my first knee surgery.
00:22:35.000 Right.
00:22:36.000 And while the guy was working, it was really weird because I was like half in it and half out of it.
00:22:40.000 Yeah.
00:22:41.000 And he was, you know, he was just a guy that was like tired of being a doctor.
00:22:46.000 Like really wasn't into people or whatever it was.
00:22:49.000 I mean, if he fixed my knee, it still fixes day.
00:22:51.000 It's a patella tendon graft where they take a slice of your patella and they open you up and take a piece of bone out of your shin and a piece of bone in your kneecap and they use that to replace your anterior cruciate ligament.
00:23:03.000 Right.
00:23:05.000 He puts it in there and moves my leg around and goes, well, better than it was.
00:23:09.000 That's what he said.
00:23:10.000 I was awake.
00:23:11.000 I don't know if he just forgot I was awake or thought I wouldn't remember, but I remember him moving around like, well, better than it was.
00:23:19.000 That's it?
00:23:20.000 We've got it done?
00:23:21.000 Beautiful job?
00:23:22.000 This young man will be up and walking in no time?
00:23:25.000 Just better than it was.
00:23:26.000 That's the limit of his ambition.
00:23:27.000 His attitude was just, like, so...
00:23:30.000 He didn't give a fuck.
00:23:31.000 And I remember visiting him to get it looked at, like, after, you know, he would, like, want a check-up to see how it was, like, months later.
00:23:39.000 Like, the guy just didn't like people.
00:23:41.000 You could tell.
00:23:42.000 He had this thing.
00:23:43.000 It was just done.
00:23:44.000 Just done.
00:23:44.000 There was no bedside manner.
00:23:46.000 He was courteous.
00:23:47.000 He wasn't yelling at you or anything, but it was just...
00:23:48.000 You were just another piece of meat on the table.
00:23:50.000 Yeah.
00:23:51.000 It's weird to watch, though, isn't it?
00:23:53.000 Your body getting operated on.
00:23:54.000 It's a very strange experience to undergo.
00:23:57.000 In my case, as I say, I was not able to watch it because they put up a curtain, but I heard it.
00:24:02.000 And the particular things that I heard were sawing and hammering.
00:24:07.000 I saw it on a screen.
00:24:08.000 Right.
00:24:09.000 I didn't watch it.
00:24:10.000 I couldn't watch it in front of me, but I saw what was happening on the screen.
00:24:13.000 It was crazy.
00:24:14.000 It was really weird.
00:24:15.000 They open you up like a fish.
00:24:17.000 But the hip replacement is a gigantic one.
00:24:19.000 It's a big surgery.
00:24:21.000 How is it six weeks later and you're walking around like you're great?
00:24:24.000 You didn't have a limp at all.
00:24:25.000 No, I guess in some ways I must have been reasonably fit and got on.
00:24:31.000 That's good.
00:24:33.000 That's very important.
00:24:34.000 Because I know for folks that are overweight or have issues already, they allow a hip injury to let them get overweight.
00:24:41.000 That's a big rehabilitation.
00:24:44.000 It's a big thing.
00:24:46.000 And it is major surgery.
00:24:47.000 It's to chop the end of your bone off, right?
00:24:50.000 In a way, our bodies are like machines, and we've got this ball and socket joint in the hip.
00:24:55.000 And so the ball is on the end of the long bone, the femur, I think it is.
00:25:01.000 So they chop that off.
00:25:02.000 That comes off.
00:25:05.000 And then the socket, in my case, there were cysts in the socket, which were hollow spaces that had come in there because the ball joint was out of kilter and it was rubbing in the wrong way.
00:25:16.000 I was in severe pain for a year before this happened.
00:25:22.000 What they do is they put in a titanium unit there where the socket is, and they put a titanium shaft that they hammer down into the bone.
00:25:32.000 But then on the top of the titanium is ceramic, so the actual bearings, both the titanium socket is lined with ceramic and the bearing that That moves around in it that sits on top of the titanium shaft, that's also ceramic.
00:25:46.000 So there's no metal rubbing against metal, which has caused problems in the past.
00:25:50.000 People get fragments of metal into their bloodstream and so on.
00:25:53.000 Ceramic on ceramic bearings.
00:25:55.000 And it's very good.
00:25:57.000 It works well and I'm not in pain.
00:25:59.000 And that very bad period of not being able to walk more than a quarter of a mile without having to sit down and recover, it's all gone.
00:26:08.000 It's incredible.
00:26:09.000 I mean, how long is it going to be before we have bionic bodies?
00:26:12.000 Well, it's already happening.
00:26:13.000 We are already getting bionic bodies, and this is one of the good things which medical science has done some terrible things, but one of the good things it's done is, I mean, if this had happened 50 years ago, I would have been crippled at the age of 62. I couldn't have gone on with my life.
00:26:27.000 That's what eventually did in Hunter Thompson.
00:26:29.000 Right.
00:26:30.000 He was in constant pain.
00:26:32.000 I believe he had hip replacement too, but it was like old school.
00:26:35.000 They didn't really...
00:26:36.000 They've got a lot better.
00:26:37.000 A lot better.
00:26:38.000 Yeah, that's the image right there.
00:26:40.000 But we're looking it up on that screen.
00:26:42.000 There we go.
00:26:42.000 Oh God, Graham Hancock.
00:26:45.000 Jesus louisus.
00:26:48.000 It's a funny thing to look at on the x-ray.
00:26:50.000 It's crazy.
00:26:51.000 It's the idea that you're going to run around on that.
00:26:53.000 That's a fake joint.
00:26:55.000 And you know, I asked him, when you hammer that titanium shaft down inside the bone, is there any danger that you can split the bone?
00:27:01.000 And he said, yeah, sure.
00:27:03.000 We sometimes split the bone.
00:27:04.000 But he said, then we just bind it with wire.
00:27:07.000 Oh my god!
00:27:08.000 You just, what?
00:27:09.000 You fucking tied up with duct tape?
00:27:11.000 Yes, basically.
00:27:12.000 That's so crazy.
00:27:13.000 They hammer a piece of metal into the center where the marrow is.
00:27:18.000 Where the marrow is, yeah.
00:27:19.000 Motherfucker.
00:27:20.000 Does it endanger the leg?
00:27:23.000 Apparently not.
00:27:24.000 Wow, that's incredible.
00:27:26.000 It's good stuff.
00:27:27.000 And then the body just absorbs the titanium?
00:27:30.000 It comes part of the body, bone tissue forms around as well, and you're all set.
00:27:34.000 And mates to it, right?
00:27:35.000 Yeah.
00:27:36.000 Wow.
00:27:37.000 That's incredible.
00:27:38.000 So I'm pleasantly surprised by the way that this has turned out.
00:27:42.000 I'm here in America now.
00:27:44.000 I thought I would have to take sticks with me on this trip, but I haven't had to do so.
00:27:50.000 So you planned on taking sticks?
00:27:51.000 I did, but in the end I decided not to.
00:27:54.000 It's incredible.
00:27:55.000 You're just walking around.
00:27:56.000 Totally normal.
00:27:57.000 I have neat screws in both knees.
00:27:59.000 I don't know why I'm so surprised.
00:28:00.000 But for whatever reason, a hip replacement seems incredible.
00:28:05.000 Yeah, it's kind of intimate as well, you know?
00:28:06.000 It's right in the center of your being there.
00:28:08.000 It's kind of...
00:28:08.000 It's right next to your junk.
00:28:10.000 That's what you're saying.
00:28:11.000 Right next to your junk, yeah.
00:28:12.000 I mean, it's incredibly intimate.
00:28:14.000 It feels, you know, that's what it is.
00:28:16.000 There's a vulnerability.
00:28:17.000 It's inches away from your penis, and they're sawing.
00:28:19.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:28:20.000 Plus, Jesus!
00:28:22.000 Plus, I mean, since we're in the business of revelations here, the other thing that they have to do when you have the surgery for the 24 hours after the surgery is you have to have a catheter through the penis and into the bladder because for those first 24 hours you cannot get up out of bed and you can't lift up to use a bedpan.
00:28:40.000 So they stick in a catheter.
00:28:44.000 I felt I wanted that out as soon as possible.
00:28:50.000 I wanted it out as soon as possible.
00:28:52.000 I wanted it to return to autonomy over my body as quickly as possible.
00:28:56.000 I did not want it to be subject to the whims or fancies of others.
00:29:01.000 And I made a big fuss about this.
00:29:03.000 I wanted the catheter out the next morning.
00:29:06.000 And I literally was up on a Zimmer frame by midday the next day and hobbling to the toilet.
00:29:15.000 Wow!
00:29:16.000 So how many days was it before you could walk?
00:29:18.000 So I was walking the very next day on a Zimmer frame.
00:29:22.000 And they tell you to do this?
00:29:24.000 Yeah, you have to get going.
00:29:25.000 You can't just sit there and do nothing.
00:29:28.000 You've got to get going.
00:29:29.000 So I walked on a Zimmer frame, then I walked on two sticks, and then one stick.
00:29:33.000 How long to one stick?
00:29:35.000 Oh, I only got rid of the one stick about ten days ago.
00:29:39.000 Okay, so it was how long in before you could do one stick?
00:29:45.000 Let's say four and a half weeks.
00:29:47.000 Four and a half weeks of just walking around with a cane.
00:29:50.000 Wow.
00:29:52.000 Worth it.
00:29:52.000 Worth it.
00:29:53.000 I'm very happy that I had it done and that I don't have to suffer the pain because I had severe osteoarthritis.
00:29:59.000 I don't know why.
00:30:01.000 I mean, we all think we're young, but I feel young.
00:30:05.000 I'm 62, and I don't know why I was afflicted with this at an age.
00:30:10.000 Most people who go for hip replacement, they're into their 70s, so I don't know why it hit me so hard.
00:30:16.000 I like the line from Creators of the Lost Ark, you know, where Indiana Jones is all beat up, sitting in the ship's cabin, in some cabin, and the lady with him comments on his appearance, you know, and he says, it's not the years, it's the mileage.
00:30:31.000 And I think I put on some mileage over the years.
00:30:34.000 Well, I know a lot of martial artists that get hip replacements.
00:30:37.000 Mark Coleman, the former UFC heavyweight champion, just tweeted that he's going in for a hip replacement.
00:30:43.000 Actually, he's already done it.
00:30:44.000 I believe Chuck Norris has had hip replacements.
00:30:47.000 It's very common.
00:30:49.000 And I have a buddy, my friend Shuki, who's a Muay Thai instructor.
00:30:53.000 I believe he was in line for a hip replacement the last time I saw him.
00:30:58.000 It's a weird joint.
00:31:00.000 Yeah, it's a weird joint, but the good news is It's doable.
00:31:04.000 And after a few weeks of pain and discomfort, you're back on your feet and fully functional.
00:31:09.000 Unless the surgeon screws up, which they do sometimes.
00:31:11.000 I wonder about guys like Bo Jackson.
00:31:15.000 He was a football player that was injured really badly and he had to get a hip replacement and it basically ended his career.
00:31:22.000 He was playing football and baseball at the same time.
00:31:25.000 He was a super athlete, an incredible athlete.
00:31:28.000 But if they could have fixed him with this back then, it seems like he could have continued playing football.
00:31:33.000 Probably could have carried on.
00:31:34.000 That's insane.
00:31:35.000 Football with an artificial hip.
00:31:37.000 But why should I be shocked?
00:31:38.000 We have metal tubes that fly to other countries.
00:31:41.000 Why should I be shocked that they can fix your hip?
00:31:44.000 And what that comes down to is where your quality of life has deteriorated because of pain and immobility, you can recapture that.
00:31:52.000 You can get your quality of life back.
00:31:53.000 And that's what I value about it.
00:31:56.000 It's another place where cannabis is a beautiful drug.
00:31:58.000 When you're injured, you know, to just give you a sense of ease of your body.
00:32:02.000 Yeah.
00:32:02.000 It's for people that are in pain, you know, people have back problems.
00:32:06.000 Cannabis is a wonderful sort of thing.
00:32:08.000 It's incredible.
00:32:08.000 Relaxes things.
00:32:09.000 I have to say that I did wonder, and I still do wonder, whether the fact that I quit cannabis in October 2011 And started feeling severe hip pain just three months later in the early part of 2012,
00:32:28.000 whether there's some connection or whether the cannabis was either in some way protecting me from the onset of severe osteoarthritis or whether at least it was reducing my sensitivity to the pain of the osteoarthritis.
00:32:43.000 Because that's when I started noticing it.
00:32:44.000 So your body was just out of alignment?
00:32:46.000 The hip was out of socket or something?
00:32:48.000 It was wearing in a funny way?
00:32:49.000 Yeah, it was wearing in a funny way.
00:32:51.000 It seemed that that ball socket joint was not quite the right shape.
00:32:56.000 Oh, it's just a natural?
00:32:57.000 Some kind of natural thing.
00:33:00.000 When you talked about the ayahuasca experience and you talked about the goddess coming to you and that you choose to believe that it's real, My thoughts on this whole what is real and what is not real thing,
00:33:17.000 what I've been thinking lately is that it doesn't really even matter.
00:33:21.000 Because what it is, is it's about the experience itself.
00:33:26.000 And the best parts of psychedelic experiences are the learning parts.
00:33:31.000 It sounds like so boring to people because they think like, oh no, I thought I was going to see amazing things and I was going to watch elephants fly and it was going to be mad hallucinations, which, yeah, does occur sometimes, but that's not what it's really about.
00:33:47.000 What it's really about is about a learning experience.
00:33:50.000 I completely agree.
00:33:51.000 Massive leaps in development of your personality and your psyche, your worldview, your personal view, and these massive leaps that happen through psychedelics, they happen exactly the same way if you really do encounter a goddess or if this goddess is just conjured up by your imagination in incredibly vivid detail.
00:34:14.000 Either one is the same experience to you personally.
00:34:18.000 I think that's a very important part.
00:34:19.000 It's a very important point because, yes, it might be a hallucination, but it is immensely beneficial.
00:34:25.000 Or it might not be a hallucination, and we might not have a full account of what the fuck goes on in the human consciousness, especially during altered states.
00:34:33.000 And to go one way or the other, I think, is absurd.
00:34:38.000 We don't need to do that.
00:34:39.000 We don't need to, we don't know.
00:34:41.000 Here is an incredibly valuable experience, which is available to us, and which, let's not forget, that humanity has had a long relationship with these plants.
00:34:52.000 This is, I think, one of the problems, again, caused by the war on drugs, which is that it sought to intervene in that relationship and demonize and make it It's dangerous to use them because you might get sent to prison.
00:35:08.000 You can get sent to prison for a very long time.
00:35:10.000 People live in fear.
00:35:11.000 What we need is a nurturing society which makes it possible for people to have these experiences in the safest, most loving environment.
00:35:21.000 Love is key.
00:35:22.000 If you're feeling threatened in your head at a particular time, if you're in a space that is uncomfortable or difficult for you, chances are the psychedelic experience will also be uncomfortable and difficult.
00:35:34.000 The more that you can control the space, the more that you can be surrounded by others who love you and have your best interests at heart, the more likely you are to have a very beneficial experience from that.
00:35:45.000 And those beneficial experiences can and frequently do include painful moments when you come to realization of actually who you are and what you are.
00:35:56.000 And this is absolutely fundamental with ayahuasca, is what I call the life review, where you You see the impact of your behavior on others, which previously you had insulated yourself from.
00:36:10.000 And when you see the pain you'd caused, you might have felt perfectly justified at the time.
00:36:15.000 When you see it, and you see it with that clarity, it makes you strongly motivated not to do that again.
00:36:21.000 So it's a very important learning experience.
00:36:23.000 They call them plant teachers.
00:36:24.000 They call them teachers in the Amazon.
00:36:26.000 That aspect, that learning from your past mistake aspects, exists in a lot of psychedelics.
00:36:31.000 It's a core factor of psychedelics.
00:36:32.000 I would say it's a core factor of all psychedelics.
00:36:34.000 And I've always felt like it's really ironic that law enforcement works against psychedelics because nothing would benefit law enforcement more than psychedelics.
00:36:45.000 Absolutely.
00:36:45.000 If psychedelics were legal, there'd be so many less crimes.
00:36:49.000 First of all, the drug crimes be out the door, and then it would be a matter of how many people around Mushrooms are going to rob your house.
00:36:56.000 How about zero?
00:36:57.000 They would ask you for food if they were that starving.
00:37:01.000 I just think that...
00:37:03.000 We have this incredible ally that our culture, our society, we have this amazing plant thing that we've discovered in several different forms.
00:37:13.000 And we've made all of them outside of our reach.
00:37:17.000 We put all of them outside legal reach, which is insane.
00:37:21.000 It's insane.
00:37:21.000 It makes you wonder what's going on.
00:37:23.000 Why is society on this self-destructive trip right now?
00:37:27.000 They're ignorant.
00:37:28.000 Essentially, I believe And this is, it sounds crazy, but I believe this.
00:37:34.000 I believe that psychedelics are here for human beings to take to move to the next level of consciousness.
00:37:40.000 And they can elevate us away from our war-like ways.
00:37:43.000 I'm with you on that.
00:37:43.000 I think it's the only thing.
00:37:44.000 The only thing, I don't think ideology, morality shifts with understanding, with the exchange of information.
00:37:51.000 I think morality escalates slowly but surely all throughout culture.
00:37:54.000 And eventually we may get to a term or a time in the future where we're not war-like at all.
00:37:59.000 Yeah.
00:38:00.000 But the best way to do that is through psychedelics.
00:38:02.000 And the people who are involved in the running of things most likely are ignorant to the experience.
00:38:09.000 And so what you're dealing with is someone who is 50, 60 years into a lifelong Closed-off ego trip of death and destruction, and they're the ones that are running the world.
00:38:21.000 Unfortunately, they're the ones that are running the world.
00:38:23.000 That's why we're so fucked.
00:38:25.000 We're not so fucked because humans are evil, and when you look around at all the nice people that you meet, you get really confused as to how the world can be so fucked up.
00:38:32.000 How can it be so fucked up?
00:38:33.000 When people are basically good.
00:38:35.000 Most people are good, but the people that are running shit, most of them are not good.
00:38:40.000 Yeah, and they get like into personality types.
00:38:43.000 I mean, if you want to run shit, Then, right there, you've got a certain kind of personality.
00:38:48.000 Yeah, anybody that wants to be president should not be allowed to be president.
00:38:51.000 Exactly.
00:38:52.000 There should be an instant disqualification.
00:38:54.000 You should be absolutely not wanting that job.
00:38:56.000 It should be like the lottery.
00:38:59.000 Like the public, like a new president comes in every month.
00:39:03.000 If you do a good job, people get to vote whether they keep you for a few months.
00:39:08.000 And it's just a person.
00:39:10.000 You have random qualifications as far as education, as far as your background.
00:39:14.000 Not some power-hungry egomaniac who wants to push you around, which is unfortunately the case.
00:39:18.000 And the old boy network, the thing that comes into place when these guys, they're cronies and they all help each other out and hook each other up and communicate with each other.
00:39:27.000 And then there's lobbyists and special interest groups.
00:39:29.000 And they all want to make sure that this keeps going so they make sure that the laws continue to stay on the books, that allow them to do all the stupidity, especially when, like, Congress can't be guilty of insider trading.
00:39:39.000 Have you seen that?
00:39:40.000 I didn't see that.
00:39:41.000 Let me Google that because I want to make sure that I'm correct.
00:39:44.000 Congress not guilty of insider trading.
00:39:47.000 I think you can't accuse them of insider trading.
00:39:50.000 Oh dear.
00:39:52.000 Yeah, oh dear is the right way to say that.
00:39:54.000 Let me Google that to make sure that that's true.
00:40:00.000 So basically they get immunity?
00:40:02.000 Yeah.
00:40:03.000 Hold on.
00:40:04.000 I wrote it wrong.
00:40:05.000 Maybe can't be guilty.
00:40:08.000 Immune to insider trading?
00:40:09.000 Hmm.
00:40:10.000 Let's try immune.
00:40:11.000 Yeah, there's something.
00:40:11.000 I'm looking at some articles on this here.
00:40:15.000 Well, politicians are always cutting themselves all the slack there is.
00:40:18.000 That is exactly what it is.
00:40:20.000 Congress believes they're immune to insider trading laws, and there are legal professors that are debating them.
00:40:30.000 And the legal analysis by law professor Donna Nagley of the Indiana University suggests that members of Congress may not be immune We're good to
00:41:00.000 go.
00:41:01.000 They can say that they don't want to be prosecuted for insider trading.
00:41:05.000 It's like, why is that?
00:41:07.000 How much are you doing?
00:41:08.000 How much insider...
00:41:08.000 Guess what?
00:41:09.000 You can come to me all day and you say, hey, Joe, do you think that insider trading should be illegal?
00:41:14.000 I'll say, yes.
00:41:15.000 And if I do insider trading, prosecute me.
00:41:18.000 But if I'm coming out saying, I don't want you to prosecute me for insider trading...
00:41:21.000 You've definitely got something to hide.
00:41:22.000 Yeah, you've got to be like, what the fuck are you doing, man?
00:41:24.000 Yeah.
00:41:26.000 That's why you want to be a congressman?
00:41:27.000 So you can just profit off of the stock market?
00:41:30.000 You creep?
00:41:30.000 So I thought, and I've made this proposal several times, that what I would like to see is anybody running for high office, first right off, they've got to do 10 ayahuasca sessions.
00:41:41.000 It's a great idea.
00:41:42.000 That's it.
00:41:43.000 That's the first hurdle.
00:41:45.000 They've got to do that, they've got to go through it, and we'll see how they feel afterwards.
00:41:49.000 Could be ten strong mushroom sessions that would be just as good, but they've got to be able to You know what's really crazy?
00:41:58.000 The solution exists to a better world.
00:42:02.000 It exists.
00:42:03.000 It exists right here.
00:42:03.000 It's not like we, well, imagine if some benevolent race from another planet came down here and gifted us with some space fruit.
00:42:13.000 And if we eat the space fruit, we'll see ourselves for who we truly are and we'll recognize our potential.
00:42:18.000 Right there in that concept which many people hold, they're letting go of their responsibility for their own lives.
00:42:22.000 Yes.
00:42:23.000 Yes.
00:42:24.000 But if you told people that, you would go, wow, that would be great, but it's science fiction.
00:42:30.000 Yeah.
00:42:31.000 Well, the exact thing exists with ayahuasca, with psychedelic mushrooms.
00:42:36.000 That's true.
00:42:36.000 It exists.
00:42:37.000 And for whatever reason, discussing it is a very controversial thing.
00:42:42.000 Very controversial.
00:42:42.000 It's very controversial.
00:42:43.000 I've had producers ask me, why are you talking about TV shows that I'm working on?
00:42:49.000 Why are you talking about illegal drugs?
00:42:51.000 I'm like, I've been asked to stay away from those subjects.
00:42:54.000 Of course.
00:42:55.000 Don't talk.
00:42:56.000 You're going to fuck up this whole thing, this ancient archaeology.
00:42:59.000 I think you're onto something, Graham.
00:43:00.000 I think you've done some good work.
00:43:02.000 But leave the mushrooms now, buddy.
00:43:04.000 Exactly.
00:43:05.000 Come on, Graham.
00:43:05.000 I've had that conversation.
00:43:07.000 Come on, Graham.
00:43:08.000 You don't need the mushrooms.
00:43:10.000 We're making some money over here, Graham.
00:43:12.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:43:13.000 Yeah, it exists.
00:43:15.000 And I think that was part of the problem with my TED Talk, too.
00:43:18.000 Yeah.
00:43:19.000 We could live in a Narnia world.
00:43:21.000 We could live in a world like Avatar.
00:43:23.000 If everybody was doing ayahuasca, we could pull this world together with rapid quickness.
00:43:29.000 If they just broke out ayahuasca ceremonies all over the globe, if it became the next big thing, sort of like cell phones.
00:43:36.000 Everybody's got ayahuasca ceremonies on every corner.
00:43:38.000 You could change the whole world within our lifetime in an astounding, loving way where people would abandon so many of their ideas about business and so many of their ideas about controlling resources and killing people.
00:43:54.000 You know, the amazing thing is that it is actually happening.
00:43:57.000 It is actually happening, admittedly on a small scale, but for me this is one of the mysteries of ayahuasca at a time when the Amazon jungle is under such terrible threat, that out of the jungle emerge these two plants, one of which is a vine, which then begins to spread her tentacles all around the planet and to call out to people.
00:44:17.000 And people are drawn to ayahuasca.
00:44:19.000 I can't tell you how often I get asked Where do I go for a good ayahuasca ceremony where I know I can trust the shaman?
00:44:27.000 It's happening everywhere.
00:44:29.000 It's happening in Japan.
00:44:29.000 It's happening in America.
00:44:31.000 It's happening in Germany.
00:44:32.000 It's happening all over the world.
00:44:34.000 And so you get a small but growing group of initiates who have had this shared experience, and we kind of know each other when we meet.
00:44:44.000 And the initiates that have had this experience are talking about it and more are coming.
00:44:49.000 Exactly.
00:44:50.000 It's building and building.
00:44:51.000 And the ayahuasca tourism in South America is gigantic now.
00:44:54.000 It's gigantic.
00:44:55.000 And again, a number of times I stand up and I'm giving a presentation somewhere and I'm talking about ayahuasca.
00:45:02.000 And then somebody stands up in the audience and says, don't you realize that by promoting ayahuasca you're leading to the depletion of the rainforest?
00:45:08.000 Quite the opposite is the case.
00:45:12.000 What's happened with ayahuasca is that ayahuasca is being massively planted in the rainforest now because of ayahuasca tourism.
00:45:18.000 Ayahuasca tourism is a really good thing for ayahuasca.
00:45:21.000 It's not causing any depletion, and ayahuasca can be grown in many different parts of the world, and it is being grown.
00:45:28.000 That's the divine.
00:45:31.000 It's really a fascinating subject, the fact that something does exist to give you that experience.
00:45:36.000 I've always said about the DMT experience that if you could just show someone what you see, without taking it, if you could just show someone, they would want to do it.
00:45:46.000 They would want to go, wait a minute, and it doesn't hurt you?
00:45:48.000 No, it doesn't hurt you.
00:45:49.000 You're not going to get hurt.
00:45:51.000 But most people probably shouldn't do it, though.
00:45:54.000 That's what I think, also.
00:45:55.000 We need baby steps.
00:45:57.000 Yeah, if we lived in that ideal world where we as adults had the right to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness, I think most people wouldn't choose to do it.
00:46:06.000 Yeah, I think you're right.
00:46:07.000 Well, if you look at how it is in Holland, where marijuana is essentially legal, and nobody, you know, they look down upon people that get high all the time, and they also look down upon hard drugs.
00:46:18.000 Because of the fact that you can get most things, they understand with great clarity what's dangerous and what's not dangerous.
00:46:24.000 And people are always going to make bad mistakes.
00:46:26.000 That's it.
00:46:26.000 You just have to treat people as adults.
00:46:28.000 Yeah.
00:46:28.000 And you have to understand that some people will make mistakes and there will be problems, but that should not be an obstacle to what has to be a fundamental freedom.
00:46:39.000 But what about allowing people into your community that sell them?
00:46:43.000 Allowing people in your community of friends and neighbors that profit off of the addiction of others?
00:46:48.000 Because there's certain drugs like meth.
00:46:51.000 I agree.
00:46:51.000 I'm not saying that meth should be illegal.
00:46:53.000 I don't know whether or not I don't know whether or not there's a way to handle it where you get the maximum benefit.
00:47:00.000 I don't know whether it's making it illegal, decriminalizing it, making it so that people can't get prosecuted for using but they can get prosecuted for selling.
00:47:08.000 It's a complicated area.
00:47:09.000 Some of these substances are very harmful.
00:47:13.000 Personally, I don't want to smoke meth.
00:47:14.000 But if you were next door to a meth guy, you would not want that guy in your communities profiting off of enslaving people, chemically enslaving people.
00:47:22.000 So this is an area where more work has to be done.
00:47:26.000 But I think if we approach the problem from a spirit of love and from a spirit of respect for the sovereignty of other adults, it'll be a whole lot better than the way we're approaching the problem right now.
00:47:36.000 And as we know, making these Toxic substances, illegal, doesn't prevent their use.
00:47:42.000 It absolutely does not prevent their use.
00:47:44.000 The use has gone up and up and up and up and up over the decades.
00:47:47.000 And it's kind of unique, one of the properties of psychedelics, whether it's, like, for some folks, Ibogaine has a great...
00:47:59.000 It's a great result for curing addictions, and ayahuasca has a great result.
00:48:04.000 And the people that are doing these very things and selling these very drugs, both, participating in both sides, selling and dealing, could both benefit from ayahuasca.
00:48:13.000 Like, if you're a meth dealer, you're an asshole.
00:48:16.000 Like, what an asshole?
00:48:17.000 You're selling something that fucking kills people, makes them pull their skin off of their face.
00:48:22.000 What are you doing?
00:48:23.000 One of the first ayahuasca sessions that I went to in Brazil, there was a guy there from L.A. who was a heavy smoker of crystal meth.
00:48:34.000 Oh, Jesus.
00:48:35.000 And he came there in a state, he was just so wired.
00:48:40.000 And it came out, as we were discussing, as we were talking, it came out that he had a rival in love.
00:48:46.000 And he'd gone out and got a gun, and just before he left LA, the best decision he ever made was to leave LA and come down to Brazil and drink ayahuasca.
00:48:55.000 He was getting close to the point of murdering a fellow human being.
00:49:00.000 Two weeks in Brazil, five ayahuasca sessions, completely turned him around, completely turned him around, and he revolutionized his life.
00:49:08.000 It's incredible.
00:49:08.000 And he became such a loving, positive, warm-spirited person, and all his anger was gone, and he moved on in his life in amazing ways.
00:49:16.000 And I've seen many, many, many, many, many examples of that.
00:49:19.000 I don't want to pretend, however, that it's all sweetness and light in the garden.
00:49:25.000 There are problems also with ayahuasca, and people should be aware of this.
00:49:31.000 There are shamans who are abusing their power.
00:49:36.000 You know, if you go to a place like Iquitos in Peru, You'll find there's two types of shamans.
00:49:41.000 One type are the curanderos.
00:49:43.000 They're the healers.
00:49:44.000 The other type are the brujos.
00:49:46.000 They're sorcerers, actually.
00:49:48.000 And they will use ayahuasca to gain power over others.
00:49:54.000 And there have been one or two horrendous cases that occur with this.
00:49:57.000 So I do think the intention of the individuals who are involved is also an important part of this.
00:50:04.000 And psychedelics I agree with you that the single one-stop shop to transform our society and make it a better place, a far better place than it can be today, is the correct use of psychedelics.
00:50:19.000 But I would be wrong to say that psychedelics are a magic potion, because they're not.
00:50:25.000 And there have been societies which have Misused psychedelics profoundly.
00:50:30.000 I would say that the Aztecs in Mexico were one of those.
00:50:34.000 What did they do?
00:50:35.000 Well, they used psilocybin, but they did not use it for gentle consciousness exploration.
00:50:42.000 The Aztecs used psilocybin preparatory to rituals of human sacrifice.
00:50:47.000 The Aztecs used psilocybin as a vehicle to communicate with their deities, and those deities included characters like Huitzilopochtli, who was the war god, who spoke to – Montezuma was the last Aztec emperor,
00:51:03.000 and that's 1519 when Cortes appears in Mexico.
00:51:08.000 And Montezuma was in daily communication with the war god by means of psilocybin mushrooms.
00:51:15.000 And what the war god was telling him to do, you know, there's demons out there as well as angels.
00:51:20.000 What the war god was telling him to do was to kill people and to stretch them over a stone and cut out their hearts.
00:51:27.000 And there was a horrendous situation in Tenochtitlan, which was the capital city, which is now Mexico City as a matter of fact, when they inaugurated the Great Pyramid.
00:51:37.000 Reliable accounts.
00:51:38.000 80,000 people were sacrificed to the god of war.
00:51:42.000 In four days.
00:51:43.000 In four days.
00:51:44.000 80,000 people.
00:51:46.000 Now, this is a bloody awful thing that was going on there, and psychedelics were involved.
00:51:51.000 I'm not saying that psychedelics caused it.
00:51:53.000 And again, we come to this issue.
00:51:56.000 Are these entities that we encounter projections of our own minds?
00:51:59.000 Or is there some other realm or level of existence where non-physical entities that communicate with us at the level of consciousness exist?
00:52:09.000 Whichever it is, whether it's a projection of our own minds, as you rightly say, or whether those entities are real, is less important than the effects on our behavior.
00:52:17.000 But if what is being projected from our own mind is very dark and negative and wicked, or if those entities also include evil angels as well as good guys, then you can get cultures misled down this path.
00:52:32.000 And I do believe that's what happened with the Aztecs.
00:52:35.000 There's also recently, and again, I think truth is really important.
00:52:39.000 Truth is really important.
00:52:40.000 So let's be truthful about this also.
00:52:42.000 There have been some tragic cases with ayahuasca, most recently in Chile, which actually involved a human sacrifice, which actually involved the burning to death of a baby on the instructions of the so-called guru or shaman.
00:52:57.000 He formed a kind of death cult, but their sacrament was ayahuasca.
00:53:02.000 This is very rare, but it does happen.
00:53:04.000 And I think people should be aware when they enter ayahuasca space that one of the things ayahuasca does is it makes you more suggestible.
00:53:10.000 It opens your heart.
00:53:12.000 If a powerful, strong, negative personality comes along and says to you, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, you might just do it.
00:53:20.000 And that is also there possible.
00:53:22.000 So you have to be strong in yourself.
00:53:25.000 You have to be clear on your intent.
00:53:26.000 And if you're not going into this with good intent, then bad things also can happen.
00:53:32.000 Well, I was also wondering what would it be like to introduce psychedelics into the insane warlike environment of Aztec Mexico in the 1500s?
00:53:43.000 I mean, what would it have been like, this living back then, and what would it take to become A person of royalty, an emperor, a king.
00:53:54.000 In those days, it was insane bloodshed.
00:53:57.000 Insane bloodshed.
00:53:59.000 They were a very dark and demonic culture, and unfortunately, that demonic aspect of Aztec culture was Without any shadow of a doubt, mediated by psilocybin mushrooms.
00:54:11.000 And they called them Teonanactyl, which means the flesh of the gods.
00:54:14.000 And they were used for communication with demonic entities.
00:54:18.000 And we cannot pretend that that was not so.
00:54:22.000 This was the case.
00:54:24.000 And indeed, if the Aztecs had not been those people, I mean, if you imagine a society which was run by serial killers and in the interests of serial killers,
00:54:39.000 that's roughly Aztec society in 1519. So they would have neighboring tribes who they would prey on.
00:54:46.000 They could easily have completely defeated them, but they preferred not to completely defeat them.
00:54:49.000 They preferred to use them for warfare every year, make war on them, take captives, bring the captives back to Tenochtitlan, and cut out their hearts.
00:54:58.000 And this is why there's karma.
00:54:59.000 There's such a thing as karma.
00:55:01.000 This is why Montezuma was brought down.
00:55:03.000 I mean, 490 Spaniards turn up on the coast of Mexico and destroy a standing army of 200,000 men.
00:55:09.000 Why does that happen?
00:55:10.000 It happened because the neighbors of the Aztecs hated the Aztecs.
00:55:13.000 They utterly hated them.
00:55:15.000 And they were looking for liberation from that horror that was being inflicted on them.
00:55:19.000 Well, isn't that a better – I shouldn't say a better, but isn't a possibility that what you're dealing with is A bunch of sociopaths and a bunch of crazy people, and if you introduce psilocybin into their system in this insane warlike world,
00:55:40.000 that what you're conjuring up is their imagination.
00:55:43.000 It is the desire to manifest these things that would ask them to do horrible things.
00:55:52.000 This is a core behavior pattern in human beings when they get in control of armies.
00:55:58.000 Yes, it is.
00:55:59.000 Absolute, complete, total ruthlessness.
00:56:02.000 Barbaric behavior is...
00:56:03.000 Not only is it beneficial, but it's necessary.
00:56:07.000 It's applauded.
00:56:09.000 Yeah, it's applauded, it's necessary.
00:56:10.000 And it wins you medals.
00:56:11.000 And if you don't do it, someone around you is going to do it, so you have to do it.
00:56:15.000 So there's the interesting question right there.
00:56:18.000 I mean, we have armies now in the world today, which are going out doing murderous stuff.
00:56:23.000 And so the question is, if we were to...
00:56:27.000 Be in such a position that we could massively introduce psychedelics into those armies.
00:56:32.000 Would it actually make them worse or better?
00:56:34.000 I'm not sure what the answer is.
00:56:36.000 I'm not sure what the answer is.
00:56:37.000 It's very honest of you to not be sure.
00:56:39.000 I think there's no way to be sure.
00:56:42.000 We know that the Vikings, they berserkered on mushrooms.
00:56:47.000 Was it Amanita Muscaria?
00:56:49.000 Amanita Muscaria, yeah.
00:56:50.000 I never had much luck with that.
00:56:52.000 Me neither.
00:56:53.000 Yeah, that's what I hear from a lot of people.
00:56:54.000 Me neither.
00:56:55.000 It felt weird.
00:56:56.000 If you want to have luck with it, You've got to pass it through...
00:56:59.000 Urine.
00:57:00.000 Urine.
00:57:00.000 You've got to pass it through a reindeer or through the bladder of a shaman.
00:57:04.000 Yeah.
00:57:05.000 Then it'll work, you know?
00:57:06.000 Oh, how convenient.
00:57:08.000 You have to drink shaman piss.
00:57:10.000 Yes.
00:57:10.000 Yeah, that's the thing that they always say.
00:57:12.000 You have to recycle your urine.
00:57:13.000 I'm like...
00:57:14.000 It's as though the body functions as a filter, and it removes certain impurities, which then allow the good stuff to remain, and that comes through in urine.
00:57:23.000 Apparently, you can pass it through seven human bodies.
00:57:25.000 It doesn't lose the blood.
00:57:26.000 Hey, easy!
00:57:28.000 I know a buddy who did it.
00:57:32.000 He was on mushrooms and they told him to drink his urine.
00:57:34.000 He's like, I am so high right now.
00:57:36.000 I do not need to drink my urine.
00:57:37.000 And they're like, trust me, drink your urine.
00:57:39.000 And he said he drank his urine.
00:57:40.000 It was like just getting shot through a cyclone.
00:57:43.000 Boom!
00:57:44.000 He said the whole thing just took some incredible path from drinking his own urine.
00:57:50.000 Yeah, I must say that's not an experience I've had or would welcome, but that's what the research shows.
00:57:56.000 I have drunk my own urine on several occasions.
00:57:58.000 Have you?
00:57:58.000 Yeah, just to see, because I read about urine therapy, so I wanted to find out what it was about.
00:58:02.000 It's a big thing in India.
00:58:03.000 Yeah, does it really make you feel better when you're sick?
00:58:05.000 And it did work, but it totally might have been placebo.
00:58:08.000 I don't know.
00:58:09.000 But there was one time when I was sick and I took it.
00:58:12.000 I called my friend Yana, but I'm like, dude, I drank my own piss and it worked.
00:58:16.000 It was crazy, because he was big on it.
00:58:19.000 Does it taste okay?
00:58:21.000 It doesn't taste nearly as bad as you would think it tastes.
00:58:24.000 The idea is a lot worse than the actual reality of the urine.
00:58:27.000 The idea is hard to grasp.
00:58:29.000 Yeah, but it's just like warm water.
00:58:30.000 It's not horrific tasting.
00:58:32.000 You gag a little when you smell it.
00:58:34.000 You can't believe I'm going to drink this.
00:58:36.000 But once you're actually drinking it, it's not that big a deal.
00:58:38.000 I haven't done it in a long time.
00:58:42.000 Liotta Machida, who's a famous UFC fighter, he drinks his own urine every morning.
00:58:46.000 There's another guy, Juan Manuel Marquez, a famous boxer from Mexico, same thing, was drinking his own.
00:58:51.000 I think he quit.
00:58:52.000 He gave up on urine.
00:58:53.000 If you're gonna do that, you might as well have some Amanita Muscaria in there.
00:58:56.000 Yeah, you might as well, and even then, yeah.
00:58:59.000 I wonder if when a person goes completely psycho, when you're living in war, and one of the things about the Mexicans, the Aztecs, rather, is I don't even think they had horses yet.
00:59:12.000 No, they didn't.
00:59:13.000 This is one of the reasons, again, why a relatively small force of Spaniards were able to defeat them was because the horse had been extinct in the Americas for 12,000 years from the end of the last ice age.
00:59:27.000 And so when the Spanish turned up with actually only 16 horses, 16 heavy hunters that were trained for warfare, European armies had had thousands of years to develop strategies to deal with men on horseback.
00:59:42.000 And there were definite, specific tactics and responses that you used when you were charged.
00:59:48.000 But the Maya and the Aztecs, they had no idea what they were looking at.
00:59:52.000 They actually, if you look at their accounts, which I've done, you'll find that they initially thought that they were dealing with supernatural beings, which were part deer, actually, because that was the nearest animal that they could relate to a horse, part deer and part human.
01:00:06.000 And they didn't know how to handle these things.
01:00:10.000 And they're coming down at you at 25 or 30 miles an hour.
01:00:13.000 They're covered in armor, the horse and the man.
01:00:16.000 And it's a pretty terrifying prospect.
01:00:19.000 And they broke armies of tens of thousands of men, were just fled in terror at the sight of these entities charging down on them.
01:00:27.000 Eventually they learned.
01:00:29.000 And there's a famous case that one of the Tribes in Mexico that fought most vigorously against Montezuma were a people called the Tlaxcalans.
01:00:39.000 He used them for human sacrifice.
01:00:40.000 They're very independent-spirited people, great warriors.
01:00:43.000 And you would have thought when the Spanish came into Mexico that the first people who would become their allies would be the Tlaxcalans.
01:00:49.000 But in fact, the Tlaxcalans had a heroic character called Shikotenka, Who was their battle king.
01:00:55.000 And he saw the future.
01:00:56.000 And he saw what Spain would eventually do to Mexico.
01:01:00.000 And so initially, and very hard, he fought the Spanish tooth and nail.
01:01:05.000 For over a long campaign that lasted about six weeks.
01:01:08.000 And during that campaign, on one occasion, one of his warriors actually took the head off a horse with a single blow of their weapon, which was a bit like a sword.
01:01:20.000 It was made of wood.
01:01:21.000 It was called a, and it had flakes of obsidian lined along the edges of the blade.
01:01:26.000 And that horse was not wearing armor that day, and a horse was beheaded, shocked the Spanish.
01:01:30.000 It was the first time suddenly there was proof For the people in front of them that these animals were not supernatural, that they could be killed.
01:01:39.000 But eventually, Cortes was a terrorist.
01:01:42.000 He went around massacring whole villages.
01:01:45.000 He burned people at the stake.
01:01:47.000 He fed people to dogs.
01:01:49.000 And eventually the Tlaxcalans did the calculation, and they said, we better join this guy rather than carry on with this.
01:01:56.000 And so eventually they did join forces with him, and suddenly he had 100,000 auxiliaries who were Ready to take Moctezuma on.
01:02:04.000 Jesus Christ.
01:02:06.000 Can you imagine living back then?
01:02:08.000 Extraordinary times.
01:02:10.000 And I have to say, although I really detest a lot of the things that the Spanish did, I have to say, those 490 men, they had balls of steel.
01:02:21.000 They had balls of steel.
01:02:23.000 I mean, to turn up on this distant coast with no resources, no reserves, nothing to fall back on, And to know that you're confronting an enemy that is a militaristic power, that has hundreds of thousands of men under arms, that sacrifices you if it catches you,
01:02:38.000 and still to go for it, that takes tremendous courage.
01:02:41.000 Cortes actually scuttled all his ships so that his men could not flee.
01:02:46.000 The ships were scuttled.
01:02:47.000 What does that mean, scuttled?
01:02:48.000 Sunk.
01:02:49.000 He sunk them.
01:02:50.000 Put holes in them?
01:02:51.000 Yeah.
01:02:51.000 He put holes in them and sunk them.
01:02:53.000 Oh, gangster.
01:02:54.000 And then he said, this is it.
01:02:56.000 There's no going back.
01:02:57.000 Jesus Christ.
01:02:58.000 We conquer, we conquer, or we die.
01:03:01.000 What a fucking psycho.
01:03:03.000 Yeah, so total psycho.
01:03:04.000 So it's been interesting for me, because my latest writing effort has been a novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
01:03:10.000 These days I do novels as well as non-fiction.
01:03:13.000 It's been interesting for me to get inside the head of a man like Cortez, to get inside the head of a man like Montezuma, and to figure out what drove them and what made these characters what they were.
01:03:25.000 And I have a witch in the story, a young Aztec witch, and I have a famous woman called Malinal, who became Cortez's lover, who had a grudge against Montezuma.
01:03:35.000 History doesn't tell us why.
01:03:37.000 But I give her a motive in the story, because he tried to sacrifice it.
01:03:40.000 That's kind of cool that you can do that with history.
01:03:41.000 You can do that with history, and you can do that with fiction.
01:03:46.000 She's a key player, not just in my story, but in the story of history, because she became Cortés' interpreter.
01:03:51.000 She was very clever.
01:03:52.000 She learned Spanish very, very fast.
01:03:55.000 So in the paintings from those days, you always see her standing beside Cortés, and coming out of her mouth is the glyph that means speech.
01:04:03.000 And she gave the whole story away to Cortés.
01:04:07.000 She told Cortés how to defeat Montezuma, and that was to play on the myth of Quetzalcoatl, of the Feathered Serpent who would return and bring in a new age and overthrow a wicked king.
01:04:18.000 And she had Cortez fill the boots of Quetzalcoatl.
01:04:22.000 Wow.
01:04:23.000 How did you get so involved in the Aztec culture?
01:04:26.000 It's so fascinating.
01:04:27.000 When I was researching, this is the book by the way.
01:04:31.000 War God.
01:04:33.000 This is it.
01:04:35.000 When I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods back in The early 90s.
01:04:43.000 I traveled extensively and widely in Mexico as part of my research because Mexico is a fascinating place from the point of view of a lost civilization.
01:04:54.000 You know, we have the Olmec culture.
01:04:56.000 We have those gigantic stone heads from a site that's thought to be 3,500 years old.
01:05:03.000 I think it's probably much older than that on the Gulf of Mexico.
01:05:06.000 Heads in the form of African heads, which is very puzzling and weird.
01:05:10.000 But also images of people with very strongly Caucasian features with massive beards and definitely not American Indian faces.
01:05:20.000 And there they are.
01:05:21.000 So I was wondering, are these the remnants of some lost civilization?
01:05:25.000 Because history does not explain how individuals with that appearance ever turned up in Mexico.
01:05:31.000 And I inadvertently, as I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods in Mexico, I inadvertently traveled the route of Cortez.
01:05:40.000 And I found myself again and again crossing the path that Cortes had taken from the Gulf of Mexico up to what is now Mexico City.
01:05:50.000 And I began to realize there was a fascinating story to tell here and a story that had never been properly told.
01:05:56.000 And I used the accounts of some of the conquistadors, men like Bernard Diaz, who give us eyewitness accounts of Aztec society.
01:06:04.000 This helped me to – because the Aztecs They were latecomers in the civilization of Mexico, but they'd only existed as an empire for 200 years before Cortes came.
01:06:16.000 But they revered earlier cultures, and particularly the amazing pyramid site of Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City, which means the place where men became gods.
01:06:29.000 So I was investigating the possibility of a lost civilization, but I was kind of imbibing The story of Cortes and of the Aztecs at the same time.
01:06:39.000 And I felt this kind of pall of sadness that hangs over Mexico, this feeling that something terrible happened there.
01:06:48.000 And what's at the heart of my story, without giving too much of it away, is this notion of demonic influence that Montezuma, and I accept it could be projection of the individual's mind because he's just a particularly wicked, evil individual, or it could be that there are real demons out there.
01:07:04.000 So Montezuma is communicated with and advised by Huitzilopochtli, the war god, and Cortes is well known, believed he had a special relationship with St. Peter.
01:07:13.000 And he, in dreams, encountered St. Peter, and St. Peter advised him to carry out some of the most horrific acts of genocide that have been ever recorded in the history of the Americas.
01:07:25.000 How convenient.
01:07:26.000 Yeah.
01:07:27.000 The speculation of the novel is that both The entity that appeared to Moctezuma as the war god and the entity that appeared to Cortes as Saint Peter were actually one and the same demonic entity seeking to multiply human misery because that's what demons do.
01:07:43.000 And if we think it was bad under the Aztecs, let's be honest and accept that it was a thousand times worse after the Spanish took over.
01:07:52.000 The population of Mexico It was calculated to be 30 million in 1519. Within 40 years, it was 1 million.
01:08:00.000 29 million people died.
01:08:04.000 Gigantic, horrendous genocide.
01:08:08.000 And the Spanish were monsters.
01:08:10.000 They would use people to test the edge of their weapons.
01:08:15.000 Let's just see if we can chop off somebody's arm here.
01:08:20.000 Let's see what this axe will do.
01:08:22.000 Oh, the dogs are hungry.
01:08:23.000 Let's just throw a bunch of people to the dogs.
01:08:26.000 That's where the phrase throwing them to the dogs comes from, as a matter of fact.
01:08:29.000 So they were awful people.
01:08:31.000 And it's been a dark story to write, but I've also found that in this world, in this realm at that time, there was the capacity for love.
01:08:39.000 There were decent people who did their best.
01:08:41.000 My dad is a pretty sensible guy.
01:08:43.000 He's never for weirdness or spiritual shit.
01:08:47.000 He's just not that kind of guy.
01:08:50.000 But he was telling me about going to Gettysburg.
01:08:52.000 Yeah.
01:08:52.000 That was a horrendous battle.
01:08:54.000 He said he could feel sadness in the air.
01:08:57.000 He said it was inescapable.
01:08:59.000 It was overwhelming.
01:09:00.000 And he said, I just didn't expect that.
01:09:02.000 He said, you know, I didn't, I mean, I don't know what it is.
01:09:04.000 I don't know what it is.
01:09:05.000 Maybe it's the knowledge of what happened there.
01:09:07.000 He goes, but I don't think so.
01:09:09.000 He goes, it was like it was in the air.
01:09:11.000 It permeates the atmosphere.
01:09:13.000 And you felt that?
01:09:14.000 I felt that very strongly, that there was this terrible, terrible sadness hanging over Mexico.
01:09:18.000 I was always high.
01:09:21.000 It could have been that, right?
01:09:23.000 Were you high in Mexico, you fucking gangster?
01:09:25.000 Yeah, I got high in Mexico.
01:09:26.000 Goddamn, that's dangerous.
01:09:28.000 I wanted to ask you about this because there's a guy on my message board, his name is Frodo Swaggins, and he sent me a cool link to this new thing that's been found under Teotihuacan.
01:09:40.000 They found a jade mask from an earlier era and some building, some work underneath there that they're investigating now that they believe was Olmec.
01:09:51.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:09:52.000 It doesn't surprise me at all.
01:09:53.000 I think we're going to find that Teotihuacan actually goes way back, not just to the beginnings of the historical epoch, but far deep into prehistory.
01:10:02.000 And the Olmec, the so-called Olmecs of Central America may go back 10, 12,000 years.
01:10:07.000 They may not be – I don't think we should just limit them to the last 3,500 years.
01:10:11.000 So this is the case with many of these sites.
01:10:14.000 It's the same, by the way, if you go to Chichen Itza.
01:10:16.000 If you can get inside the pyramid of Cucucan, Chichen Itza, and Cucucan is just another name for Quetzalcoatl, you'll find that it's built on top of another pyramid, which is inside it, an older pyramid, and preserved completely inside it, and you can even get inside that older pyramid.
01:10:32.000 And I think it's the case all over the world that sites have been built on top of older sites, reincarnated in a way.
01:10:38.000 So there was an ancient sacred place, and later cultures came along and honored it and built new Monuments on top of it, but the mistake the archaeologists make is that the origins of the site are the later culture, and they don't take account of the earlier culture.
01:10:51.000 Well, that was one of the things that John Anthony West was suggesting about Egypt when you show the very different construction methods that coincidentally are below the ground.
01:11:01.000 Like you have to dig out the sand to pull these things up and, oh, lo and behold, they look different.
01:11:05.000 Yeah, and that's like the Osirion in Abydos in Upper Egypt, which is 50 or 60 feet lower than the Temple of Seti I and was actually covered with 50 feet of sedimentation.
01:11:16.000 Until archaeologists dug it out, but they still insist on giving it to Seti I. It's a fascinating thing, the denialism that's involved in Egyptology.
01:11:26.000 It is.
01:11:27.000 That Zawi Hawass dude is a trip just to watch him talk about things.
01:11:31.000 How are you in control of how this thing gets labeled or discovered or researched?
01:11:36.000 It's an extraordinary thing, Zahi's rise to power and then his subsequent fall.
01:11:41.000 Is he in trouble now?
01:11:42.000 Is he in jail?
01:11:43.000 He's in deep shit.
01:11:44.000 Is he going to jail?
01:11:45.000 What did he do?
01:11:46.000 Corruption?
01:11:47.000 Well, no.
01:11:49.000 His main thing was that he was closely associated with the Mubarak family, particularly with Susan Mubarak, the wife of the deposed president Hosni Mubarak.
01:11:59.000 And they protected him so he could do whatever he liked while Mubarak was running Egypt.
01:12:04.000 And therefore he was one of the closest to Mubarak in the Egyptian regime.
01:12:09.000 So when Mubarak fell and a whole new system came into play in Egypt, Zahir was one of the first to go.
01:12:15.000 It was shocking.
01:12:17.000 The John Anthony West series, Magical Egypt, is one of my favorite DVD series ever.
01:12:22.000 Fantastic.
01:12:22.000 And John is such a brilliant human being.
01:12:23.000 He's awesome.
01:12:26.000 Exploring the mystery of Egypt and the magic of Egypt.
01:12:29.000 This is what Achille just never do.
01:12:31.000 And if he's listening, I owe you an email, dude.
01:12:33.000 I swear to God, I'm going to email you back quick.
01:12:34.000 I've just been crazy busy.
01:12:36.000 I had an email exchange with John today.
01:12:39.000 I've been so swamped with this new TV show that I'm doing that I'm behind on everything.
01:12:44.000 Text messages and emails and all that.
01:12:46.000 But I'm a big fan of that guy's work.
01:12:48.000 And that magical Egypt thing is just one of the most stunning documentary series I've ever watched.
01:12:52.000 It's like ten DVDs or something like that.
01:12:54.000 It's an immense amount of work.
01:12:56.000 That's right.
01:12:56.000 And incorporating John's just vast encyclopedic knowledge of the mysteries of Egypt.
01:13:01.000 It's all expressed in there.
01:13:04.000 Incredible.
01:13:05.000 So John is about to be vindicated, I would say.
01:13:08.000 He and Robert Shock from Boston University.
01:13:12.000 This was John's work initially, and Robert Shock became involved in it, which was the, you'll remember, the argument about the Sphinx.
01:13:18.000 Yes.
01:13:18.000 The Sphinx...
01:13:20.000 It bears very characteristic erosion marks, both on its body and on the trench dug around it, and that those are the marks of precipitation-induced weathering, of exposure to thousands of years of heavy rainfall.
01:13:31.000 Cut a long story short, no such rainfall in Egypt in the last 5,000 years.
01:13:35.000 You have to go back 10,000, 12,000 years, end of the last ice age, to get that kind of climate.
01:13:40.000 And then you have to have thousands of years of those conditions to create that kind of erosion.
01:13:45.000 To get that weathering.
01:13:46.000 So when John Anthony West and Robert Shock dropped this bombshell on Egyptology in roughly 1992, that the Sphinx actually might be thousands of years older than the Egyptologists imagine, there was a huge outcry.
01:14:00.000 And Egyptologists became very, very angry about it because they were threatened in the core of their being.
01:14:06.000 And one of the arguments they made, which they thought was the killer argument, was, look, you're saying this monument is 12,000 years old.
01:14:13.000 But there are no other large monuments anywhere in the world which are 12,000 years old.
01:14:18.000 Well, unfortunately for the Egyptologists, that's no longer true because just the most amazing site has been discovered in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.
01:14:27.000 Yeah, we talked about that the last time you were on.
01:14:29.000 Amazing.
01:14:29.000 Incredible site.
01:14:30.000 And it was deliberately buried by the people who made it.
01:14:33.000 14,000 years ago.
01:14:35.000 Well, no.
01:14:35.000 It looks like it was made 12,000 years ago.
01:14:37.000 12,000.
01:14:38.000 Deliberately buried 10,000 years ago.
01:14:39.000 And that means that no later culture has tramped over it to confuse the dating record.
01:14:45.000 And therefore, we have a pristine site.
01:14:47.000 And when a site is pristine and it's approached by a mainstream...
01:14:52.000 Archaeologists such as Klaus Schmidt from the German Archaeological Institute, who's the excavator, he has to honestly put his hand on his heart and say, this site is 12,000 years old.
01:14:59.000 And if Gobekli Tepe is 12,000 years old, then there's no reason on earth why the Sphinx shouldn't be 12,000 years old.
01:15:04.000 And if the Sphinx and Gobekli Tepe are 12,000 years old, then I'm sorry, we have to rewrite the history books.
01:15:09.000 There was a real weird moment.
01:15:13.000 Whatever documentary it was that showed Robert Schock presenting his findings, because he's an academic, and he's the only one that they would allow to present.
01:15:22.000 Professor of Geology at Boston University.
01:15:23.000 And John Anthony West is not an academic.
01:15:26.000 He's an Egypt expert.
01:15:27.000 He's a guy who's immersed himself in Egypt his whole life, but I don't know what his formal education is, but the fact that that guy hasn't been given some sort of, at least someone test him, And give the guy a fucking degree.
01:15:39.000 Because, like, who the hell knows more about ancient Egypt than John Anthony West?
01:15:43.000 Nobody knows more about ancient Egypt.
01:15:44.000 And it should, obviously, his credentials should be examined.
01:15:47.000 I mean, his words should be checked.
01:15:50.000 But I'm sure that he's on.
01:15:53.000 He's totally on.
01:15:54.000 He's on.
01:15:54.000 I've never heard a single thing about any of his translations, about any of his...
01:15:59.000 That seemed to me anything less than cunty, if they were negative.
01:16:02.000 It didn't make any sense at all.
01:16:04.000 I think he's a pretty astounding person when it comes to his knowledge of Egypt.
01:16:07.000 I think John is an astounding person, and I think that he's brought a unique insight to ancient Egypt, and he's done far more for the exploration of the past than any...
01:16:17.000 So now that Gobekli Tepe has been clearly established at least 10,000 years old.
01:16:22.000 12,000 years old because the best stuff is the oldest.
01:16:25.000 10,000 years ago, like a time capsule, they bury it.
01:16:29.000 And by the way, it's only 5% of it has been excavated.
01:16:32.000 A huge, vast area remaining to be excavated.
01:16:34.000 So who knows what the hell they're going to find under there, whether they're going to find artifacts or what have you.
01:16:40.000 Explain things a little bit better.
01:16:41.000 But we know people were capable of doing that then.
01:16:44.000 That's 100%.
01:16:45.000 And therefore, if they're capable – because some of those megaliths weigh – one of them weighs 50 tons.
01:16:51.000 Gobekli Tepe is a stone circle.
01:16:53.000 There's a circle of – Series of stone circles.
01:16:54.000 Series of stone circles.
01:16:56.000 And therefore, we're looking at a culture that 12,000 years ago was already capable of doing that.
01:17:02.000 We can't say that they just made that up overnight.
01:17:05.000 There has to be a long background to that that got them to the point where they could do that.
01:17:09.000 That is why Gobekli Tepe is the single most important archaeological site in the world because It could not have appeared by magic.
01:17:18.000 It had to be the result of a culture which had figured out how to work with large and heavy blocks of stone and to quarry them and carve them and move them around.
01:17:26.000 And our ancestors are supposed to have been hunter-gatherers, you know, living in small groups without any large-scale organization.
01:17:35.000 And Gobekli Tepe gives the lie to that.
01:17:37.000 And there's a very sophisticated carving method employed on these beams, a three-dimensional carving method, where instead of carving the image into the stone itself, which is the easy way to draw something, they actually left the piece of stone, like if they drew a lizard,
01:17:53.000 they would cut away everything else and leave the lizard to stand out.
01:17:57.000 Exactly.
01:17:57.000 That's very difficult to do.
01:17:59.000 Carving in high relief.
01:18:00.000 It's extremely difficult to do.
01:18:02.000 It takes practice.
01:18:03.000 It takes a culture that's worked on that.
01:18:05.000 So we have to say there's a background to this which goes thousands of years earlier Than the site that we found.
01:18:10.000 And as more excavation is done, I believe more and more of that is going to come out.
01:18:15.000 One of my favorite quotes of yours is that we're a civilization with amnesia.
01:18:20.000 A species with amnesia.
01:18:21.000 Species with amnesia.
01:18:22.000 It's such a great way of putting it.
01:18:25.000 Because when you keep digging holes and finding things that are like old as fuck.
01:18:29.000 Like Gobekli Teppu was found by a farmer, right?
01:18:31.000 He was just putzing around and was like, what the hell is this?
01:18:34.000 He kicks it, he moves it around.
01:18:35.000 He's like, this is weird.
01:18:36.000 He starts digging and boom.
01:18:38.000 It's one of the most important archaeological findings ever.
01:18:40.000 Absolutely.
01:18:41.000 But none of this existed while you guys were dealing with Zali Hawass.
01:18:44.000 No.
01:18:45.000 I was watching that and the other thing was the other academic who he was communicating with, whatever that guy's name is, no need to even say it, such a cunty human being.
01:18:55.000 The way he was laughing.
01:18:57.000 What culture are we talking about that existed 10,000 years ago?
01:19:02.000 Why is that funny to you?
01:19:03.000 Let him remain nameless.
01:19:05.000 I know who you mean.
01:19:05.000 Let him remain nameless.
01:19:06.000 And yeah, they pour scorn on these ideas.
01:19:10.000 Intellectual scorn.
01:19:10.000 They're so fucking arrogant.
01:19:12.000 Not all of them, right?
01:19:14.000 No, not all of them.
01:19:14.000 I mean, most of them are doing amazing things.
01:19:16.000 The reason why you have an incredible hip, right?
01:19:18.000 Some bad motherfuckers in academia.
01:19:22.000 Absolutely.
01:19:23.000 I'm not insulting science as such.
01:19:26.000 Just humans.
01:19:27.000 Just shitty ego humans.
01:19:28.000 There's just some shitty ego-driven humans.
01:19:30.000 And it happens that...
01:19:32.000 Archaeology is one of those areas of study which is very territorial and where scholars have staked their reputation on a particular view of the past and they get very angry when anybody Threatens that.
01:19:46.000 And they're very, very, very obnoxious to one another as well as to outsiders.
01:19:51.000 And they've told this story and given degrees based on what they've taught for decades.
01:19:57.000 Decades after decades after decades.
01:19:59.000 And to all of a sudden step in and say, we were wrong.
01:20:02.000 There's no way this guy...
01:20:05.000 It's very difficult to do.
01:20:06.000 It's very difficult to do.
01:20:07.000 And in saying these negative things about Egyptology, I also do want to say that they also do great work.
01:20:15.000 There's a fantastic work that's been done by Egyptology, and I don't think that I could have written any of my books if I hadn't been able to draw on the huge amount of data that Egyptology has provided, but sometimes I put a different interpretation on it from the one that they put on it.
01:20:30.000 So I don't want to put them down completely.
01:20:32.000 They've done great work, but they're narrowly focused on a particular reference frame, a particular idea of how human history evolved, and they should let the evidence speak for itself rather than impose that And we should point out that there is a small group of people,
01:20:49.000 not a small group, I shouldn't even say, I shouldn't quantify them.
01:20:53.000 Some people believe that the water erosion feature, it was actually wind and sand.
01:20:59.000 I've seen that argument, and I'm not a geologist, obviously, but when I saw Robert Schock deal with that argument, it doesn't seem to hold water.
01:21:08.000 It doesn't.
01:21:09.000 Schock's got an excellent answer to all of that, and it is not.
01:21:13.000 It is not.
01:21:16.000 The Sphinx was covered with sand for a very long period of time.
01:21:18.000 The way it cuts down and in, it looks like water had been pouring down for a long time.
01:21:29.000 I don't know, though.
01:21:30.000 I'm not qualified to...
01:21:32.000 Well, that's why Schoch has made a marvelous contribution to this whole field because he is a credentialed academic, he is a geologist, and he's been prepared to put his reputation on the line and say, I'm sorry, I think the Sphinx is really, really old.
01:21:44.000 Yeah.
01:21:45.000 What bothers me about the people that debunk it is they claim to be correct.
01:21:50.000 It's very obvious that you're dealing with some pretty significant erosion.
01:21:54.000 Why is it so different looking than the erosion on the outside of the Sphinx, which looks like wind and sand?
01:22:00.000 Why are you dealing with it in this enclosure where this thing was buried for so long?
01:22:04.000 Why is it different here?
01:22:06.000 Is it the type of stone?
01:22:08.000 Is that what it is?
01:22:10.000 Or is it evidence of an older time?
01:22:12.000 Is it possibly something that was built into some malleable stone a long fucking time ago?
01:22:18.000 And them pretending that it's not possible is kind of silly.
01:22:20.000 It's kind of silly.
01:22:21.000 Because you don't know.
01:22:22.000 We don't have a really accurate map of what happened 10,000 years ago.
01:22:26.000 And the history of science is such we know again and again that fixed and rigid views about how the world is do get overthrown.
01:22:34.000 They do get changed.
01:22:35.000 But reluctantly in some areas.
01:22:37.000 Reluctantly, with a fight, but eventually the new evidence overwhelms the old.
01:22:41.000 And I think we're, in the realm of ancient history, we're poised on the verge.
01:22:46.000 Of that kind of revolution.
01:22:47.000 I think it's going to happen.
01:22:48.000 With Zawi Hawass out of the picture, is it possible now that they can excavate some sites that they weren't allowed to before?
01:22:54.000 Like, I know there was something where they wanted to do something under the paw of the Sphinx.
01:22:58.000 They had found some chamber.
01:22:59.000 That's a needed project, which needs to be done.
01:23:04.000 I don't know.
01:23:04.000 I don't know whether the new authorities...
01:23:06.000 Right now, Egypt is just so busy surviving.
01:23:08.000 And so busy trying to figure out where it goes next.
01:23:12.000 And they've had a major political change.
01:23:17.000 But many of the old guard are still in place in many, many ways.
01:23:21.000 And there is this popular uprising in Egypt, but it's disorganized and unplanned.
01:23:27.000 Right now, the last thing that most Egyptians are thinking about is ancient history.
01:23:32.000 My take on that part of the world, as a comedian, is that if that's the birthplace of civilization, that's the cradle of civilization, that those people, right now, that's the townies of the world.
01:23:43.000 That's the people that never left.
01:23:44.000 The people that literally are living with the echoes of the behavior of people that lived 10,000 years ago in that very same spot.
01:23:52.000 In particular, Egypt's Coptic.
01:23:56.000 Yes.
01:23:57.000 Who number out of 60 million, I believe, roughly 6 million are Copts.
01:24:02.000 So they are practicing a particularly ancient form of Christianity.
01:24:06.000 Their language is...
01:24:08.000 They're structurally very closely related to the ancient Egyptian language, and they are the direct inheritors of the ancient Egyptian tradition.
01:24:16.000 So when ancient Egyptians were converted to Christianity around about 300 or 400 years after Christ, that was the beginning of the Coptic Church in ancient Egypt, and the Coptic people are the true inheritors of the lost wisdom.
01:24:34.000 Fascinating.
01:24:34.000 And I bet they suck to hang out with.
01:24:37.000 I bet they're really annoying.
01:24:38.000 I bet they've got some crazy rules.
01:24:40.000 They do a lot of weird stuff to their people.
01:24:42.000 Are they involved in genital manipulation?
01:24:45.000 No, not really.
01:24:46.000 Who's doing that?
01:24:46.000 They're a persecuted minority.
01:24:49.000 Very, very much so.
01:24:49.000 Six million of them.
01:24:51.000 Yeah, but out of 60 million and in an area which is involved with Islamic fundamentalism, very much it's difficult to be a minority in that situation.
01:25:00.000 So what you're saying is it's better to be a Christian in that area?
01:25:03.000 No.
01:25:04.000 I think that all three of the world's monotheistic faiths, whether it's Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, have been responsible for just a vast amount of misery in the world.
01:25:16.000 And I think we're not going to move on as a human race unless we actually move on from that time where we don't accept that something is true just because our parents or some guy with a beard tells us that it's true, you know, where we look for direct experience.
01:25:30.000 Of the spirit and the divine.
01:25:32.000 This is the problem with all of those big religions.
01:25:33.000 I don't care whether they call themselves Christians, Muslims, or Jews, you know, is that they're hierarchies, they're bureaucracies, they're power structures, and they do not offer a direct experience.
01:25:44.000 That's why all of them persecute the use of psychedelics.
01:25:47.000 They don't want people to have direct contact with the divine.
01:25:50.000 Are you hopeful about things when you see like Arab Spring, people rising up and trying to remove dictators and what happened in Egypt, getting rid of Mubarak?
01:25:59.000 I am hopeful and I think it is happening all over the world and I think the internet has played a part with it and it's happening in America.
01:26:08.000 I come here as a foreigner.
01:26:10.000 I'm British.
01:26:11.000 I come to America often.
01:26:14.000 I have family here in America.
01:26:16.000 I feel very closely Connected with America.
01:26:19.000 And America is a paradox.
01:26:21.000 You know, it's a huge paradox because on the world stage, America is a very dark and malignant force, which does tremendous harm consistently and has done for a long time.
01:26:35.000 But at the individual level, there's a tremendous spirit of awakening in America.
01:26:40.000 Look just what's happening with cannabis laws in America.
01:26:43.000 In the last 10 years.
01:26:45.000 That's unimaginable in Britain.
01:26:47.000 We can't make changes like that.
01:26:49.000 Why is that?
01:26:50.000 Because we don't have this spirit of independence.
01:26:52.000 We don't have the structure where individual states can make decisions on key issues like that.
01:26:58.000 And of course, in America, there's a conflict between state law and federal law.
01:27:02.000 The federal government is not always respecting state laws and is seeking to persecute people who are using cannabis.
01:27:09.000 I think that that in itself, the fact that a number of states have decriminalized or even legalized cannabis, is a sign of a sea change that is underway at the moment.
01:27:20.000 And what it reflects is an awakening of the American people.
01:27:23.000 So even though huge negative forces are still at work, And are still sitting in the seat of power.
01:27:32.000 I think there's a tremendous hope for the future in America, and that comes from the awakening to consciousness of the American people.
01:27:40.000 And maybe it's small right now, but it's growing.
01:27:42.000 And in that sense, far more than any other, I believe America is leading the world, that there is this possibility for awakening here.
01:27:51.000 And maybe it goes back to the founding fathers and the frontier days and just the sense that That people should be able to make decisions about their own lives without government telling them what to do.
01:28:02.000 That's the step we all need to take.
01:28:03.000 We need to move ahead.
01:28:04.000 We need to set aside our commitment to these large monolithic religions.
01:28:10.000 We need to set aside our commitment to large monolithic states.
01:28:13.000 We need to run our own lives and make decisions for ourselves.
01:28:17.000 And it just happens that that is very close to the heart of what America is all about.
01:28:22.000 What it should be all about instead of what it's all about is we're living inside of the balls of the dick that's fucking the world.
01:28:28.000 That's really what it's all about.
01:28:30.000 But living inside the balls, you're in a position to give that dick that's fucking the world a real pain.
01:28:35.000 Well, it would be even better if the dick would just get its shit together.
01:28:41.000 It's not impossible.
01:28:42.000 It's only going to be done by the American people.
01:28:44.000 By the awakening of the American people, they will say enough is enough and we will not accept this crap anymore.
01:28:49.000 And slowly but surely, the old guard dies off.
01:28:53.000 And then there's a huge industry of brainwashing which goes on.
01:28:56.000 It makes it difficult for people to think for themselves.
01:29:00.000 From Washington, like how?
01:29:01.000 Well, through the media.
01:29:03.000 I mean, just through the control.
01:29:04.000 So there's this whole ethic that our lives are supposed to be about production and consumption and nothing else, that we define ourselves in terms of what we own.
01:29:12.000 We're prepared to go into huge debt to own a shiny car or a better house.
01:29:18.000 And that's supposed to be right and proper.
01:29:21.000 And then we're supposed to define ourselves in terms of our consumption.
01:29:24.000 And we must work hard.
01:29:26.000 We must go to the office every day.
01:29:28.000 All of these things are brainwashing.
01:29:30.000 And then there's the TV. We can have a little relaxation.
01:29:33.000 We can enjoy some fantasy.
01:29:34.000 Maybe we'll win the lottery one day.
01:29:36.000 All of these are mechanisms of control which keep people quiet in society.
01:29:41.000 And distractions.
01:29:42.000 Distractions from the great beyond.
01:29:44.000 There's too much out there to really stop and think about.
01:29:48.000 About the fact that your body is going to slowly expire.
01:29:51.000 Even the sun that heats the world itself is going to die out.
01:29:55.000 I think the possibilities when we really consider them all are pretty terrifying.
01:30:00.000 We watch storage wars.
01:30:02.000 Do you have storage wars?
01:30:04.000 No.
01:30:05.000 One of the best shows ever.
01:30:06.000 Not really.
01:30:06.000 It's terrible.
01:30:07.000 But, I mean, it's hilarious.
01:30:08.000 They go to storage units that people haven't paid for, and they open up the door, and they find things in there.
01:30:14.000 Like, whoa, what is this?
01:30:16.000 And they bid on the door.
01:30:17.000 There's like ten people sitting around, and they all bid on the contents.
01:30:20.000 And if you get lucky, who knows?
01:30:21.000 There might be gold bullion in there that someone saved.
01:30:24.000 Or not.
01:30:25.000 And so these idiots go and open up these boxes and then pull shit out.
01:30:30.000 And then it turns out that...
01:30:32.000 It's not even really what the contents were.
01:30:35.000 They added fake contents to these storage places.
01:30:38.000 But people watch it and they just get distracted.
01:30:41.000 It's a distraction.
01:30:43.000 So if we're going to wake up, we have to overthrow these systems of mental control which are in place.
01:30:52.000 Right.
01:30:52.000 Or take responsibility for your own time.
01:30:55.000 Because those distractions are just, they're money extractors.
01:30:58.000 That's what they are.
01:30:59.000 They're all money extractors.
01:31:00.000 Yeah, they're selling Tide or Toyota trucks or whatever the hell they're selling.
01:31:03.000 And, you know, they're just putting on this thing because it's a machine that they can press and it's like an automatic program that runs and extracts money.
01:31:11.000 It's not really necessarily a work of art.
01:31:13.000 It's just, you know, you've made a hack.
01:31:14.000 Terrifying prospect, really.
01:31:16.000 But you don't have to do it.
01:31:18.000 I think what people really need is guys like you to talk about things.
01:31:26.000 Guys like you to put ideas out there that makes them go, yeah, what am I doing?
01:31:30.000 What is this?
01:31:32.000 And start the ball rolling of rethinking their thought process.
01:31:38.000 Rethinking is badly needed.
01:31:40.000 It's everything, right?
01:31:42.000 It's everything.
01:31:43.000 And I do think that something I bang on about a lot is the issue of sovereignty over consciousness.
01:31:50.000 That is, to me, just one of the very, very, very key issues, which a lot of people have been persuaded not ever to think about.
01:31:57.000 But once you start thinking about it and you realize that this mysterious...
01:32:00.000 We don't even know what consciousness is.
01:32:02.000 There is no clear science on what it is or to explain it.
01:32:07.000 But we know we've got it.
01:32:08.000 And whatever it is, it's the essence of ourselves.
01:32:12.000 And why can we not make sovereign decisions over the most intimate and personal part of ourselves?
01:32:18.000 It's crazy.
01:32:18.000 And I find when you put that to people, even to arch-Republicans, they get it.
01:32:25.000 They suddenly realize that actually legalizing psychedelics is a Republican issue.
01:32:31.000 I'll tell you what the problem is, Graham Hancock, is the children.
01:32:34.000 What you're ignoring is you're endorsing drug use to children.
01:32:37.000 And I think that's incredibly irresponsible.
01:32:40.000 That's exactly what Ted said when they banned my talk.
01:32:43.000 In one of their statements they said that we can't allow this talk to be on the air because some young man might go off to South America and drink ayahuasca.
01:32:52.000 That's so hilariously dumb.
01:32:54.000 And Ted cannot be seen to be endorsing The drinking of ayahuasca.
01:32:58.000 Is that the...
01:32:59.000 There was a huge issue with you.
01:33:00.000 And by the way, your issue was after Eddie Huang came in here.
01:33:04.000 Eddie Huang told his gross story that makes you just go, ew, Ted.
01:33:08.000 Apparently John Anthony West has a Ted story as well.
01:33:11.000 And I think that...
01:33:14.000 There's a lot of beautiful things that come out of TED, a lot of incredible, but it seems like any organization, once people get into power and once people have the ability to tell other people what's cool and what's not cool,
01:33:29.000 it starts getting weird and you start telling Eddie Wong that he has to attend all these different things and meet all these donors and Like some kind of freaky cult.
01:33:36.000 Yeah, but that's what he felt like.
01:33:38.000 He felt like it was really strange.
01:33:39.000 Now, your thing got pulled, and what was the scientific explanation for why they got pulled?
01:33:45.000 Well, it was none.
01:33:47.000 You had an exchange with one of the guys on TED. I read the comments, and you presented all the things that he had said and said, please show your example of when I said this, I never said this.
01:33:58.000 What was the thing that he accused you of, and what was the response?
01:34:01.000 There were two of us who got our talks deleted Rupert Sheldrake as well.
01:34:04.000 Rupert Sheldrake is the other.
01:34:05.000 His talk was called The Science Delusion.
01:34:06.000 My talk was called The War on Consciousness.
01:34:08.000 He can't be shitting on science like that, called The Science Delusion, Rupert.
01:34:11.000 How dare you poke the beehive.
01:34:14.000 It was as though Ted felt that these talks must automatically be wrong.
01:34:18.000 And that they had some kind of preconception about what we were saying.
01:34:21.000 So they didn't even bother to sit down and listen to the actual 18-minute talk.
01:34:24.000 It's not that much to listen to, you know, before deleting it from their YouTube channel.
01:34:28.000 They just said, this is pseudoscience.
01:34:31.000 And they listed a series of false statements that we'd supposedly made.
01:34:35.000 But the problem was neither I nor Rupert had made those statements.
01:34:38.000 So they never even bothered to look at it.
01:34:39.000 They just read complaints and then responded on those complaints.
01:34:42.000 They read complaints and responded on the basis of those.
01:34:43.000 So when we challenged them, okay, please go through, in my case, go through my talk and find where I say that ayahuasca allows you to communicate with an ancient mother culture.
01:34:55.000 Where do I say that?
01:34:56.000 I never said that in my talk.
01:34:58.000 I never said any such thing in my talk.
01:35:00.000 They actually couldn't do it.
01:35:02.000 Is that something you've said before?
01:35:04.000 No, I've never said that.
01:35:05.000 You've never said that?
01:35:05.000 I've never said that.
01:35:05.000 You just said it right now.
01:35:06.000 I heard you.
01:35:07.000 Well...
01:35:08.000 What I talked about was the mother goddess or the experience of an encounter with the mother goddess.
01:35:14.000 But I never said it allows you to communicate with an ancient mother culture like a lost civilization.
01:35:19.000 They knew I'd written books about lost civilizations.
01:35:22.000 So they thought I must be bringing my lost civilization beef into my TED talk, which I didn't.
01:35:27.000 It didn't have anything to do with lost civilization.
01:35:29.000 It was a talk about consciousness.
01:35:31.000 And the original version was Giving Up the Green Bitch.
01:35:35.000 I originally called the talk Giving Up the Green Bitch.
01:35:37.000 That's when I watched it.
01:35:38.000 Because I was giving my personal story of, you know, why I gave up cannabis.
01:35:45.000 I changed that title because a lot of people pointed out to me that that's deeply disrespectful of cannabis and that for many people cannabis is a green goddess.
01:35:52.000 And cannabis was a green goddess for me and I accepted that.
01:35:55.000 Well, to those people I'd say, fucking relax.
01:35:58.000 Okay, because I love cannabis too, but it didn't bother me.
01:36:01.000 Some people got really upset.
01:36:03.000 I realized that there is in fact a cannabis orthodoxy as well, which by talking about my quitting of cannabis, I had upset this orthodoxy.
01:36:13.000 But when I looked at my talk, my talk was much more about the war on consciousness than it was about that.
01:36:18.000 That's what it was really about.
01:36:19.000 So, for example, I made the point that our society doesn't object in principle to altering consciousness.
01:36:26.000 I mean, what happens when you put a kid on Ritalin?
01:36:28.000 You know, that's a powerful pharmacological drug which is altering consciousness.
01:36:33.000 When you over-prescribe Prozac or Siroxat for conditions of depression, those drugs are altering consciousness.
01:36:41.000 We value alcohol.
01:36:42.000 We invest, you know, multi-billion dollar alcohol industry.
01:36:45.000 People don't primarily drink alcohol because of the taste.
01:36:48.000 They drink it because it alters their consciousness in a way that they like.
01:36:51.000 And so we don't object to altering consciousness in principle, but we object to altering consciousness in certain kinds of ways which threaten the status quo.
01:36:59.000 And that's what psychedelics do.
01:37:01.000 They alter consciousness in ways that lead people to ask profound questions about the nature of the society they live in.
01:37:08.000 And that appears to be the line that I crossed.
01:37:10.000 So Ted tried to dress it up as pseudoscience, and when I called them on that, in the end, because they realized, I think, that they'd got themselves into some kind of danger, And it's still there on the webpage.
01:37:22.000 Rupert and I call it their naughty corner.
01:37:24.000 They created a naughty corner of the TED website where our talks were put back online.
01:37:29.000 And with all their reasons why they'd taken them off.
01:37:31.000 So first thing they did was they crossed out all their reasons.
01:37:34.000 So you can find that everything they said has actually been crossed out.
01:37:38.000 And then they published our rebuttal.
01:37:39.000 Deleted?
01:37:40.000 Completely deleted?
01:37:40.000 No, we insisted that they accepted that nothing they'd said was true.
01:37:45.000 But we insisted they leave it there on the public record, but put a line through it.
01:37:49.000 Oh, wow.
01:37:50.000 And they did that?
01:37:51.000 They did that.
01:37:52.000 They did that.
01:37:53.000 Oh my god.
01:37:54.000 That's kind of a cool victory.
01:37:56.000 I know.
01:37:56.000 I know.
01:37:57.000 And they published our rebuttals in full.
01:37:58.000 But it wasn't a complete victory because what they didn't do, which is all we wanted, was for our talks to be reinstated on the TEDx YouTube channel.
01:38:05.000 Not only that, but you can't put your talk online yourself.
01:38:09.000 Well, no.
01:38:10.000 I have put my talk online myself, and so have about 100 other YouTube channels.
01:38:15.000 Oh, beautiful.
01:38:16.000 And I think Ted took such a massive beating over this because it clearly was an act of censorship.
01:38:23.000 However they tried to dress it up, that they've decided not to go and pull the talks from YouTube, which probably they could do.
01:38:32.000 So, I mean, my talk had 132,000 views on YouTube, on their channel, when they pulled it.
01:38:37.000 But since then, it's had hundreds of thousands of more views all over the Internet.
01:38:40.000 So rather than actually suppress the talk, I think it's called the Streisand effect.
01:38:46.000 Rather than suppress the talks, they ended up multiplying.
01:38:48.000 Same with Rupert's talk.
01:38:49.000 How is that a Streisand effect?
01:38:50.000 Apparently, I think it was Barbara Streisand tried to stop some public statement that had been made about her, and it ended up multiplying the statement.
01:38:59.000 This is the great thing about the Internet.
01:39:01.000 When you try to suppress something, It grows.
01:39:03.000 It doesn't get suppressed.
01:39:05.000 The internet is...
01:39:06.000 Including dick pictures.
01:39:07.000 It is.
01:39:08.000 Got one of those out there?
01:39:09.000 Come back around, Graham Hancock.
01:39:11.000 I'm going to find you.
01:39:13.000 I've never had my dick photographed.
01:39:15.000 Congratulations.
01:39:16.000 How about you?
01:39:18.000 I plead the fifth.
01:39:21.000 So, now, the page got pulled.
01:39:25.000 Your talk got pulled.
01:39:26.000 It got reinstated.
01:39:27.000 They crossed a line through it.
01:39:28.000 In the naughty corner, yeah.
01:39:29.000 And put up in the naughty corner, but at least it's on YouTube as well.
01:39:32.000 Yeah, all over YouTube.
01:39:34.000 Is it possible, this is what I know, okay?
01:39:39.000 I really love your work.
01:39:40.000 I've been a fan ever since Fingerprints of the Gods.
01:39:43.000 It was a fascinating book that really changed the way I looked at history.
01:39:46.000 I think you're a brilliant guy.
01:39:48.000 But I take more shit for you from the extreme science dorks.
01:39:53.000 I take more shit about having you, well, is Graham Hancock going to come on your podcast and pump out his pseudoscience?
01:40:02.000 So many people get so twatty about you.
01:40:06.000 And it's a science thing, and it could be mistakes that you've made in the past, we all make them, that they want to chirp on.
01:40:13.000 It could be the whole Mars thing, the whole face on Mars thing.
01:40:16.000 You got a little kooky with that.
01:40:17.000 Got a little kooky with that.
01:40:18.000 I still think it's an interesting phenomenon.
01:40:20.000 It is interesting.
01:40:21.000 There's a lot of interesting rocks on Mars.
01:40:23.000 It might have, at one point in time, had a culture on it.
01:40:26.000 We don't know what they are.
01:40:28.000 We need to do more work.
01:40:29.000 But yeah, I have annoyed scientists.
01:40:31.000 I tell you what, it's not actually – I've certainly made mistakes.
01:40:35.000 What about junk DNA? There was something about the contents of junk DNA that's one thing that they keep harping on about.
01:40:42.000 They keep talking about that.
01:40:43.000 You had erroneously stated.
01:40:45.000 You know, something about the knowledge that we have of junk DNA? Well, yes.
01:40:49.000 I said that 97% of DNA is defined as junk, and maybe it isn't.
01:40:55.000 And that there may be data stored on DNA. And as a matter of fact, this is now being done.
01:41:03.000 Data is being stored on DNA. So you just were misinformed?
01:41:07.000 I don't think that I was misinformed.
01:41:09.000 I think that I was exploring an interesting area of inquiry.
01:41:12.000 And it's true since I published on that in 2005 that some new work has been done on so-called junk DNA, and it is found to have an important biophysical function.
01:41:23.000 But what I reported, and this was in my book Supernatural in 2005, There was a study published in the magazine Science by Eugene Stanley, which looked at the language-like structure of junk DNA. The junk DNA has a structure very similar to all human languages.
01:41:45.000 There are certain patterns that repeat in languages that appear also in junk DNA. I simply wanted to speculate on this.
01:41:53.000 Is it possible that junk DNA is some kind of archive?
01:41:58.000 When I wrote Supernatural, I was looking at this connection with entities that people have in altered states of consciousness.
01:42:06.000 And I was saying that the kind of place I would bet on is that in some weird way these entities may be real.
01:42:13.000 That is, in itself, a very annoying statement to make to any materialist scientist.
01:42:18.000 But then I said, but maybe there's another possibility.
01:42:21.000 Maybe there's an archive of information stored on all our DNA all around the world, and maybe in altered states of consciousness we gain access to the archive, and that's maybe why people from all different cultures at different periods of history see the same thing.
01:42:36.000 And I cited The work of Francis Crick, who was the discoverer of the double helix form of DNA, in a book that he wrote called Life Itself, where Crick speculates that DNA did not evolve on this planet.
01:42:52.000 This is the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick.
01:42:55.000 This is not Graham Hancock who's making this statement.
01:42:57.000 Crick suggests a phenomenon called directed panspermia, that the reason that life exploded so rapidly And amazingly, on this planet, within a hundred million years of the planet being cool enough to support life, roughly four billion years ago,
01:43:13.000 the reason that it exploded so suddenly was that it came here from elsewhere.
01:43:16.000 And he suggested that there had been some advanced alien culture on the other side of the galaxy that faced annihilation.
01:43:24.000 Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in their vicinity.
01:43:27.000 And they looked desperately for some way to preserve life.
01:43:30.000 And their first thought was, could they get themselves off the planet?
01:43:33.000 And they realized that, yes, they could, but that they could not travel through interstellar space for thousands or millions of years to reach other possibly habitable planets.
01:43:43.000 So in the end what they did was they sent bacteria out into the universe on spaceships and they genetically engineered those bacteria to make them incredibly hardy.
01:43:52.000 This was Crick's suggestion, not mine.
01:43:55.000 You've got to really say that.
01:43:56.000 The only thing I added to it was if his theory were right and that life spiraled up on this planet because one of those spaceships hit the ancient earth and spilled out its cargo of genetically engineered bacteria, Well, maybe they wrote a message on the DNA of those bacteria,
01:44:13.000 and maybe that message has been preserved, highly preserved, and there are certain strands of DNA that are preserved for hundreds of millions or billions of years and passed down into modern human beings, and maybe it's a message for us about that lost ancestor culture that made the DNA that Or rather didn't make it,
01:44:34.000 but engineered the DNA and the bacteria that started life on Earth and that eventually evolved into us.
01:44:39.000 And it was just an interesting inquiry.
01:44:41.000 By the way, this lends credence to the idea that Francis Crick did a lot of acid.
01:44:45.000 Which he certainly did.
01:44:47.000 Some deny this.
01:44:48.000 Michio Kaku wouldn't agree with me on this.
01:44:50.000 Francis Crick was a big user of acid and so were many intellectuals in that period.
01:44:56.000 This is essentially the Prometheus story in a lot of ways.
01:44:59.000 I guess it is.
01:45:00.000 So I thought it was an interesting area to inquire into.
01:45:02.000 For me, I feel my role is to inquire into interesting things that are forbidden territory for scientists.
01:45:10.000 And when I inquire into them, it doesn't mean that I'm insisting this is a fact.
01:45:16.000 What I'm saying is this is something that we need an alternative point of view on.
01:45:20.000 And let's look at and consider what this might mean.
01:45:23.000 And I may be completely wrong, but I think the exploration is worthwhile.
01:45:27.000 That's the position that I take.
01:45:29.000 It does annoy scientists.
01:45:30.000 I think the other reason it annoys scientists is because I don't mean to pat myself on the back, but I'm not particularly lunatic on a day-to-day basis.
01:45:40.000 I'm not particularly kooky.
01:45:42.000 I'm moderately rational.
01:45:43.000 I can make an argument.
01:45:45.000 I can express things.
01:45:46.000 And I think if I was You know, an obvious nutcase.
01:45:51.000 They wouldn't need to get so angry with me.
01:45:53.000 But because I'm fairly reasonable and open to discussion and persuasion, I think it makes me a little bit more dangerous to them.
01:46:02.000 And it's the same with John Anthony West.
01:46:03.000 John is a very reasonable man.
01:46:05.000 You know, he's coming up with extraordinary ideas about the past.
01:46:08.000 But he's arguing them very, very well and very coherently and based on evidence.
01:46:13.000 Intellectual ideas also are the battlefield of scientists and science thinkers and science dorks.
01:46:20.000 Proving someone incorrect is a huge feather in your cap.
01:46:23.000 Being able to point out inconsistencies, correcting mistakes.
01:46:28.000 And that's how science works.
01:46:29.000 That's what's good about science.
01:46:32.000 On the one hand, it's what's good about science.
01:46:34.000 Which is what you would call destructive criticism.
01:46:37.000 Here is a new idea.
01:46:39.000 Let's figure out any way we can to destroy it.
01:46:42.000 If anything is left after we've exposed it to that fire for a decade, that thing that's left is probably worthwhile.
01:46:51.000 That is the scientific method.
01:46:54.000 I think there's room for another method.
01:46:56.000 Here's this extraordinary idea that somebody put over.
01:46:59.000 Let's look for what's good in that idea.
01:47:01.000 Let's see if we can find something good in that idea.
01:47:03.000 If there's something possible.
01:47:03.000 Yeah, see if there's something possible.
01:47:05.000 Same approach, just in a positive way.
01:47:07.000 Just in a positive way rather than a negative way.
01:47:10.000 Right.
01:47:12.000 Both are possible.
01:47:14.000 It's the same attitude, essentially.
01:47:16.000 You're trying to find truth.
01:47:17.000 You're saying, is there a possibility of this?
01:47:21.000 Is there a truth in here?
01:47:22.000 And is there a benefit?
01:47:24.000 That's what a real Egyptologist would do if they examined the Sphinx.
01:47:28.000 They would say, you know, this really bears some consideration.
01:47:30.000 This is really unique.
01:47:31.000 It's unusual.
01:47:33.000 And geologists seem to be pointing to this.
01:47:35.000 Let's discuss this.
01:47:37.000 Let's explore this further rather than just get rid of it right at the beginning and massively destroy it.
01:47:41.000 What culture are we talking about from 10,000 years ago?
01:47:44.000 Exactly.
01:47:45.000 Exactly.
01:47:45.000 And so with this destructive method, scientists seek to destroy each other's reputations.
01:47:50.000 Right.
01:47:51.000 And so many, many great individuals have suffered most painful experiences as a result of this, but have ended up later to be proved to be right.
01:48:00.000 Sometimes.
01:48:02.000 There's plenty of quacks out there too, and they need to be exposed.
01:48:06.000 I'm doing this new show on the Sci-Fi Channel, it's called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and eventually I would like to get to the mysteries of ancient civilizations, whether or not there were Agreed.
01:48:28.000 Agreed.
01:48:28.000 Agreed.
01:48:38.000 Cling to like a cat stuck in a tree.
01:48:42.000 They won't let go of these fucking kooky ideas.
01:48:45.000 And no matter how many experts you bring in there that are true experts on whatever subject is at hand, if that person has a kooky idea that they've clung to, they are not letting that fucking thing go.
01:48:56.000 No, they'll never let it go.
01:48:56.000 That's why science is so important.
01:48:58.000 No, science is incredibly important.
01:49:00.000 It's the ego part that's a problem, right?
01:49:01.000 I am sitting here in this chair with a pain-free hip.
01:49:04.000 As a result of science.
01:49:06.000 That is science.
01:49:07.000 Science gave me my legs back.
01:49:09.000 Science gave me my mobility.
01:49:11.000 Science is how we're doing this podcast.
01:49:12.000 Science is how we're doing this podcast.
01:49:14.000 It's a wonderful thing.
01:49:15.000 It's an incredible instrument.
01:49:17.000 We should not despise it in itself.
01:49:19.000 But we should, I think, be open to the view that there are other modes of inquiry into the nature of reality which should be Also considered.
01:49:29.000 It could even be done scientifically.
01:49:32.000 For example, psychedelics are a marvelous tool for inquiring into consciousness, this mystery of consciousness.
01:49:38.000 And we could have detailed scientific studies.
01:49:40.000 So here's the hypothesis.
01:49:43.000 With psychedelics, we retune the receiver wavelength of the brain, hypothesis mind you, and gain access to other levels of reality, parallel universes if you like, which are inhabited by intelligent beings.
01:49:54.000 Okay, let's explore that hypothesis scientifically.
01:49:57.000 How are we going to do that?
01:49:59.000 Psychedelics, the very best way, put people into deeply altered states of consciousness on cue, you know, and then get them to compare notes, get them to ask questions of those entities, see if any new information, any novel information comes back that couldn't possibly have been known.
01:50:13.000 That kind of thing.
01:50:14.000 It's being done, interestingly, with near-death research.
01:50:18.000 That's another area where most materialist mainstream scientists will say, nonsense, there's no possibility of any kind of survival of death.
01:50:27.000 But people report these astonishing near-death experiences, and they report seeing things that they should not have been able to see.
01:50:34.000 So now in operating theaters, in emergency rooms, in a number of hospitals in London, But also, I believe, in the United States as well, they have created shelves up at a high level where they have placed certain images, and they are recording the data right now.
01:50:51.000 When people have a near-death experience and they have had the sense of leaving their bodies and being up around the ceiling, have they seen these images?
01:50:57.000 If they've seen those images and it can be documented scientifically, then we have to think again about consciousness.
01:51:04.000 So they're putting the images up there specifically to catch people looking?
01:51:07.000 Yeah.
01:51:09.000 So when the guy comes back, when he flatlines and he's considered to be brain dead and they bring him back to life, this is happening more and more with advanced resuscitation techniques, many of them report having experiences out of their body.
01:51:22.000 Well, now here's a scientific way to test that.
01:51:25.000 Is that imagination or is there something real going on?
01:51:27.000 What's the data so far?
01:51:28.000 Have people seen those images?
01:51:29.000 Have they had any hits?
01:51:30.000 There's some quite compelling data but there's an elusive nature to the phenomenon Which is that very often when somebody has a near-death experience, they've had it in the one theater that didn't have the images on view.
01:51:45.000 So they're looking for a way...
01:51:47.000 How convenient.
01:51:48.000 How convenient.
01:51:49.000 They're looking for a way around this, which might involve using, like, iPad devices, which can be moved around very rapidly and placed in certain spots.
01:51:59.000 Where they resuscitate people.
01:52:00.000 Where they're resuscitating people.
01:52:02.000 I don't think...
01:52:03.000 See, I think this is part of the issue.
01:52:04.000 You know, when we say, why doesn't science do this?
01:52:07.000 Or what if science did that?
01:52:09.000 I really don't think it's science.
01:52:10.000 I think science and the scientific method are awesome and very hugely important.
01:52:15.000 I think it's people.
01:52:16.000 I think the issue is people.
01:52:18.000 It's personalities.
01:52:19.000 It's people's style of communication.
01:52:21.000 It's people's styles of interaction and their sense of Competition that they have with exchanging ideas and with exploring ideas.
01:52:29.000 There's a massive amount of competition involved in being intellectually correct.
01:52:33.000 Getting those points.
01:52:34.000 The points for being correct.
01:52:35.000 We're all human.
01:52:36.000 We all want to be right.
01:52:37.000 It's a competition forum.
01:52:39.000 I've seen it on my message board.
01:52:40.000 I've seen it on Reddit.
01:52:42.000 When you're writing something, you're not just writing something.
01:52:44.000 You're also expressing yourself in a way that you would like to get brownie points for.
01:52:49.000 You're investing yourself, your good name, everything into what you say.
01:52:53.000 And you would like people we all want to be like.
01:52:56.000 So when people go to battle about ideas, the real issue is ego.
01:53:00.000 It's humans.
01:53:01.000 It's not the scientific method, which the scientific method should most certainly be applied to psychedelics.
01:53:06.000 It should most certainly be applied to every aspect of the known world.
01:53:11.000 And in fact, if that was the case, Then more people would probably do psychedelics and we'd have less of an issue in the first place.
01:53:18.000 I would rather think so.
01:53:21.000 So you're not an anti-science guy.
01:53:24.000 Not at all.
01:53:24.000 You're just an anti-asshole guy.
01:53:26.000 Thank you.
01:53:26.000 That's a really good way to put it.
01:53:28.000 I think – but there's a label that people like to throw on you that you're anti-scientific.
01:53:34.000 I think that's one of the ways that this TED thing built momentum.
01:53:38.000 Yeah.
01:53:38.000 And when – They do like to throw that label.
01:53:41.000 As a matter of fact – Pseudoscience.
01:53:43.000 As a matter of fact, it's one of the reasons, amongst many, why I've started to write fiction as well as non-fiction.
01:53:51.000 Because if I explore extraordinary ideas in the realm of fiction, I'm not actually there making a claim that this is fact.
01:54:00.000 Nevertheless, the ideas are there to be explored in what I've written.
01:54:06.000 So it becomes possible to enter into an inquiry into the nature of reality without having to create this huge superstructure of defense against attacks by scientists.
01:54:22.000 And I think it's a very useful way forward, as far as I'm concerned, because I did find that writing nonfiction more and more, because I've become this Target figure for scientists required me to bulletproof my arguments in ways that make them,
01:54:43.000 frankly, a bit boring to read, you know.
01:54:45.000 And I quite like the liberation of not having to do that.
01:54:49.000 Yeah, I agree.
01:54:50.000 I think your ideas are always very novel and you're a very interesting dude.
01:54:55.000 But I think in a lot of ways you're sort of a bard, you know.
01:54:59.000 You're a great storyteller and you're an exciter of the imagination and an inspirer of questions.
01:55:05.000 Thank you.
01:55:05.000 I feel that's what I'm supposed to do.
01:55:07.000 That's what you do best, man.
01:55:08.000 That book, Fingerprints of the Gods, got me looking at so many different aspects of our culture and then questioning how we got to this point in the first place, how it is that I get up in the morning, I get in my car and I drive to work.
01:55:19.000 As I was doing this after reading your book, I was thinking how strange it is that we live in this society where I was born in 1967. The cities have been here since I was a baby.
01:55:31.000 Cars have been here.
01:55:32.000 I've assumed that they've always been here.
01:55:34.000 But then, when you really stop and think about what a short period of time 2,500 BC is, or what a short period of time even 30,000 BC is, that's nothing, man.
01:55:44.000 In the history of the world, it's all a blink.
01:55:47.000 It's a nothing.
01:55:48.000 And we are in the middle of this.
01:55:51.000 We wake up.
01:55:52.000 Being born is like waking up in the middle of a trip.
01:55:55.000 Like, where are we?
01:55:56.000 Where are we going?
01:55:57.000 And that's the entire collective culture.
01:55:59.000 And that was really probably the first time I ever really considered that was in reading your book.
01:56:03.000 And that made me so excited about history.
01:56:06.000 I wasn't excited about history from school.
01:56:08.000 I mean, I took the obligatory classes.
01:56:10.000 I'm really glad to have had that effect.
01:56:12.000 And it makes me feel good.
01:56:13.000 As I'm getting on in life, one of the things that makes me feel good is the feedback that I do get from people who've read my books, which I've...
01:56:21.000 I've sweated blood in order to write, and I've taken a lot of attacks from doing that.
01:56:26.000 But I find this a new thing for me.
01:56:29.000 You know, Facebook.
01:56:30.000 I mean, I'm a novice at Facebook, but I've started...
01:56:34.000 To interact really quite strongly on my Facebook pages.
01:56:38.000 I enjoy the interaction that I get there.
01:56:40.000 I enjoy the new ideas that are put to me by others.
01:56:44.000 And yeah, frankly, it's really nice when some kid in his 20s writes to me and says he read Fingerprints of the Gods and it changed the way that he looks at the world.
01:56:52.000 That makes me feel I've done something right anyway.
01:56:56.000 In all the mistakes I may have made, I've done something right.
01:57:00.000 You've done quite a bit right.
01:57:01.000 But one of the things I think that you haven't done yet that you could totally be amazing at is your own podcast.
01:57:07.000 You're a wind-up guy.
01:57:08.000 I could press you.
01:57:09.000 I could start you up.
01:57:11.000 What's this ayahuasca stuff?
01:57:13.000 Bang!
01:57:13.000 Press play, and you will do the dance and captivate with amazing...
01:57:20.000 The descriptions and this very entrancing way of communicating.
01:57:26.000 I think people like that are really important in culture and most scientists are boring as fuck.
01:57:33.000 And even though they're doing amazing work and we wouldn't be communicating if it wasn't for some boring scientist, the reality is you're not going to excite people with that shitty personality of yours.
01:57:43.000 And it's not all of them.
01:57:45.000 I mean, Feynman was legendarily charismatic.
01:57:48.000 There's some great charismatic scientists.
01:57:49.000 As is Carl Sagan.
01:57:50.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson is brilliant in that regard.
01:57:53.000 He's a brilliant man, and he's brilliant.
01:57:55.000 He's captivating, entertaining, and he draws you in.
01:57:58.000 And they're very important as well.
01:58:00.000 Very important as well.
01:58:01.000 There's a lot of...
01:58:03.000 Well, I will look at the...
01:58:04.000 Podcast, my friend!
01:58:06.000 Now that I've kind of initiated myself into the internet world and got talking to people on Facebook and so on, and my website, you know, all of these things are...
01:58:14.000 And the one thing I haven't done, I do have a YouTube channel, but what I don't have is a podcast, and it might be something I... Massively important.
01:58:22.000 It's the best way to communicate with people because even in writing, sometimes things are lost in tone, in the way...
01:58:30.000 You could be sarcastic and just joking around.
01:58:32.000 You actually have to write it just kidding.
01:58:34.000 You have to actually quantify it.
01:58:36.000 Whereas people know in the inflection of your voice, the look on your face.
01:58:40.000 That's why we like to do this.
01:58:41.000 Even though most of the people listen to this podcast, we like to have an iTunes version so you can see sometimes we're making silly faces.
01:58:48.000 We're joking around.
01:58:50.000 I think for you, it would be an excellent way to explore new ideas, things that come to you, and also respond to people online.
01:58:58.000 Instead of sitting there and writing everything out, pick a few emails every week and respond to them.
01:59:04.000 Very good thought.
01:59:05.000 It's great!
01:59:05.000 I will take your advice.
01:59:07.000 It's perfect for you.
01:59:08.000 I will take your advice on this.
01:59:09.000 The argument against Rupert Sheldrake, from what I read online, was a bit stronger than the argument for you.
01:59:17.000 No, I don't think so.
01:59:18.000 Again, they attributed statements to him that he didn't make.
01:59:20.000 So it was more of the same type of thing?
01:59:22.000 It was the same type of thing.
01:59:23.000 What was his controversy?
01:59:25.000 Well, he's saying that science is locked in what we call a materialist reference frame, which is that it seeks to reduce everything to matter.
01:59:35.000 So therefore, the idea of telepathy, for example, is an impossible idea as far as mainstream science is concerned.
01:59:45.000 Your consciousness is simply something that's generated by your brain.
01:59:48.000 How can you then pick up the thoughts of somebody else across a continent or on the other side of the world?
01:59:55.000 How is that possible?
01:59:58.000 So he is questioning the materialist reference frame of mainstream science.
02:00:04.000 The most vocal advocates of mainstream science are materialists.
02:00:08.000 They do believe that consciousness is an accidental epiphenomenon of brain activity, that there is nothing else to it than that.
02:00:17.000 He got under a lot of skins.
02:00:18.000 Well, there's also the ones that don't believe that and haven't clearly defined what consciousness is, but say, if psychic abilities do exist, Show them.
02:00:29.000 Exhibit them.
02:00:30.000 Well, that's precisely what Rupert has done.
02:00:32.000 Has he?
02:00:32.000 Yes.
02:00:33.000 What has he done clearly that shows, in your opinion?
02:00:36.000 Well, for example, documenting the sense of being stared at.
02:00:41.000 People know when they're being stared at.
02:00:44.000 And he's done experiments which document this and prove it at a level of statistical significance.
02:00:50.000 A couple percent, right?
02:00:52.000 Yeah, a couple of percent.
02:00:54.000 Why does your dog know when you're coming home?
02:00:56.000 Has that been disproven ever?
02:00:58.000 No.
02:00:58.000 No.
02:00:58.000 Even though the owner of the dog varies the route, comes home by a different route in a different way every day.
02:01:07.000 This might be your wife calling.
02:01:08.000 Yeah, that's probably Santa.
02:01:11.000 Hello?
02:01:12.000 Oh, it's your neighbor.
02:01:16.000 Oh, yeah.
02:01:17.000 She's here.
02:01:18.000 Okay.
02:01:18.000 We'll have someone come out and get her right now.
02:01:20.000 Thank you very much.
02:01:22.000 All right.
02:01:22.000 Jamie, just go out and tell her we'll wrap this up.
02:01:25.000 That's our neighbor.
02:01:26.000 She must have been knocking on the door.
02:01:28.000 Well, this is the great thing about a live discussion.
02:01:31.000 Yeah, it's beautiful.
02:01:33.000 When my wonderful Santa turns up at the door and can't get in, she's got a telephone.
02:01:38.000 Well, it's cool because people know that it's not edited and polished.
02:01:44.000 It's a real conversation in that way.
02:01:47.000 We couldn't have this conversation afterwards and say, you know, the thing about science, maybe I said something.
02:01:52.000 Can we cut that out?
02:01:53.000 Exactly.
02:01:53.000 Exactly.
02:01:54.000 It's raw, it's real, and it works.
02:02:00.000 Can I say a couple of things which I would like people to hear?
02:02:03.000 Sure.
02:02:04.000 One is, this is an odd thing to ask because I've been very successful as a non-fiction author.
02:02:11.000 But I am hoping that people will pay attention to my fiction and that people will listen to my fiction.
02:02:19.000 It's very, very difficult for me to be published as a novelist.
02:02:23.000 The publishing industry want me to stay in my box as a successful non-fiction author, and they don't want me to explore the fictional side of things.
02:02:33.000 So I've managed to get a British publisher for my novel, which we talked about earlier, War God, about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
02:02:39.000 But so far I don't have an American publisher.
02:02:43.000 And I have been helped a lot by my Facebook community, many of whom are Americans, who have gone to Amazon UK and bought the British edition of my book from America.
02:02:56.000 And it will be delivered to them here in America in a few days because the book is published on the 30th of May.
02:03:03.000 And if anybody's interested in that story, I would appreciate if they'd make the effort to go to Amazon UK and pick up the book because what that does then is it gives the book the possibility of some success in Britain.
02:03:13.000 And if it succeeds in Britain, then it will be picked up by an American publisher.
02:03:19.000 So it's only the resistance is just that it's nonfiction?
02:03:22.000 Yeah, that's right.
02:03:23.000 Publishing industry is an industry that thinks in terms of brands.
02:03:27.000 And I am branded as a non-fiction author.
02:03:29.000 This is your second non-fiction author?
02:03:31.000 This is my second.
02:03:31.000 Did your first one sell well?
02:03:33.000 My first novel vanished without a trace, because that was called Entangled, because it had absolutely no support from the publishers at all.
02:03:41.000 It sold a few thousand copies, but really it was completely ignored.
02:03:45.000 And the same thing is going to happen with War God as well.
02:03:49.000 And what I've done is I've put free-to-read chapters online on my website.
02:03:56.000 And that is GrahamHancock.com?
02:03:58.000 And that's www.GrahamHancock.com.
02:04:01.000 We've got to fix your Twitter, man.
02:04:02.000 This double underscore is confusing a lot of people.
02:04:05.000 Well, I know it is, but I couldn't get that name.
02:04:07.000 I couldn't get at Graham Hancock.
02:04:10.000 Who is Graham Hancock?
02:04:11.000 Who's the at Graham Hancock?
02:04:13.000 Well, there's another guy with my name.
02:04:14.000 And his name is Graham Hancock?
02:04:15.000 Yeah, his name is Graham Hancock.
02:04:16.000 He got it first, so nothing can be...
02:04:18.000 Just that double underscore.
02:04:20.000 Couldn't you just do something else, like Graham Hancock in one word?
02:04:24.000 No, that's what he's got.
02:04:26.000 He's got it...
02:04:27.000 Oh.
02:04:27.000 Well, how about...
02:04:29.000 Do you have a middle name?
02:04:31.000 Graham Bruce Hancock.
02:04:32.000 Graham B. Hancock?
02:04:33.000 Yeah.
02:04:34.000 How about that?
02:04:35.000 No, that's stupid.
02:04:36.000 Forget it.
02:04:37.000 Forget what I said.
02:04:38.000 You know, my mother, bless her, when she gave me my name, she had in my...
02:04:44.000 So my initials are G.B. Hancock, okay?
02:04:47.000 Right.
02:04:47.000 When she gave me my name...
02:04:48.000 How about that?
02:04:49.000 She was thinking of...
02:04:50.000 Yeah, that's what I use on my email address.
02:04:52.000 She was thinking of...
02:04:53.000 Hey, you fucked up.
02:04:53.000 Someone's going to hit you with an email now.
02:04:55.000 They hit me with emails anyway.
02:04:56.000 It's okay.
02:04:56.000 She was thinking...
02:04:57.000 In a rather grandiose way of George Bernard Shaw, you know, G.B. Hancock.
02:05:02.000 So she called me G.B. Hancock, not realizing that GBH also stands for grievous bodily harm, you know.
02:05:08.000 Oh, it does?
02:05:08.000 In British law, yeah, that's a particular crime, you know, that you've committed an act of GBH against somebody.
02:05:17.000 So that's my initials.
02:05:20.000 I don't know what to do about my Twitter name.
02:05:23.000 Maybe we just have to keep a double underscore.
02:05:25.000 So there's an underscore, Graham underscore?
02:05:27.000 Since this is live, can I introduce my Santa?
02:05:29.000 Sure, if she wants to.
02:05:30.000 Santa, come here.
02:05:32.000 Hi, Santa.
02:05:33.000 Hi.
02:05:33.000 What's up?
02:05:34.000 Come, come.
02:05:35.000 He's all so happy now that he quit weed.
02:05:37.000 Look at him.
02:05:39.000 Completely, yes.
02:05:40.000 Are you happier now that you quit?
02:05:42.000 Absolutely.
02:05:42.000 Wow.
02:05:43.000 Thank God.
02:05:45.000 That's hilarious.
02:05:47.000 Simply because he was abusing the substance.
02:05:49.000 Right.
02:05:51.000 Yeah, I understand.
02:05:52.000 Yeah, it was the substance controlling him or being in control of him as opposed to him in control of the substance.
02:06:00.000 Yeah, we went deep into it.
02:06:03.000 It's interesting stuff.
02:06:04.000 Do you have this on Kindle?
02:06:07.000 Yes, but you have to buy it in England.
02:06:09.000 And I think there's some things that make it difficult for Americans to buy the Kindle edition.
02:06:12.000 They can only buy the hardback edition.
02:06:16.000 Oh, that's so stupid.
02:06:16.000 But there's links on my website which go to the right place to buy it.
02:06:21.000 And there's chapters to read so people can make...
02:06:23.000 I'm not asking people to buy it blind.
02:06:25.000 People can make up their own minds.
02:06:26.000 Read the chapters.
02:06:27.000 If they hate it, don't buy it.
02:06:28.000 Well, Graham Hancock, one of our sponsors is audible.com.
02:06:31.000 It's audible.com.
02:06:32.000 Do you have an audio version of it?
02:06:34.000 The US edition of my first novel, Entangled, is available on Audible.
02:06:38.000 But right now, I do not have...
02:06:40.000 Did you read it?
02:06:42.000 No, I didn't.
02:06:43.000 It was read by somebody else.
02:06:44.000 Do you like the person who read it?
02:06:46.000 Is it good?
02:06:47.000 That's got to be weird, hearing someone read your words.
02:06:50.000 It's weird if they don't do it well.
02:06:53.000 But in this case, it was done well.
02:06:55.000 Yeah, you don't want to buy Stephen King's when he reads them.
02:06:58.000 That's the only, if I give you advice.
02:06:59.000 I'm a huge Stephen King fan.
02:07:01.000 Me too.
02:07:02.000 Stephen King is brilliant.
02:07:03.000 He's amazing.
02:07:04.000 And his book on writing is equally amazing.
02:07:07.000 Fantastic book.
02:07:07.000 On writing.
02:07:08.000 Yeah, if you're a writer, there's two books you need.
02:07:11.000 The War of Art and Stephen King on Writing.
02:07:13.000 Those are the two.
02:07:13.000 The other one is Stephen Pressfield's The War on Art.
02:07:16.000 Yeah, and his new one, Turning Pro, which is equally brilliant.
02:07:20.000 Fantastic.
02:07:20.000 But don't ever get an audiobook that Stephen King reads because he's fucking boring as shit.
02:07:25.000 Okay.
02:07:25.000 He'll put you right to sleep.
02:07:26.000 I mean, the guy's the greatest author ever as far as I'm concerned.
02:07:29.000 Yeah, I agree.
02:07:30.000 He is the best.
02:07:31.000 He writes just an amazing narrator, the amazing stories.
02:07:34.000 He's got the gift, fantastic gift of writing a story.
02:07:37.000 Yeah, I remember reading some of his stuff when I was a young teenager, like thinking like, Jesus, I shouldn't even be reading this.
02:07:42.000 Yeah.
02:07:42.000 What the fuck?
02:07:44.000 His descriptions, they bordered on creepy, some of the sexual stuff.
02:07:49.000 He's just a beast.
02:07:51.000 But he's also been given a gift by the universe to write amazing stories that make you want to keep turning the pages.
02:07:59.000 And you're right, his book on writing, for anybody who aspires to become a writer, that is the first place you go, is read Stephen King on writing.
02:08:07.000 Yeah, it's a brilliant book, and he's so forthcoming about all of his trials and struggles, and he's amazing.
02:08:14.000 And that's my favorite kind of movie is his books, where it's just fantasy.
02:08:21.000 I don't need things to be real in my fiction.
02:08:24.000 I enjoy fiction, but I don't need to see a really depressing movie where everybody's got cancer, and oh my god, so brilliantly acted.
02:08:31.000 Stop.
02:08:32.000 Entertain me.
02:08:33.000 Show me an evil car that kills people.
02:08:36.000 Show me the dude next door neighbor's a werewolf.
02:08:39.000 I think that's the writer's first task.
02:08:42.000 The fiction writer's first task is to entertain.
02:08:44.000 You said witches in this.
02:08:46.000 Did you throw some supernatural shit in this as well?
02:08:49.000 Yeah, the war god is full of the supernatural.
02:08:51.000 And I was able to bounce off the facts because the Aztec Society has been rightly described as the last magical civilization.
02:09:00.000 They were involved in magic and witchcraft in a huge way.
02:09:04.000 But they also persecuted witches, just as European society in the Middle Ages persecuted witches.
02:09:10.000 There are strong supernatural elements in this story, and in a way, I think it's only possible to understand what happened between 1519 and 1521 when you take the beliefs in the supernatural into account.
02:09:22.000 It sounds like they were – I mean, your description of a nation of serial killers is apt.
02:09:28.000 That's what the Aztecs were.
02:09:29.000 That's what the Aztecs were.
02:09:30.000 And here's the thing, you see.
02:09:31.000 I mean, my two central female characters meet in what's called a fattening pen.
02:09:37.000 So this is what the Aztecs did.
02:09:39.000 They're human sacrificial victims.
02:09:40.000 They would, first of all, they would fatten them up in prisons.
02:09:45.000 Why would they fatten them?
02:09:46.000 Because they wanted to present them to the god plump and desirable.
02:09:50.000 So they would fatten them for months on end.
02:09:52.000 And can you imagine living, that's your situation, you've been put in the fattening pen, they're feeding you this high-calorie diet, and at a certain date you're going to be marched up the pyramid and have your heart cut out.
02:10:03.000 That takes some courage to resist.
02:10:06.000 That Teotihuacan sacrifice of four days of 80,000 people.
02:10:11.000 I told that to my friend Steve Rinella and he didn't even believe me.
02:10:15.000 Tenochtitlan, by the way.
02:10:17.000 Tenochtitlan.
02:10:17.000 How do you say it?
02:10:18.000 Tenochtitlan.
02:10:19.000 That was the ancient name of Mexico City.
02:10:20.000 It used to be an island in the middle of a lake.
02:10:22.000 Approached by causeways.
02:10:24.000 And the temple was called Teotihuacan?
02:10:26.000 Well, no, that's actually 35 miles north of Mexico City.
02:10:29.000 That's the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, and the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, which the Aztecs revered as the place where men became gods.
02:10:39.000 But they didn't know who made Teotihuacan.
02:10:41.000 Teotihuacan was already remotely ancient when the Aztecs...
02:10:45.000 Came into the Valley of Mexico and encountered it.
02:10:47.000 So the Pyramid of the Sun, the completion of that was when they killed 80,000 people?
02:10:52.000 No.
02:10:53.000 That was the Pyramid of the War God.
02:10:55.000 Oh, the Pyramid of the War God.
02:10:55.000 Which is why my novel is called War God.
02:10:57.000 And that stood in the heart of what is now Mexico City.
02:11:01.000 And when the Spanish took that city, the very first thing they did was to take that pyramid apart stone by stone.
02:11:08.000 Did you see what happened in Belize recently?
02:11:11.000 Yeah, so an ancient Mayan pyramid is used as a construction material by some asshole firm who used diggers to just break down the body of the pyramid and use it to make roads.
02:11:23.000 How crazy is that?
02:11:23.000 It kind of sums up everything that's wrong with our culture.
02:11:26.000 That's not our culture.
02:11:28.000 That's the place where John McAfee was living.
02:11:31.000 You know that whole craziness?
02:11:33.000 Yeah, absolutely.
02:11:33.000 I refer to global culture.
02:11:34.000 Global culture of production and consumption.
02:11:37.000 Yeah, it was astounding that someone would be willing to do that.
02:11:41.000 You're destroying an archaeological site just for its limestone?
02:11:44.000 Like, whoa, that is some short-sighted assholes.
02:11:48.000 It's incredible.
02:11:49.000 But doesn't that short-sightedness, the pursuit of short-term goals, which might be immediately profitable, even though long-term massively damaging, doesn't that actually completely sum up everything that's wrong with global culture today?
02:12:02.000 I mean, if you wanted to take one act which kind of expresses it, that would be it.
02:12:06.000 But, you know, we don't think long-term.
02:12:09.000 We don't think in terms of the sacred.
02:12:11.000 We don't – the Amazon jungle.
02:12:13.000 Nobody considers, when it's being exploited as an economic resource, what that means for our planet in the long run, if all of those trees come down.
02:12:22.000 Short term, some money might be made out of it.
02:12:24.000 Long term, we're losing the lungs of our planet.
02:12:27.000 Well, the pattern is, the real issue with human beings is our ability to do things in large numbers that would be horrific if we did singularly.
02:12:35.000 The diffusion of responsibility that comes from acting as a corporation or acting as an army or acting where horrific things can be justified because you're only a part of one huge group of people that are doing these things.
02:12:49.000 We talked about science.
02:12:50.000 There's been some interesting science done on exactly that point, which is that they set it up with actors.
02:12:56.000 You put a situation where somebody is on the street and they're in jeopardy.
02:12:59.000 A woman is perhaps being attacked.
02:13:01.000 If there are two or three people walking on the street, They will almost always intervene to prevent the attack.
02:13:08.000 But if there's a thousand people walking on the street, nobody intervenes.
02:13:11.000 Yeah, well, I think that happens most of the time.
02:13:16.000 It can happen, but I think a lot of people would intervene.
02:13:19.000 I think that's one of those weird things that is like a psychological principle that gets brought up sort of as a matter of fact.
02:13:28.000 I don't necessarily think it's a matter of fact.
02:13:30.000 Because if I saw someone raping someone, I'd kick their ass.
02:13:32.000 I would try, at least.
02:13:33.000 You might be the extraordinary exception.
02:13:36.000 I don't think so.
02:13:37.000 I think there's a lot of people who jump in.
02:13:38.000 But you hear stories like that all the time, where people save someone from this and did something there.
02:13:43.000 I think it's more likely that cowards would walk away if there's a thousand people.
02:13:48.000 But there's still, out of a thousand people...
02:13:50.000 There's still somebody with guts who's going to do something about it.
02:13:52.000 Somebody who realizes we're all in this together.
02:13:54.000 I hope you're right.
02:13:56.000 I share your faith in the human race.
02:13:58.000 I think we have amazing...
02:14:01.000 Amazing capacity to love, amazing capacity to give, amazing generosity and decency.
02:14:06.000 That's what I encounter day to day.
02:14:09.000 Yeah, for the most part, right?
02:14:10.000 Mostly people are awesome.
02:14:12.000 It's just a few of these Montezuma motherfuckers running around killing everybody.
02:14:17.000 And throughout history, there's been giant groups of people led by serial killers.
02:14:23.000 And that's a big part of reality.
02:14:27.000 They're the ones who go for that job.
02:14:29.000 Yeah, I'm a big fan of this podcast called Hardcore History that I talk about all the time.
02:14:34.000 But I've been listening to it.
02:14:36.000 Lately it's been talk about the Nazis and World War II. But when you go back and pay attention to some of the things that happened in history and you see the amazing level of ruthlessness that people exhibited...
02:15:03.000 It's still happening now, Joe.
02:15:07.000 I mean, you know, when a drone flies over a village in Afghanistan or Pakistan and 120 people get slaughtered, it's a bit remote, it's a bit distant.
02:15:16.000 We're not getting our hands dirty, but people are still being killed.
02:15:19.000 Well, it's crazy.
02:15:20.000 Children are being deprived of their parents.
02:15:21.000 Children are dying.
02:15:23.000 Children are getting maimed.
02:15:24.000 And the numbers are so skewed in the favor of people who were casualties that were innocent.
02:15:33.000 There's way more people that are innocent that are getting killed by these drones.
02:15:37.000 And then they say, well, that's because these terrorists, they do things in highly populated areas.
02:15:42.000 Well, Well, then you can't do that.
02:15:44.000 You can't just say we're going to kill – that is one of the most un-American things you could ever do.
02:15:50.000 It's a terrible un-American thing.
02:15:51.000 The idea that you could kill all these oppressed, innocent people just to get this one bad guy.
02:15:55.000 It's patently obviously wrong, and yet at the level of government, nobody seems to have got it yet how wrong it is.
02:16:01.000 It's diffusion of responsibility in a digital technological form, a warfare form.
02:16:08.000 No one's even there.
02:16:10.000 This is what we can do.
02:16:11.000 Instead of doing some horrific war crimes, we send soldiers in there to slaughter all these innocents to get these bad people.
02:16:17.000 Instead of doing that, which is totally unacceptable, we'll just do it this way, where you're not even really there.
02:16:22.000 Yeah, like some guy sitting in a control tower playing a computer game, really.
02:16:26.000 How about the fact they're going to give them medals?
02:16:28.000 That was one of the big things.
02:16:29.000 They're gonna give drone pilots medals and people are like, what are you doing?
02:16:34.000 Like, this is getting bananas.
02:16:35.000 No act of courage is involved.
02:16:38.000 Well, apparently there's been a new scandal where four Americans were killed in a recent drone strike and now Obama is trying to restrict the use of drones and trying to say that they can't be used on Americans.
02:16:53.000 But whatever.
02:16:53.000 We live in strange times.
02:16:55.000 Is it because our humanity has not yet caught up to our technological capabilities that we are We've evolved technologically so much in the past several hundred years.
02:17:07.000 We've literally changed the world entirely, but yet the tissue, the DNA, the echoes of the past that lie in our language and in our cultures is really not caught up by any stretch of the imagination.
02:17:22.000 I think that's a good point.
02:17:22.000 I think that's a good point.
02:17:24.000 We've got these incredible toys, but we haven't learned to play with them responsibly yet.
02:17:30.000 Yeah, we've got this barbaric mindset that's still in place to run shit.
02:17:34.000 If you want to run shit, you've got to be a fucking savage.
02:17:36.000 The mindset hasn't changed that much in the last 1,000 or 500 years.
02:17:41.000 But yet we're hopeful.
02:17:42.000 But we're hopeful, and I remain hopeful.
02:17:46.000 I think it's a wonderful thing to be human.
02:17:49.000 It's a great gift to be born in a human body.
02:17:53.000 You know, that's part of it, actually.
02:17:56.000 The human predicament is the predicament of making choices between alternatives, between good and evil, between dark and light.
02:18:08.000 And our world we live in today is filled with darkness and with light.
02:18:12.000 But the one thing that all of us can do as individuals is we can make the right choice rather than the wrong choice.
02:18:18.000 We don't have to add to the misery in the world, not even one tiny fraction.
02:18:24.000 We've always got the choices we make.
02:18:27.000 Those are our responsibility alone.
02:18:29.000 And we cannot devolve those on others.
02:18:31.000 We can't say it's the government's fault.
02:18:33.000 The choices we make are our choices.
02:18:35.000 And that is the message of ayahuasca, isn't it?
02:18:37.000 Yes, that's the message of ayahuasca.
02:18:39.000 That's why everybody needs it.
02:18:40.000 Yeah, because your choices are yours, and your choices will define you.
02:18:45.000 Isn't it funny that that would be one of the single most powerful changing elements in this culture, if all of a sudden ayahuasca centers started opening them up?
02:18:57.000 And we started exploring it scientifically.
02:19:00.000 We started figuring out what the contents are.
02:19:02.000 As long as those centers were run by good-hearted people who had the capacity to love and wanted The betterment of mankind rather than who were seeking personal gain or personal power through it.
02:19:13.000 The evil ones in the Peru and where have you, are they taking it as well?
02:19:18.000 Yeah.
02:19:19.000 So they're taking it and doing evil things once they take it?
02:19:22.000 I'm afraid so, yeah.
02:19:23.000 Wow.
02:19:24.000 So do you think that they're just psychopaths that got a hold of some ayahuasca and that you can't fix that kind of crazy?
02:19:30.000 Finally, yes.
02:19:30.000 If you come to this medicine with wicked intent, then bad things can happen.
02:19:38.000 So you really believe in the idea of entities being evil?
02:19:41.000 You believe in the communication of evil entities?
02:19:45.000 I think it's a very interesting possibility, which explains a lot in human history.
02:19:52.000 Demons?
02:19:53.000 Yeah, demons.
02:19:54.000 I think that's a simple shorthand for it, just as there are also I think that the reality is much more complicated than we imagine, that there are huge unseen realms which impact upon us in important ways,
02:20:10.000 and we are interacting with them whether we like it or not.
02:20:14.000 And in certain states of consciousness, that interaction can become conscious, and we can gain access to those realms.
02:20:22.000 And furthermore, I would say, I believe ultimately in the unity of all things, but right now in this particular learning experience that we're undergoing in a human incarnation, I think it's really useful that those choices exist.
02:20:39.000 What, after all, if everything was all good and rosy and perfect and that we're not possible to do wrong, what could we learn from this experience of life?
02:20:49.000 If we don't have the opportunity to make mistakes, if we are not faced with fundamental choices, what would we benefit from in living this life in a human body?
02:21:00.000 You know, that's one of the main arguments for computer simulation theory.
02:21:03.000 Excellent argument, yeah.
02:21:05.000 One of the main arguments is that we've got ourselves to a point where life is fucking boring because we've solved all the problems.
02:21:10.000 We've eliminated all the stress and conflict.
02:21:13.000 That's painfully untrue.
02:21:14.000 We haven't solved all the problems.
02:21:15.000 But that this is a computer simulation.
02:21:17.000 That the life we are living, that we're in the roaring 20s of the digital era.
02:21:21.000 We're in the simulation where it's indiscernible.
02:21:25.000 It's quite possible to imagine virtual reality, even in our technology today, getting to the point where you wouldn't know.
02:21:31.000 That it was virtual, where you're totally immersed in that reality.
02:21:35.000 And for all we know, Joe, that's exactly what you and I are.
02:21:38.000 That's the argument, yeah.
02:21:41.000 Lifespan, our 70 or 80 years or however many years we get, you know, a random element in that, we're going to step out and find ourselves in a room where we've been playing this game all along and then we'll be scored on what we did, you know?
02:21:55.000 And did we actually fulfill the objectives that we set out at the beginning of the game with?
02:22:02.000 There you get, actually, with that idea of a computer simulation, you find yourself coming full circle and meeting very ancient spiritual ideas, like that thing that I called the weighing of the soul in the ancient Egyptian system.
02:22:16.000 That's where you get scored on how you performed in the computer game.
02:22:21.000 Maybe how you performed was not how much money you made or how much power you had.
02:22:26.000 Maybe it was really how much love you gave.
02:22:28.000 That was the thing you most needed to do.
02:22:31.000 Is it possible that the fractal nature of reality manifests itself in the idea of these demons being that you must reinforce good and you must punish bad and the only way these dumb people ever really completely understand is if they feel a physical manifestation?
02:23:00.000 Could be so.
02:23:12.000 Where it's most terrifying, your common enemies that you have in real life, whether it's predators or enemies, they're a physical manifestation.
02:23:20.000 Absolutely.
02:23:21.000 We don't know the answer to these questions.
02:23:24.000 We're touching here upon a great mystery.
02:23:27.000 People all over the world have these experiences and report remarkably similar encounters with entities, either demonic or angelic.
02:23:36.000 And this has been going on throughout human culture.
02:23:38.000 And it's a feature of the psychedelic experience as well.
02:23:41.000 And we don't know what those things are.
02:23:45.000 This is just not clear.
02:23:46.000 Do they have an independent existence from us or are they part of a teaching program that we need to encounter, as you're suggesting just now?
02:23:52.000 I think they're very interesting questions to examine, but I don't know the answer to them.
02:23:56.000 I've always had an issue with the possibility of archetypes, too, that people have already established.
02:24:02.000 That archetypes that people already have in their head so that when you have an abduction experience, what you think is an abduction experience, you sort of fill in the blanks with whatever these entities are.
02:24:11.000 All of a sudden they become these grey guys with big black eyes because that's the cultural archetype that we've sort of subscribed to.
02:24:18.000 And in all these stories...
02:24:20.000 Why did we find them painted on cave walls 25,000 years ago then?
02:24:23.000 That's a good question.
02:24:25.000 Which ones did we find?
02:24:26.000 Well, particularly on the walls of, in fact, on a little alcove and a ceiling inside Peshmerl Cave in France, there's a fantastically recognizable depiction of what we would call a grey today.
02:24:38.000 Can you pull that up?
02:24:39.000 How do you spell it?
02:24:40.000 I call him the wounded man sometimes.
02:24:45.000 He's Peshmerl, P-E-C-H. M-E-R-L-E. Peshmerl.
02:24:51.000 And he is pierced through the body with a number of spears and he has this kind of high-domed forehead and narrow pointed chin and just a hint of large dark eyes.
02:25:01.000 Do you think that these things are actually physically visiting or do you think that there's a chemical doorway that's opened through psychedelics or through some technology and that that's how they're appearing?
02:25:13.000 I think it's a chemical doorway.
02:25:15.000 I think that we have a hidden doorway inside our minds through which we can project our consciousness into other levels of reality.
02:25:24.000 I can't prove that, but that's what I think may be going on.
02:25:29.000 That's what it feels to you when you experience you?
02:25:31.000 That's what it feels to me like, that I'm entering a seamlessly convincing And again, I want to stress the point that because you've had this experience, these true experiences, if they're just a hallucination, a byproduct of the mind that is impossible to prove,
02:25:46.000 you're still having the exact same experience.
02:25:49.000 Yeah, you're still having the exact same experience.
02:25:50.000 And there you come back to the point we made earlier, that what do you then learn from that experience?
02:25:54.000 And if you grow in some way through that experience, it doesn't really matter whether it's Freestanding reality or whether it's something you projected.
02:26:03.000 And as we become more interconnected with our ability to communicate and our idea that the human race really is one gigantic superorganism, as we accept that idea more and more, it opens up a lot of other possibilities.
02:26:19.000 It opens up a lot of possibilities for just our overall view of things.
02:26:26.000 Yeah, sure.
02:26:27.000 This is the new Copernican revolution that we're poised on the edge of.
02:26:34.000 At one time, it was considered that the Sun went around the Earth.
02:26:42.000 And that all the stars revolved around the Earth, and the Earth was fixed and still in the center.
02:26:46.000 And then some people started having experiences, or if you like, finding data which contradicted that, and eventually a whole world view was thrown away.
02:26:55.000 And I think we're at the edge of moving into a whole new revolution about the nature of reality, that it is just much more complicated than we've imagined.
02:27:07.000 That's a kind of sketch of the Peshmel figure.
02:27:09.000 That's not the original cave painting, and I'm afraid the only UFOs that are actually present are the ones above the individual's head.
02:27:16.000 The other two are not there in the painting.
02:27:17.000 So let's go see if you can find the original one, Jamie, because that one looks like shit.
02:27:20.000 That looks like an animal, too.
02:27:22.000 You know, who knows, but they were really terrible at drawing, too.
02:27:25.000 Well, no, they were amazing at drawing.
02:27:27.000 Some of them were.
02:27:28.000 Some of the cave paintings are absolutely stunning.
02:27:30.000 Eh, I wouldn't pay for them.
02:27:31.000 I mean, I would if I knew they were really old.
02:27:33.000 But if, like, some new dude just came along and that was his version of a buffalo, I'd be like, bitch.
02:27:39.000 You haven't seen what is painted inside Chauvet Cave in France.
02:27:42.000 Well, I've watched that documentary, the Werner Herzog documentary.
02:27:45.000 Yeah, no, it's amazing.
02:27:46.000 I'm joking around, obviously.
02:27:48.000 As you do.
02:27:49.000 But still, I'd rather buy an Alex Gray painting.
02:27:52.000 I think his shit is cooler.
02:27:54.000 I'd like some Frank Frazetta.
02:27:55.000 That's art to me.
02:27:57.000 There's no Frank Frazetta on cave walls.
02:27:59.000 I mean, the caves, this is one of the great experiences we can have as human beings, is to go into those painted caves and go in in silence and in darkness and just get a sense of the atmosphere.
02:28:13.000 They're transformative spaces.
02:28:15.000 They knew something about set and setting in those times.
02:28:18.000 And of course, I'm convinced they were using psychedelics.
02:28:22.000 And that was, the caves in France were...
02:28:24.000 Caves in France, caves in Spain, yeah.
02:28:26.000 What are the oldest ones?
02:28:27.000 The very oldest is Fumani Cave in Italy, which is 35,000 years old.
02:28:34.000 Chauvet Cave, about 33,000, 32,000 years old.
02:28:39.000 They're pretty fucking ancient.
02:28:41.000 So do you think that those were people that were living in those caves that were making that artwork?
02:28:46.000 No, people never lived in those caves.
02:28:47.000 Never lived in them?
02:28:48.000 No, no, they didn't.
02:28:49.000 They used them as sacred spaces.
02:28:50.000 They visited them in small numbers, often separated.
02:28:54.000 There might be an interval of 2,000 years between when one group went in and when another group went in.
02:28:58.000 So our idea of cave art, as the layperson's idea, is cavemen were inside this cave, and at nighttime they would light fires and draw cave art.
02:29:07.000 That's not what was going on.
02:29:08.000 That's not what happened.
02:29:08.000 They never lived in those spaces.
02:29:10.000 They lived outside.
02:29:11.000 They lived in portable structures like teepees.
02:29:15.000 They were hunter-gatherers, and they used the caves as sacred spaces, and they communicated their most profound ideas about the spirit.
02:29:24.000 So, they were a lot more sophisticated than we like to believe.
02:29:27.000 They were just as sophisticated as we are.
02:29:29.000 Was there ever a time before that, that we know of, where they weren't?
02:29:35.000 Where, like, Neanderthals supposedly are being, they did some cave art as well, correct?
02:29:41.000 Yep.
02:29:41.000 This is the new discovery that some of the very oldest cave art was almost certainly done by Neanderthals.
02:29:45.000 So the Neanderthal image is due for a complete rehabilitation very, very, very soon.
02:29:52.000 The Neanderthals – the image that we have of Neanderthals is completely wrong.
02:29:57.000 But there's a thing I call six million years of boredom, which is from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee through until well after the emergence of anatomically modern humans, our ancestors were very dull, judging by what they left behind, judging by what they produced.
02:30:13.000 They were not thinking laterally.
02:30:16.000 They were not creating.
02:30:17.000 They were not – they did not have spiritual concepts or ideas.
02:30:21.000 And it's rather like a light is switched on in the human brain all around the world somewhere after 100,000 years ago, really 40,000 years ago, that we get this amazing explosion of symbolic art and suddenly you recognize that the creatures are just like us and that we are dealing with people we could communicate with on a symbolic level.
02:30:44.000 So something happened.
02:30:47.000 And I made this case extensively in my book, Supernatural, that what happened to our ancestors was encounters with psychedelics.
02:30:55.000 That's what took us out of the dull and boring zone and put us into the realm of imagination and creativity and spirit.
02:31:04.000 Well, it's a fascinating idea, and it's a weird one to dismiss because we know that the impact of psychedelics on the mind is so astonishing.
02:31:12.000 It's very poo-pooed and marginalized because it's thought to be frivolous and silly, but that's only by people who haven't done it.
02:31:19.000 It's one of the weirdest things where it's persecuted by people who really need it more than anybody.
02:31:24.000 Well, exactly.
02:31:26.000 I mean, for those who've never had a psychedelic experience, To put down others who have had it and to tell them that that experience is wrong, I mean, that's like a celibate telling somebody not to have sex.
02:31:43.000 The celibate has no experience of the thing that they're talking about.
02:31:46.000 How dare they make judgments about that?
02:31:49.000 Yeah, it's a good point.
02:31:50.000 It's strange.
02:31:52.000 But I think that people like you that are brave enough to speak out about this and, in fact, even write books about it, that's the ripples that sends out this information and the universe picks it up.
02:32:02.000 And the internet grabs it and duplicates it and throws it up on Twitter and then, boom, we're off to the races.
02:32:08.000 And new ideas are introduced into the minds of the young people who I think, that's what gives me hope.
02:32:13.000 That's what gives me hope too.
02:32:15.000 There's a fantastic, growing community of alert, intelligent, awake, aware young people out there.
02:32:21.000 That grew up with the internet.
02:32:22.000 That grew up with the internet and that are not going to put up with all that shit any longer that comes down from a hierarchical, controlling, dominator culture.
02:32:33.000 Boom!
02:32:34.000 Graham Hancock just dropped some science.
02:32:38.000 That was a beautiful conversation, man.
02:32:40.000 Thank you very much.
02:32:40.000 Thank you, Joe.
02:32:41.000 We've got to do this more often.
02:32:42.000 I agree.
02:32:43.000 When are you back in America again?
02:32:45.000 Oh, late October.
02:32:46.000 So if people want to buy WarGod, they can go to Amazon.co.uk.
02:32:51.000 Well, the easiest way to do it is to go to my website.
02:32:54.000 Okay, GrahamHancock.com.
02:32:57.000 Okay, you already have the Canadian and the UK link up.
02:33:00.000 Because that's the two places that's on sale, Amazon Canada or Amazon UK, and they can buy it there.
02:33:05.000 And hopefully if our friends at Audible are listening, hook it up, bitch.
02:33:09.000 Get somebody to read it.
02:33:10.000 Come on.
02:33:11.000 I'd love to have that in my car when I'm driving around.
02:33:13.000 But I'll pick it up as well.
02:33:15.000 Support.
02:33:16.000 Fresh.
02:33:16.000 Thank you.
02:33:16.000 Thank you, sir.
02:33:17.000 And is that the original K-Ward?
02:33:19.000 Yes, it is.
02:33:20.000 There it is.
02:33:20.000 So you can see that high-domed forehead.
02:33:24.000 It could just be shitty art.
02:33:26.000 There you can see the dark eyes.
02:33:28.000 What's that up in the sky above it?
02:33:32.000 Let me tell you something.
02:33:33.000 I got a three year old and she draws people.
02:33:34.000 They look exactly like that.
02:33:36.000 She's not trying to depict aliens.
02:33:38.000 She's just shitty at drawing.
02:33:41.000 The problem with this is it's too ambiguous.
02:33:45.000 That's not good art.
02:33:46.000 I don't know what that is.
02:33:48.000 Is that a spider?
02:33:49.000 It could be a spider because It could be a crab.
02:33:51.000 It's a human body with spears pierced through his body.
02:33:56.000 Okay, what about that thing in the upper left?
02:33:57.000 What the hell is that?
02:33:58.000 That thing there.
02:33:58.000 Nobody knows what it is.
02:34:00.000 It's a fucking shitty spider.
02:34:01.000 Nobody knows what it is.
02:34:04.000 That guy sucked.
02:34:05.000 I hope that guy was way better at killing buffalo because his drawings are dog shit.
02:34:08.000 I think we need to send you into the painted cave.
02:34:11.000 No, I'm joking around completely.
02:34:13.000 I mean, this I'm not that impressed with.
02:34:15.000 I would like to look at it.
02:34:16.000 I think it's fascinating because it's so old.
02:34:17.000 Actually, as a work of art, it's not impressive, but as a subject matter.
02:34:22.000 What is being depicted there is rather interesting.
02:34:25.000 I sort of disagree.
02:34:27.000 And this is why I disagree.
02:34:28.000 Because the thing in the upper left that might be a spider shows me a really rudimentary level of replicating what they're trying to draw.
02:34:36.000 That looks like shit.
02:34:37.000 And so this looks like shit too.
02:34:39.000 I don't know what it is.
02:34:39.000 It might be a bug.
02:34:41.000 It might be an animal.
02:34:43.000 It's like the guy sucks at drawing.
02:34:45.000 He's not that good.
02:34:46.000 So to try to attribute anything to it, I think it'll be a little disingenuous.
02:34:50.000 So those archaeologists that are trying to figure what this thing out is, you just guess it, man.
02:34:57.000 Same sort of images found all over the world.
02:35:00.000 It is.
02:35:01.000 The image of the gray head, right?
02:35:03.000 And also the image of the therianthrope, which is the creature that's part human and part animal in form.
02:35:09.000 That is found all around the world.
02:35:12.000 Often I've seen virtually identical images in the Painted Caves in France and in canyons in Utah, for example.
02:35:18.000 And you feel that that is directly related to psychedelic use, the spirit world?
02:35:22.000 Absolutely.
02:35:22.000 I think this is related to psychedelics as well.
02:35:24.000 I think that's a painting of a vision.
02:35:26.000 And the vision might have been, you know, not very clear, but that's what's being painted.
02:35:31.000 I think somebody gave a three-year-old a colored rock, and that's what they drew.
02:35:35.000 That's what my three-year-old draws.
02:35:37.000 I'm telling you, man.
02:35:39.000 The idea of the morphing of the...
02:35:42.000 If you're looking at Google, call up Chauvet, Chauvet Cave, images from Chauvet Cave.
02:35:48.000 I want Joe to see some beautiful images.
02:35:50.000 Oh, no, I will.
02:35:51.000 I will be very impressed.
02:35:52.000 I'm just joking around.
02:35:53.000 I'm being completely joking.
02:35:55.000 But you're right, that image is rudimentary.
02:35:58.000 What are the best images, the best images, depictions of aliens to you that you feel?
02:36:03.000 Well, first of all, let me make it clear.
02:36:06.000 I don't think that we're dealing with aliens, quote-unquote.
02:36:11.000 Well, I mean that gray archetype.
02:36:14.000 I think we're dealing with a mystery.
02:36:15.000 I think we're dealing with a phenomenon.
02:36:16.000 And I think we as a culture or certain members of our culture are jumping to the conclusion that creatures a bit like us, perhaps looking slightly different, In very high-tech craft are crossing interstellar space.
02:36:29.000 There's a beautiful picture from Chauvet.
02:36:31.000 It's not bad.
02:36:31.000 Are crossing interstellar space and are coming here in technology.
02:36:34.000 I personally think, again, I can't prove it, but I think it's more likely we're dealing with interdimensional contexts, that these entities are not high-tech aliens from a planet a bit like ours, but they're coming to us from literally the other side of reality.
02:36:49.000 Well, my unfortunate labeling aside, calling them aliens, I meant that archetype that you say repeats itself over and over again.
02:36:56.000 Yeah, South Africa, for example, in the Drakensberg Mountains, images just like that.
02:37:01.000 What's the best example we could pull up right now?
02:37:03.000 I don't think you'd be able to pull this up.
02:37:05.000 No, they don't have those images online?
02:37:07.000 No, you might find it.
02:37:08.000 Everything is on the internet.
02:37:10.000 I'm not sure.
02:37:11.000 How could they not have that online?
02:37:12.000 I have it in my book, Supernatural.
02:37:14.000 But what is the best one that's online, in your opinion?
02:37:17.000 I honestly couldn't tell you.
02:37:19.000 I just wanted to get some.
02:37:20.000 I've seen some really fascinating ones.
02:37:23.000 One crazy shaman where it's a very strange-looking creature.
02:37:32.000 He looks like it could be.
02:37:33.000 Maybe from Shaman Cave in Texas, possibly.
02:37:36.000 Is that what it is?
02:37:37.000 Maybe.
02:37:37.000 And those are Native American depictions?
02:37:39.000 Yeah.
02:37:40.000 But then you find similar things from Tassili in Algeria.
02:37:43.000 You know, these kind of glowing figures that seem to, it's very easy to construe them as alien visitors from other planets.
02:37:52.000 Why do so many drugs, like whether it's ayahuasca or there's other ones that have archetypes that are built in like snakes and jaguars, what do you think that is?
02:38:02.000 Do you think that's the experiences of the people that have taken it before you?
02:38:06.000 Well, first of all, I don't think it's that we don't know what an archetype is.
02:38:10.000 There's this idea that the human brain has all these patterns and shapes just built into it archetypally.
02:38:15.000 I think just as possible is that there are other levels of reality in which entities are able to look like that, shape-shifting entities that can take on many different forms.
02:38:26.000 The experience is very universal.
02:38:28.000 For example, everyone who drinks ayahuasca, pretty much everyone, if they persist with it, will encounter serpents.
02:38:36.000 And those serpents aren't Like your everyday serpent, you know, they're 500 feet long with mouths the size of cars and richly colored and patterned and intelligent.
02:38:53.000 MR. Now, why is it that somebody who drinks ayahuasca in Tokyo and somebody who drinks it in New York and somebody who drinks it in the Amazon, that they all encounter these serpent, intelligent serpent entities?
02:39:03.000 Why do you think of this?
02:39:04.000 MR. Well, I think that there's something out there which chooses to manifest in that form, and I think that it's being witnessed just as if Three different explorers went into the jungle and met the same previously uncontacted tribe and came back and drew us images.
02:39:19.000 And I think that there is some reality to it.
02:39:21.000 But I can't prove that.
02:39:22.000 I just think that that's what's going on.
02:39:25.000 And I've had Enough encounters.
02:39:27.000 So like Rick Strassman's work with DMT, which I know that you're familiar with because you presented the DMT, the spirit molecule documentary, that a number of his volunteers encounter entities who say to them, we're so glad you've discovered this technology.
02:39:44.000 Now we can communicate with you more often.
02:39:46.000 Right.
02:39:47.000 Yeah, I always wonder about those trips, whether or not that's just your imagination on hyperdrive creating these benevolent creatures.
02:39:55.000 And right and proper that you should wonder about it.
02:39:57.000 But there's also the possibility that no, you're communicating with something.
02:40:02.000 But either way, again, like we said, it's the same experience.
02:40:06.000 You're a bad motherfucker, Graham Hancock.
02:40:08.000 Thank you.
02:40:08.000 You really are.
02:40:09.000 I'm glad we're friends.
02:40:09.000 I take that as a compliment.
02:40:10.000 You should, sir.
02:40:11.000 You should.
02:40:11.000 I'm glad we're friends.
02:40:12.000 I really, really enjoy our talks.
02:40:14.000 It's one of my favorite podcasts ever.
02:40:15.000 Thank you very much.
02:40:16.000 Thank you, Joe.
02:40:16.000 It's a real pleasure to sit down with you.
02:40:18.000 So War God, people can get it.
02:40:19.000 Go to GrahamHancock.com.
02:40:21.000 And on Twitter, he's Graham double underscore.
02:40:26.000 Thank you.
02:40:27.000 And thank you to everybody that tuned into the podcast.
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02:40:55.000 We will be back on Monday with Dave Asprey.
02:41:00.000 A lot of people really enjoyed his first talk and he's got a lot of new information.
02:41:05.000 I know a lot of folks have questions about the whole Bulletproof Exec.
02:41:09.000 Go to BulletproofExec.com if you want to prepare for this and Find out what the fuck Dave Asprey's all about, but he's a brilliant guy, and we look forward to talking to him on Monday.
02:41:18.000 Alright, thank you everybody.
02:41:19.000 Much love.
02:41:20.000 Big kiss.