In this episode of Ancient Apocalypse, host Joe Rogan sits down with his good friend Dr. Carl Sagan to discuss his new Netflix show, "Ancient Apocalypse," which explores the theories of a lost civilization that disappeared during the Ice Age. They discuss the implications of these theories, and how archaeology deals with them, as well as why these theories are so controversial and why we should embrace them as evidence of something beyond our wildest dreams. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings, which is produced by Micah Vellian. Additional music written and performed by Ian Dorsch and Matthew Boll. Special thanks and shout out to our sponsor, Caff Monster Mashup. We're working on transcribing this episode and putting it on the next episode of the podcast, which will be out soon. Thank you so much for all the support, it really means a lot to us and we can't thank you enough for all of the support we've gotten so far. We're looking forward to seeing you all in the future episodes. Cheers, Joe and Sarah! - The Joe Rogans Experience, by Caitie! Joe & Sarah Subscribe to AncientApocalypse on Podulphia.org/AncientApocalypse and subscribe to Ancient Apocalypse on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your shows, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review us a review! Subscribe on iTunes and review our podcast recommendations! If you like what you're listening to this podcast, subscribe to our podcast, we'll be listening to Ancient Mythology Podcasts! We'll be looking out for more of your thoughts and reviews on the show on the pod? and we'll send you a review on the podcast on social media! Please rate and subscribe on your favorite podcine, and review it on iTunes! and other links to our social media platforms! on the Podulium! Thanks for listening to the podcast? Subscribe, subscribe on iTunes, subscribe and review the podcast! I'll be checking out the podcast and reviewing it out on your podcast, and the podcast you're getting a review, and more! we'll also be listening out for your reviews and more in the podcast next week, coming soon!
00:00:17.000Congratulations on the success of your show.
00:00:18.000It's been very awesome to see, and it's been really awesome to hear from so many people about it that know that I'm really fascinated by the subject.
00:00:26.000And the reviews have all been super positive for my friends, so I'm really excited about it.
00:00:30.000Well, thank you for appearing on Ancient Apocalypse as well.
00:01:26.000Somebody's building a road or building apartment buildings or building a dam, and they call in archaeologists to see if there's any interesting archaeology there.
00:01:37.000And this is part of the problem I have with...
00:01:41.000With archaeology as a discipline, it likes to think of itself as scientific.
00:01:46.000But what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past.
00:01:53.000Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates?
00:02:07.000Yeah, I think it's a complicated mixture of things.
00:02:13.000First of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo.
00:02:23.000You know, anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with.
00:02:28.000And then it takes the next step and really seeks to attack I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out-on-the-edge idea.
00:02:52.000Every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal New information.
00:02:57.000But the reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. But with Ancient Apocalypse, much bigger platform,
00:03:13.000reaching a much wider audience, the reaction was just hysterical.
00:04:02.000I mean, whatever they did, however they did it, Is unbelievably extraordinary.
00:04:07.000And I think pointing that out is amazing.
00:04:12.000I mean, what you're discovering and what you're showing on that show is that there are a lot of mysteries when it comes to the history of human beings, and we should embrace those mysteries.
00:04:23.000Because there's concrete, irrefutable evidence, especially in terms of like Gobekli Tepe and some of the other structures.
00:04:44.000And that's why it's ancient apocalypse, because we know that there was a global cataclysm, a slow one, 1,200 years long, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, called the Younger Dryas.
00:04:57.000There's still arguments about what caused it, but the fact that it was cataclysmic is not really disputed.
00:05:05.000The accusations that were put against me and the show of being—the accusations included the words racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic.
00:05:48.000Those knowledge bringers are described as white-skinned.
00:05:51.000And that is why the show was accused of racism because archaeology has since taken the view that all of those stories were made up by the Spanish.
00:06:00.000And that seems to me completely ridiculous.
00:06:04.000Both in Mexico and in Peru and Bolivia, we have traditions.
00:06:15.000And actually, I think it's racist of archaeology to imagine that the magic powers of the Spaniards could impose a myth upon indigenous peoples all over the Americas, that they'd just be so stupid that they would fall for this story told by the Spaniards.
00:06:31.000Of course, these are indigenous myths and traditions.
00:06:34.000And I was reporting them in that book and I stand by them and it turns out that there's actually a huge argument within academia about this and my critics were just giving one side of that argument.
00:06:45.000Trevor Burrus And what is the rest of the argument?
00:06:49.000Well, the other side of the argument that it's inconceivable that the Spaniards made up these stories.
00:06:54.000These stories were reported to the first Spanish visitors in Mexico and in Peru.
00:06:59.000They were reported to them by indigenous peoples.
00:07:02.000As indigenous myths and the fact that they're right spread across the Americas makes it very unlikely.
00:07:08.000I mean, if it was one story, but if it's a dozen stories and they're told over a huge geographical region, the notion that this is a Spanish conspiracy, it's an ultimate conspiracy theory.
00:07:19.000I don't think we should take away these traditions from the indigenous people who reported them.
00:07:25.000But it gave a very useful handle for people to attack this series on.
00:07:33.000So the theory is that it was an uneven destruction, right?
00:07:39.000And that some places fared better than other places in terms of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, right?
00:07:52.000And by the way, on that point, I have never in anything that I've written or anything that I've broadcast ever myself suggested that white races were involved.
00:08:06.000Actually, it would be quite stupid to do so because if you look at Europe during the Ice Age, and I'm talking about a lost civilization of the Ice Age.
00:08:12.000Northern Europe and North America were absolutely inhospitable wildernesses during the Ice Age.
00:08:19.000They were frozen, they were dry, and they were dangerous.
00:08:23.000And they were not the places that people would go.
00:08:25.000People naturally gravitated south towards the equator, towards the tropics.
00:08:29.000That's where I would expect to find traces of a lost civilization, and that's where I do find traces of a lost civilization.
00:08:35.000I've never reported anything about the UK. For example, in my books, we have Stonehenge, we have Avery, we have these stone circles, but they're not old enough.
00:08:43.000That was the time when the UK started to get warmer, and it's the same with the rest of Northern Europe, and it's the same with the northern part of North America.
00:08:50.000You have to go down to the southern part of North America.
00:09:41.000Archaeology maintained that this Clovis culture, so-called Clovis culture – we don't know what they call themselves – were the first Americans and that there were no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years ago.
00:09:53.000And bit by bit, the new evidence has come in which has – Forced archaeologists screaming and tearing out their hair to back away from the Clovis first paradigm and admit that actually, yes, there were people here before that.
00:10:05.000But even then, they're reluctant to go very far back.
00:10:08.000We've recently had these footprints in White Sands in New Mexico, 23,000 years old or so.
00:10:29.000What I see again is an unfortunate mindset where a new and interesting idea is proposed, supported by masses of evidence and published in Nature.
00:10:38.000Nature has a pretty high bar to what it accepts.
00:10:41.000And then the critics look for any way to get rid of it.
00:12:04.000Well, he recently started a bone rush in the East River.
00:12:09.000Because it turns out that during the 1920s or 1930s, stuff that they had taken from his land before he owned it, they had dumped some of it.
00:12:19.000Because they had so much of it, they dumped it in the East River.
00:12:21.000And, you know, they were balking at it.
00:12:23.000But meanwhile, these people found it there.
00:12:44.000And we'll look forward to seeing the dating results.
00:12:46.000But the fact that we're dealing with megafauna that went extinct between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago implies very strongly that it's at least that old.
00:12:56.000Not only that, this area has a very thick layer of carbon that seems to indicate some sort of a mass burn or some sort of a horrible disaster.
00:13:06.000So they're going through these layers of things, and they're finding an unbelievable amount of animals that died in this area.
00:13:19.000I'm strongly opposed to what they call the overkill hypothesis.
00:13:23.000This is one of the alternative explanations for why the megafauna went extinct at that time, is that hunter-gatherers literally wiped out all the megafauna.
00:13:33.000And to me, for a couple of reasons, that doesn't make sense.
00:13:36.000It doesn't make sense, first of all, because hunter-gatherers we know in the world today do not wipe out their prey animals.
00:14:37.000The Tunguska event is a recent example of that.
00:14:40.00030th of June, 1908. Happens to be at the peak of the Beta Taurids and the Taurid meteor stream is identified as the likely culprit for what happened in the Younger Dryas.
00:14:52.000Wildfires burning, you get these impacts smashing into the Earth's...
00:14:57.000Bursting in the air over forests, it caused huge fires and that's why you get enormous amounts of charcoal as a result.
00:15:05.000And then the larger objects, it's thought, hit the North American ice cap and caused a very large amount of meltwater to flow into the world ocean.
00:15:13.000And that's what brought temperatures down at the beginning of the younger dryers.
00:15:18.000We can argue there are alternative theories.
00:15:22.000Robert Schock prefers a change in solar activity and, you know, kudos to Robert.
00:15:26.000He's a brilliant scientist and he's put his neck on the line by advocating a much older Sphinx.
00:15:32.000Any scientist these days in the field of archaeology who sticks his neck out and says that the archaeological narrative is wrong immediately gets massively...
00:15:45.000A couple of points I'd like to make about this.
00:15:48.000First of all, we said at the beginning, most archaeology, certainly in the industrialized countries, is a result of a dam or a road being built and archaeologists being called in to see if there's anything there.
00:16:01.000Something's happening and archaeologists go in there.
00:16:03.000And then there's huge areas of the world that have had very little archaeology done in them.
00:16:10.000Those include the Amazon rainforest where I've just been.
00:16:14.000I've been three weeks in the Brazilian Amazon and another couple of weeks in Peru.
00:16:19.000And there are extraordinary revelations coming out of the Amazon rainforest.
00:16:25.000Up until very recently, had very little archaeology done.
00:16:29.000You're talking about six million square kilometers of the Earth's surface, which has hardly been touched by archaeology.
00:16:34.000And now it is being touched by archaeology, thanks to LIDAR, which is identifying enormous structures under the canopy.
00:16:41.000We're finding that we have to rewrite the whole story of the Amazon, that there were potentially populations of millions living in the Amazon, that there were cities, they were joined by roads hundreds of kilometers in length.
00:16:51.000All of these things are recent discoveries which says we should be thinking again about the Amazon.
00:16:56.000Same goes for the submerged continental shells, 27 million square kilometers Of the best real estate on Earth that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now.
00:17:06.000Yes, there's been some marine archaeology, but not enough to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
00:17:12.000And the same with the Sahara Desert, 9 million square kilometers.
00:17:15.000A little bit of archaeology done, but before archaeologists say there was no lost civilization, this is what the Society for American Archaeology said in their open letter to Netflix, complaining about my show.
00:17:26.000They said, we know that there was no lost civilization during the Ice Age.
00:17:32.000And my question to them is, how can they possibly know that when they've looked at relatively small areas of the Earth?
00:19:05.000I see people who do believe what they're saying and who think I'm wrong, but who feel that I'm such a threat to the narrative that they present, that I must be neutralized in any way possible.
00:19:29.000If I get in an airplane, I do want the pilot to be a properly qualified pilot.
00:19:34.000I want him to have undergone all the training and to be really good at what he does.
00:19:40.000But flying an airplane and studying the human past are two different things.
00:19:44.000And archaeologists often compare themselves to airline pilots.
00:19:46.000They say, you wouldn't get in an airplane without a properly trained pilot, so why are you studying the past without a properly trained archaeologist?
00:19:56.000You've got a very narrow perspective on what the past could be and you're defending and protecting that perspective and imposing a narrative about the past on the public.
00:20:07.000And that's where we get into a kind of religious aspect of this.
00:20:11.000That they become the high priests of the past.
00:20:13.000Well, like Zahi Hawass is an excellent example in Egypt.
00:20:59.000But at Edfu in Upper Egypt, there's a whole story of a homeland of the primeval ones that was destroyed in a great cataclysm and flooded by the sea, leaving only a few survivors who traveled around the world seeking to restart civilization.
00:21:15.000It's told very clearly in the Edfu building text, which fortunately have now been completely translated Sadly only into German.
00:21:23.000I hope we'll see the full English translation in due course.
00:21:26.000But the translations I was working from when I first studied them are very good and they've been reinforced and supported by this new Fuller translation.
00:21:34.000So I think the Atlantis story does have an ancient Egyptian origin and I think the ancient Egyptians, Egyptians should be proud of it rather than...
00:21:54.000I mean, we have hundreds of myths and traditions from countries all around the globe, which speak of a great global cataclysm, a huge flood, often wildfires.
00:22:05.000Destruction of human beings and of animals.
00:22:08.000A few survivors who seek to restart civilization.
00:22:11.000It's a global story, not a single story told by Plato.
00:22:14.000And I mean, if you hear the same story from so many different cultures, at what point in time do you go, maybe there's something to this?
00:22:22.000I mean, it's just very strange to try to deny that.
00:22:26.000Again, we have this… Especially with the physical evidence.
00:22:28.000Yeah, especially with the physical evidence.
00:22:30.000And it's interesting with the physical evidence like Gobekli Tepe.
00:22:37.000I mean it used to be argued Robert Shock and John Anthony West's work on the Great Sphinx suggesting that the Sphinx could be 12,000 plus years old.
00:22:46.000It used to be argued that was impossible because there was no other site anywhere in the world, no other megalithic site of the same age.
00:24:11.000I've stood on top of one megalith that they partially cut out of the bedrock with the T-shape, but then they found a fault in it and they left it there.
00:25:16.000I think that what we're looking at at Gobekli Tepe, there's no doubt that the population around Gobekli Tepe were all hunter-gatherers when Gobekli Tepe started to be made.
00:25:27.000And that's the weirdest thing of all because previously archaeology always used to say hunter-gatherer cultures did not have...
00:25:35.000The manpower did not have the organizational skills, could not generate the surpluses that would allow people to specialize in architecture and engineering and astronomy and so on.
00:25:43.000So it used to be said that hunter-gatherers couldn't do that.
00:25:46.000Now archaeologists have backpedaled on that and they're saying, well, yeah, clearly hunter-gatherers did it.
00:25:50.000The funny thing is that during the thousand years that Gobekli Tepe functions, and it runs from roughly 11,600 years ago to, say, 9,600 years ago, 10,600 years ago.
00:26:04.000During those 1,000 years, the population of Gobekli Tepe transitions from being hunter-gatherers to being agriculturalists.
00:26:11.000So we see two new ideas suddenly appearing at Gobekli Tepe.
00:26:17.000And a shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture.
00:26:20.000And what Gobekli Tepe looks like to me is a transfer of technology, that people who already knew how to work megalithic architecture and align it precisely to the risings of particular stars, for example Sirius, I think Gobekli Tepe came to Gobekli Tepe at a time of chaos and cataclysm in the world.
00:26:38.000And they sought to introduce a new way of thinking.
00:26:41.000I think Gobekli Tepe was created as a project to mobilize the local community, to give them something to work on, to bring them together.
00:26:49.000And it's not an accident that during that thousand years they transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture.
00:26:55.000I don't see massive technical complications in creating Gobekli Tepe except those very precise alignments.
00:27:03.000But what I do see is a sudden appearance of something that shouldn't have been there.
00:27:53.000And actually, the interesting thing about the Amazon Joe is it's been grievously misunderstood over the years.
00:28:02.000And fortunately, archaeology is beginning to come to terms with it.
00:28:06.000There was agriculture in the Amazon going back a very long way, going back at least 10,000 years, maybe further.
00:28:13.000And we may have discussed this before, but there's this curious soil that exists in the Amazon that they call terra preta, or Amazonian dark earth.
00:28:24.000Recent investigations have shown without doubt that it's man-made and deliberately man-made, not an accidental result of refuse tips, but a deliberate attempt to make the Amazon fertile.
00:28:35.000And how do they know that it's deliberate?
00:28:37.000Because they find in it the same ingredients.
00:28:39.000And amongst those ingredients are always broken bits of ceramics.
00:30:34.000But in the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Acre, as a result of clearances of the Amazon that have been done for farming purposes, there's this rush to just cut the Amazon down and replace it with cattle ranches and soybean farms.
00:30:51.000Those clearances have revealed something that again, according to the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't be there, which is gigantic earthworks, huge ones, a bit like the henges in Europe.
00:31:03.000Enormous embankments, ditches and in geometrical forms.
00:31:08.000So you get enormous squares, enormous circles.
00:31:30.000And flying his drone within a mile of known structures that are outside the rainforest now, he found two more huge geoglyphs under the rainforest canopy, which will be investigated.
00:31:47.000They reckon the team working on this, that's Marty Parson of the University of Helsinki and Alcea Ranzi who's a Brazilian archaeologist and geologist.
00:31:56.000They reckon that there's thousands of these things still under the rainforest canopy and there's a huge untold story.
00:32:02.000So one of the places I would look for a lost civilization is the Amazon rainforest.
00:32:07.000How do they know that the terra preta replenishes itself?
00:32:25.000Nobody can say they fully understand terra preta.
00:32:27.000But what is fully understood, and it's understood by settlers, is that if they plant on terra preta, they're going to get rich crops coming out of it.
00:32:35.000Is there a way to reproduce that in America?
00:32:38.000Attempts have been made to reproduce it and biochar is one of the words that comes to mind.
00:32:43.000There's even indications that some of the modern indigenous peoples of the Amazon are still creating terra preta.
00:32:51.000This is a whole mystery that needs to be investigated much further.
00:32:54.000The oldest examples are more than 8,000 years old and that's just in the areas that have been surveyed.
00:33:00.000Very likely terra preta goes back much, much, much earlier than that.
00:33:05.000Because it's such an issue with modern farmlands where they have to use these modern fertilizers.
00:33:16.000So if they could figure out a way to reproduce terra preta...
00:33:20.000This would be one of the many ways in which our so-called high-tech industrialized society could learn from indigenous cultures.
00:33:28.000We could learn a lot from them about living in harmony with the environment and about clever things like terra preta, clever things like curare, you know, which is another Amazonian invention, which is the basis of modern anesthesiology.
00:33:59.000Because if you're going to shoot a monkey 200 feet up a tree with your arrow, you don't want it coiling its tail around the tree when it dies.
00:35:09.000There's still 5.5 million left covered by rainforest.
00:35:12.000That's bigger than the entire subcontinent of India.
00:35:15.000And hardly any archaeology has been done.
00:35:17.000And the archaeology that is being done is fascinating.
00:35:21.000And it's particularly in the state of Acre, in the southwest of Brazil, that we're seeing these extraordinary geoglyphs.
00:35:29.000Now I'm here with, I'm on the left there, that's Marty Parsinen from the University of Helsinki, and that is Fabio Filho, who's the LIDAR expert, and that's Alceu Ranzi, who's a Brazilian geographer and archaeologist.
00:35:44.000We're looking at the latest LiDAR discoveries, and there I'm about to take off in a plane with these two guys.
00:35:49.000It was just incredible to fly over there.
00:35:51.000I've flown over the Nazca lines many times, but to fly over this and to see these huge earthworks on a scale of hundreds of meters sitting there, often encroached on by farms, was very, very, very exciting.
00:36:05.000And what's the conventional explanation for these things?
00:36:07.000There is no conventional explanation because really it's only begun to be studied.
00:36:12.000I'll say you first noticed them on an overflight more than 20 years ago, but it's only relatively recently that they've started to get the funding.
00:36:19.000And I want to pay tribute to Eugene Zhang.
00:36:21.000Who is a philanthropist who has provided funding for these guys to continue their work and who's also provided funding to the Comet Research Group and who's also provided funding for the DMT research that's being done at UCSD. What's his name?
00:36:39.000J-H-O-N-G. He's a brilliant philanthropist and he's so open-minded and he's looking to support research in areas that the mainstream just won't touch.
00:38:26.000If there was a lot of stone in the Amazon, I think we'd see stone circles on them as well.
00:38:30.000There's one place further north called Rego Grande where there is an earthwork with a stone circle in it because stone is locally available.
00:38:38.000So do you think this was the base of a structure?
00:38:43.000I've talked to indigenous people there who still respect and revere them.
00:38:47.000And they say that they were for shamanic journeying, that the population would gather within them, that there would be certain areas that might be reserved for the shamans.
00:38:57.000For example, the square on the left, those two cut out areas, top left and right of that square, is suggested that shamans were in there and the rest of the population were in the other area.
00:41:45.000You can't get true north without using astronomy.
00:41:48.000So this tells us not only was there a culture that was capable of creating large-scale public projects, but also they had astronomers amongst them.
00:42:00.000The other thing is the geometrical patterns are very common experience in ayahuasca visions in altered states of consciousness.
00:42:10.000Our culture tends to despise altered states of consciousness, although fortunately that's changing.
00:42:14.000But in the Amazon and many indigenous cultures, they're regarded as extremely important.
00:42:19.000That we can't confine ourselves to the everyday, wide awake state of consciousness that requires us to interface with the physical world.
00:42:27.000There are other states of consciousness which are also valuable and which bring teachings.
00:42:31.000And it's just one of those facts that most people who drink ayahuasca, most of the time, at some point, will experience geometrical visions.
00:42:38.000So there's a question, is there a connection here between the use of ayahuasca and the geometrical patterns?
00:42:46.000There's a huge rock wall that has been found in the Colombian Amazon, Cerro de la Lindosa, which I'm hoping to get to this year.
00:42:57.000Eight kilometers long, covered in rock paintings.
00:43:00.000The rock paintings are dated more than 12,000 years old.
00:45:51.000There has been an argument made by a couple of astronomers that what is depicted there is the constellation of Taurus.
00:45:59.000And that in itself is heresy because archaeologists who want to give everything to the Greeks say that it was the Greeks who invented the constellations of the zodiac.
00:46:11.000Why do they think that that represents the constellation?
00:46:14.000Because of the six little dots which are not, I think, on the head.
00:46:19.000I think they're somewhere behind, not in this picture.
00:46:22.000Which is often how the Pleiades are seen.
00:47:12.000It's not accepted by mainstream archaeology because of their narrative, which is that the discovery of the constellations of the zodiac is given to the Greeks or perhaps to the Mesopotamians before the Greeks.
00:47:26.000It's not thought that any human culture could have noticed the constellations of the zodiac before that, and that's really absurd because the constellations of the zodiac are on the path of the sun.
00:47:35.000The sun rises against the background of a different constellation every month.
00:47:40.000And how would the ancients have missed that, especially since the skies were an ever-present phenomenon to them in a way that they are not to us?
00:47:47.000We're cut off from the skies by light pollution, but the ancients were not.
00:47:51.000What a fascinating concept that they knew about the constellations 30-plus thousand years ago.
00:47:57.000And we see that again in Gobekli Tepe in Pillar 43 in Enclosure D. You see a constellation that we recognize as Sagittarius.
00:48:06.000Brian and I were talking about one of the ancient versions of human beings, and I sent him this the other day because I read this article that I thought was amazing, where it was talking about They found wooden structures that were half a million years old.
00:48:36.000Half a million years ago is pre-anatomically modern humans.
00:48:41.000The earliest example of anatomically modern humans so far found is about 300,000 years and that's from Morocco.
00:48:50.000But there's a new thinking going on now.
00:48:54.000What about the Neanderthals who we know that anatomically modern humans interbred with?
00:48:58.000Maybe the Neanderthals are just another anatomically modern human form.
00:49:02.000Maybe they're not a different species.
00:49:05.000They're homo Neanderthalensis as opposed to homo sapiens.
00:49:09.000But maybe it was all one and there were different forms of human beings at that time.
00:49:14.000In that case, these wooden structures would fit within the Neanderthal time frame.
00:49:19.000This is that same culture, Jamie, that Brian was telling us buried their dead in a very sophisticated way where they had to crawl through these cave systems.
00:50:15.000That's the result of a National Geographic explorer in residence called Lee Berger.
00:50:21.000And he, as you discussed with Brian, we won't go over it again, but he found evidence of deliberate burial in a very complicated, difficult cave system, which you can hardly access.
00:50:33.000And, of course, immediately this was published.
00:50:37.000And it was published in a Netflix documentary.
00:50:40.000The archaeological establishment descended on him like a ton of bricks and tried to find all kinds of reasons why it couldn't possibly be deliberate burial.
00:50:49.000Whereas I think it would be much more interesting if archaeology tried to, first of all, look at all kinds of reasons why it could be deliberate burial because that opens many doors.
00:50:58.000Whereas saying, no, it's impossible, just closes all the doors.
00:51:02.000Well, what are the alternative explanations for why they had mass burial sites inside of a cave?
00:51:12.000And somehow buried themselves under the topsoil and then left engravings on the cave walls, which are very similar to engravings that we find in the caves of France, for example.
00:51:24.000Well, it does make sense, though, that ancient human species would slowly learn the things that we learned.
00:51:31.000They would slowly pick up tool making.
00:51:33.000They would slowly pick up the ability to harness fire.
00:51:36.000And that as time went on, as the species became more sophisticated and more advanced, as it evolved, it would just refine those methods.
00:51:56.000And a lot of people don't understand what I mean by that, but what I mean by it is that archaeological discoveries are constantly pushing horizons back, but not considering the implications of that.
00:52:05.000It wasn't so long ago that anatomically modern humans were thought to be just 50,000 years old.
00:52:10.000Now, if anatomically modern humans with the modern brain, with our capacities and abilities have only existed for 50,000 years, that doesn't leave a lot of room for a lost civilization to come and go.
00:52:22.000But then we find 196,000 years ago from Ethiopia and then more recently 300,000 years ago.
00:52:41.000Very fascinating also that the oldest known ones are from Africa.
00:52:50.000And, you know, we must recognize Egypt as an African culture.
00:52:54.000That is what the ancient Egyptians were.
00:52:57.000I believe their language belonged to the Hamitic language family, which is closely related to the Somali language, for example, in East Africa.
00:53:07.000African culture, incredibly sophisticated, incredibly advanced, doing stuff that we just don't know how to do today.
00:53:15.000Archaeologists will tell you they could build the Great Pyramid, but I defy them to do that.
00:53:19.000The Great Pyramid is literally impossible.
00:53:21.000It's something that doesn't make any sense.
00:53:23.000It certainly doesn't make sense as the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh, which is what we're told it was.
00:53:29.000Well, it's also sort of the ultimate – if you wanted to leave behind evidence of your culture – Something that if there was a cataclysm and people did have to sort of rethink the history of the world, that would be the best thing to leave.
00:54:37.000Rising up through the center of the pyramid.
00:54:39.000But now we know there's a second one above it that hasn't been explored yet.
00:54:43.000And that's a result of scanned pyramids.
00:54:45.000There's corridors and passageways that we didn't know were there.
00:54:47.000So the Great Pyramid is gradually, bit by bit, revealing its secrets.
00:54:52.000And it's almost as though it was waiting for a time when human beings were ready to receive those secrets and had the ability to decode them.
00:55:02.000How do they access the second grand gallery?
00:55:29.000The scanning just shows a void, but I'm informed reliably that the recent investigation has identified that void as another Grand Gallery, which is inside the Great Pyramid.
00:55:41.000And the Grand Gallery is one of the wonders of the world.
00:55:45.000Same goes for those shafts that cut through the walls of the so-called Queen's Chamber and King's Chamber.
00:55:52.000I resist these names that archaeologists have applied to the Great Pyramid.
00:55:56.000I resist the notion that it was the tomb of Khufu.
00:55:59.000I resist the notion that the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid, was intended to be Khufu's tomb chamber.
00:56:07.000But then they just changed their minds and abandoned it.
00:56:11.000And then they built the one that's now called the Queen's Chamber.
00:56:13.000That was intended to be for Khufu, but they abandoned that as well.
00:56:16.000Then they went up the Grand Gallery and they created the so-called King's Chamber.
00:56:20.000And because it has a sarcophagus in it and for no other reason, that is said to have been the original burial place of Khufu.
00:56:29.000And the connections to Khufu are from hieroglyphs depicting his vision that if he uncovered the Sphinx, he would become the Pharaoh of Egypt.
00:56:38.000Isn't there something along those lines?
00:56:42.000And it's Thutmose IV or III, if I remember correctly, In other words, he's a later pharaoh from the time of the Old Kingdom.
00:56:51.000And he put between the paws of the Sphinx a stella, which is called the dream stella.
00:56:57.000And in it, he records a dream that he had, that at that time the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand.
00:57:04.000And the dream was that he should clear the Sphinx.
00:57:07.000The Sphinx requested him or ordered him.
00:57:10.000To free it of sand and reveal it again in its true form.
00:57:14.000This was at least 1,200 years after the Sphinx is supposed to have been built, 4,500 years ago.
00:57:21.000But as you know, Robert Shock and I and many others are convinced the Sphinx is much, much older than that, that it goes back 12,000 plus years.
00:57:29.000And this is based on geological evidence of heavy rainfall, which is another interesting thing about the climate and the environment of that area, that we think of it as being desert, but at one point in time, it wasn't.
00:57:42.000Well, this is one of the reasons why I'm so frustrated by archaeologists claiming that they could know there was no lost civilization when they've done so little work in the Sahara.
00:57:53.000When the Sahara was In a number of occasions during the Ice Age, incredibly fertile.
00:58:00.000Very, very nurturing environment with huge river systems running through it and lakes.
00:58:05.000It's not disputed that that was the case.
00:58:07.000It was a kind of environment that would have nurtured human civilization.
00:58:11.000And we really can't write off the possibility of a lost civilization until we take a much closer, much more detailed look at the Sahara.
00:58:51.000The world keeps on recreating itself and we human beings make our journey through this changing world and we try to fix it and say this is how things were, this is how things will be and it never cooperates with us on that.
00:59:05.000It's just incredibly fascinating that the timeline when you go beyond the traditional timeline and you get back into where you and Robert Schock have speculated the age of the Sphinx, now you're talking about a completely different environment of lush rainforest and many,
00:59:22.000We're talking about a completely different Sahara.
00:59:25.000And shock's evidence is of a thousand years of heavy rainfall.
00:59:28.000That's what the Sphinx bears witness to, that it was already there when the rains of the Younger Dryas and the Younger Dryas affected the Sahara with heavy rainfall.
00:59:38.000Just as further north it changed the climate and made it much colder in the Sahara, it became much wetter.
00:59:43.000And it's that period of rains that are the most likely culprit for weathering the Sphinx in the way it is.
00:59:49.000But it could have stood there thousands of years before that.
00:59:51.000There's also very clear evidence that the face in the Sphinx is much younger, right?
01:00:54.000And this is, again, where Egyptology tries to attach the Sphinx to a particular period.
01:01:01.000Egyptology claims that's the face of Kafre, who was the successor to Khufu.
01:01:06.000It doesn't look like any known statues of Khafre that I can see, but let's not worry about that.
01:01:14.000It wears the headdress that's worn by the Sphinx, best looked at in the picture top left or the Quora picture.
01:01:24.000That headdress is called the Nemes headdress.
01:01:27.000It's the classic headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh.
01:01:30.000Not, in my view, Khafre, but the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh.
01:01:35.000But it's on a head that is way too small by comparison with the body.
01:01:39.000And both Shock and I and John Anthony West, Manus Seifzada, who's another excellent researcher in this field, we all feel that That the Sphinx was almost certainly a complete lion at one point.
01:01:53.000And that that head sticking up above the plateau got very heavily eroded.
01:01:58.000And by the time the ancient Egyptians inherited it, they decided to improve it a little bit, to cut down that heavily eroded head and put the head of a pharaoh on it.
01:02:06.000Does it have the same sort of sophisticated proportions where they're perfect left and right as some of the other statues do, which is another incredible mystery, that when they look at the measurements of these immense statues, somehow or another, they're completely symmetrical on both left and right side.
01:02:25.000I'm actually not sure whether that's the case with the Sphinx.
01:02:28.000I wouldn't be surprised because I have no doubt whatsoever that the head of the Great Sphinx was carved by the ancient Egyptians who made those statues.
01:02:35.000But the question is what was it carved from?
01:05:08.000You're looking at the model for the later Greek temples.
01:05:13.000They followed that example and they were honest about it.
01:05:16.000It's modern archaeology that has kind of rewritten the story and given way too much to the Greeks.
01:05:20.000When you say that in Gobekli Tepe, the speculation is that they use stone tools, is there any evidence of bizarre cutting like they find in Egypt where it looks like they're using some sort of a cylindrical drill or whether it looks like the stone is somehow scooped out in some method that we don't understand?
01:05:41.000I've not seen evidence of a cylindrical drill at Gobekli Tepe, but what you do see I'm gonna press that red button.
01:08:04.000When these people are trying to date this to 11,800 years ago and say that people only had stone tools, how do they speculate that these people did this stuff?
01:08:30.000There are some so-called pounding stones, but I find it difficult to see how pounding stones, how pounding away could have created this very fine result.
01:08:40.000It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
01:08:43.000It's the same with the incredible work that you find at Cuzco and Sacsayhuaman in Peru.
01:08:50.000Again, they're not supposed to have had – this is supposedly recent.
01:11:53.000So the notion that you can date a megalithic site with carbon dating is questionable right away.
01:11:58.000But what tends to be done is that you look for a piece of organic material that is so associated with the megalith you want to date that you can say or propose that they come from the same period of time.
01:12:11.000I have that problem with the huge Moai statues in Easter Island.
01:12:17.000What's carbon dated is the platforms they stand on and there's a lot to suggest that those platforms are much later than the original statues and the statues were re-erected on those platforms.
01:12:28.000In the case of Gobekli Tepe, one of the very special things about it is that it was deliberately buried.
01:12:34.000They ran that site for about a thousand years from 11,600 to say 10,600 years ago and then they closed it down.
01:12:42.000And they went to great effort to fill up all the enclosures with rubble and to create a hill over the top of it.
01:12:50.000And that's why Gobekli Tepe then remained untouched for the next 10,000 years.
01:12:55.000There's no danger of contamination with younger carbon from a later culture.
01:12:59.000The fact that they found carbon in enclosure D, right by pillar 43, dated to 11,600 years ago, does firmly connect that place to 11,600 years ago.
01:13:13.000There are later dates from Gobekli Tepe.
01:13:56.000Pull that image up because this image has always been wild to me because it kind of shows a sun in the center and then it shows all of the planets in our solar system.
01:14:15.000In terms of what's the bigger one, what's the smaller one?
01:14:16.000I think the ancients had, or certain peoples amongst the ancients, did have a very good idea about our solar system and about the dimensions of the Earth and about the other planets in our solar system.
01:14:30.000Again, this is something that archaeology has dismissed, but I think it's a possibility that's worthy of inquiry.
01:15:24.000But then what about the prequels to Sumer?
01:15:26.000Let's take Gobekli Tepe into account because it's so close to Sumer.
01:15:30.000And by the way, just within a few hundred kilometers of Gobekli Tepe is Abu Hurera, where there is compelling evidence of a massive airburst 12,800 years ago and a complete wipeout of the local population.
01:15:44.000I don't think it's an accident that Gobekli Tepe is where it is.
01:15:48.000Is there images of this explosion in the sky?
01:16:01.000Ancient – massive amount of evidence on the ground, particularly what is called shocked quartz where the quartz has been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees centigrade.
01:16:37.000But before it was submerged, An enormous amount of material was taken from it and it's that soil that was taken from Abu Herrera to preserve it which is producing the evidence of a Younger Dryas impact there, 12,800 years ago.
01:17:05.000But in this case, thank you archaeology for preserving soil and materials from that site, which allow this work to be done.
01:17:15.000There's no doubt that a cataclysmic event took place there.
01:17:17.000There's just a whole bunch of new papers published in the last two or three weeks on Abu Huraira.
01:17:22.000Which are further consolidating this evidence that it was subject to a very large air burst.
01:17:28.000And that after that, within the 1,000 to 2,000 years after that, just as at Gobekli Tepe, the local population transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture.
01:17:39.000It's fascinating to me how when you go to these sites and you see these – where these ancient structures existed and imagine the climate – And what a major factor that plays in what human beings do and what they're able to do,
01:17:56.000whether they're able to thrive because there's an abundance of resources.
01:17:59.000And then it seems those are the places where they create these incredible structures, like the Mayans.
01:18:05.000And where you go to a place like North America, 20,000 years ago, it was a It was unbelievably inhospitable.
01:18:11.000It was terrifying and filled with all sorts of predators.
01:18:33.000So it makes sense that the people that lived there didn't have the sort of technological sophistication that maybe people had in the – where – The northern part of North America is certainly the area that was under the ice cap until 11,000 years ago.
01:18:50.000Waste of time looking for any sign of a lost civilization there.
01:18:54.000Because it was also a frozen wasteland.
01:18:57.000But the areas closer to the equator, once you get down into the southern states of North America, get yourself into Mexico, get yourself to the Yucatan, the Maya culture, then you're looking at a place where civilizations could really grow and flourish.
01:19:14.000Yeah, that's what's really interesting about just the history of North America in general.
01:19:19.000Is that when you look at how the Native Americans existed and the way they lived just a few hundred years ago, that seems to be like an artifact of what life was like before that.
01:20:34.000We're not equipped to think about disaster descending upon us.
01:20:39.000So if such a thing were to occur, and God forbid that it does, those survivors from our industrialized technological society, those who made it through, would be smart to go take refuge amongst hunter-gatherers.
01:20:54.000They would be the ones who would preserve them and allow them to continue forwards.
01:20:58.000And maybe in that process, there would be an exchange of information, just as the survivors of industrial civilization would learn from hunter-gatherers, so they might have something to teach to hunter-gatherers.
01:21:08.000And I think that's what happened 12,800 years ago.
01:21:11.000Well, it seems like there's so much compelling evidence that that's the case.
01:21:15.000I just – I get so puzzled and baffled by the resistance to it because it's just interesting.
01:21:21.000Well, if it's right, it pulls the rug out completely from under the feet of archaeology and that's why there's resistance to it.
01:21:27.000All human beings are territorial in their own way and archaeologists are no exception.
01:21:35.000They see a gradual, slow, steady evolution of human society and they think that we were at a relatively simple stage during the so-called Stone Age and we just gradually got more and more sophisticated.
01:21:50.000It's an appealing idea and it makes sense in lots of ways, but there isn't room in that.
01:21:55.000For an earlier civilization to have emerged and been destroyed.
01:24:58.000For example, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, there was a whole constellation of evidence which suggested that something bad had happened to the Earth around 12,500 years ago.
01:25:11.000But the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis didn't exist then.
01:25:15.000So I looked into a number of possibilities that might have resulted in a cataclysm at that time.
01:25:21.000Then, that was 1995, 2007, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis comes out, 60 major scientists published in all the big mainstream journals proposing that the Earth went through an absolutely catastrophic episode between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago,
01:25:38.000exactly the window that I was proposing.
01:25:45.000You know, Gobekli Tepe, they began excavations in 1996, a year after I published Fingerprints of the Gods.
01:25:51.000But those excavations began to become public knowledge in the 2000s.
01:25:57.000And the fact that we now have a giant, sophisticated, megalithic site sitting in Turkey, and not alone.
01:26:04.000Karahan Tepe, there's about 10 other sites in that same neighborhood.
01:26:09.000Again, was not explained by the archaeology of 1995. It's something that fits better into the paradigm that I've proposed, that we're dealing with a lost episode in the human story.
01:26:18.000It's also fascinating and somewhat terrifying that if the Younger drives impact theory is correct and it really did reset human civilization, Think of how long it took for Sumer to emerge from total barbarism.
01:26:35.000Who knows what it was like for thousands of years.
01:27:53.000It was a very, very successful series.
01:27:55.000The public reaction to it is very positive.
01:27:59.000I've been writing about these possibilities since the early 1990s, the possibility of a lost civilization.
01:28:06.000The first book that really put me on the map and that immediately attracted a lot of criticism was Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. And then from public appearances, later on appearing on your show in 2011, people began to know my face and I began to be seen and recognized.
01:28:23.000People would come up to me in various places, often because they'd seen me on your show.
01:28:28.000Since the Netflix show, that recognition factor has increased enormously.
01:28:32.000In every airport I go to, I'm stopped.
01:28:34.000People want to take pictures with me, which I'm delighted to do because I would be nothing without my readers.
01:29:19.000That's encouraging to me to hear that kind of thing.
01:29:23.000And at the same time, the criticism itself, I think there's an old saying, you know, when you get a lot of flack, it tells you you're over the target.
01:29:37.000Whether it happens in my lifetime or much later, I don't know.
01:29:41.000But I'm sure we're missing a part of our story.
01:29:44.000My fear is that it's going to repeat itself and we're not going to learn before it happens.
01:29:49.000That's an unfortunate character of the human race, that we do not learn from past mistakes.
01:29:55.000And, you know, we live in a world now Dominated by hatred, dominated by competing nationalism, dominated by competing religions.
01:30:07.000I have no time for – and this is going to annoy some folk – but I have no time for the mainstream monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
01:30:17.000I think that the three of them are behind so much of the trouble and chaos and hatred in the world.
01:30:23.000It's okay to have your religious faith.
01:30:26.000But to say my faith is right and your faith is wrong, that's the first step on the road to ruin.
01:30:31.000And that's what's happening today is these exclusive religious ideas that compel people to behave in really obnoxious ways towards each other.
01:30:40.000There's nothing more dangerous than ideas sometimes.
01:30:43.000And ideas have driven so much of the conflict in the world.
01:30:47.000Look at the ideas behind Hitler's rise to power and the conflicts that resulted.
01:30:52.000People bought into those ideas and it led to disaster.
01:30:55.000And that is happening in the world today, most unfortunately.
01:31:24.000They were not fit to survive in the new world that was created by that impact six million years ago.
01:31:31.000They were not suited for survival in that world.
01:31:33.000And we may not be suited for survival in this world largely through our own behavior and our own mad obsessions with ideas that are filled with hatred and lead people to despise one another instead of looking for the best in one another.
01:31:47.000I've been lucky enough to travel extensively all my working life, live in many different countries, and I have no doubt that people are the same all over the world.
01:31:57.000The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams.
01:31:59.000I love the cultural diversity of humanity.
01:32:02.000This is one of the beautiful things about the human race.
01:32:04.000So many different cultures bring different important pieces to the party.
01:32:20.000Whatever side of a particular argument we're on, you get down to that basic level, we're all the same.
01:32:27.000I believe what unites us as a species is much more significant than what divides us.
01:32:33.000And we need to start paying less attention to what divides us and more attention to what unites us and to celebrate our diversity at the same time without saying, my diversity is better than yours.
01:32:43.000It's just so difficult for that message to get through when you have these governments and these groups of control that have the narrative that they speak to, whether it's like North Korea where they completely control it or the United States where it's a lot of propaganda and they have control of the mainstream media.
01:33:04.000Subtle in the United States, but it's still control.
01:34:03.000Or who I feel attracted to or I feel who offers some hope.
01:34:07.000I think you had Robert Kennedy Jr. on the show.
01:34:10.000To me, he's an interesting American politician.
01:34:13.000I don't know a whole lot about American politics, but he seems to be a free thinker.
01:34:19.000My litmus test for any leader in an advanced industrialized country is what's his position on drugs?
01:34:26.000What's his position on the war on drugs, his or her position?
01:34:29.000Are they going to maintain this strict control, this legal penalties for people choosing to alter their own state of consciousness?
01:34:39.000Or are they going to realize that our consciousness is fundamental to what we are as human beings and that we as adults must have the sovereign right to make choices about our own consciousness, including taking drugs?
01:34:51.000Even if those choices annoy others, we should still have the right to make those choices.
01:34:56.000And I don't see many politicians who are saying actually what we should do is legalize all drugs.
01:35:02.000I think all drugs should be legalized and then accompanied with wise advice.
01:35:06.000There's no evidence that the war on drugs has had any success in controlling the – there are dangerous drugs.
01:35:13.000There are drugs that I would not advise people to take.
01:35:17.000The way to do it is not to impose draconian penalties on people for exploring their own consciousness.
01:35:23.000The way to do it is to offer wise advice which people take seriously.
01:35:27.000Right now the advice that comes out of drug agencies around the world is not wise advice and everybody knows it's stupid and they don't go along with it.
01:35:35.000So a politician who says, I'm going to legalize all drugs and I'm going to accompany it with wise advice that will help people to make informed decisions and yes, like other things in our society, Drugs should be limited to a certain age group.
01:36:45.000But an older person that's imparting your rule of law on them, then they want to rebel.
01:36:50.000Often when people react to my view on the war on drugs, which is we should throw it away and legalize all drugs, they say, but it will be so dangerous.
01:36:58.000Terrible things will happen if you legalize all drugs.
01:37:43.000Especially when they use the term drugs.
01:37:46.000The problem with that term is it's a blanket that you throw over a bunch of different psychoactive substances that have wildly different results.
01:37:54.000And non-psychoactive substances because aren't pharmacies called drugstores in America?
01:38:28.000But, of course, if somebody wants to take them, that's also their free choice.
01:38:32.000There's also real results that show that when you're exercising, it's 1.25 times more effective than taking SSRIs for depression.
01:38:43.000A regular exercise is one of the most effective methods of mitigating some depression.
01:38:49.000There's different levels of depression, clearly, and some of it seems to be chemical, and there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about that, even.
01:38:58.000But no doubt, exercise is extremely helpful.
01:39:01.000I know if I take a long walk, I feel much better after the walk than I did before.
01:39:47.000Like the Netflix series Painkiller is a great example of what they did to get the entire country on board with this idea that pain is something you should manage with opiates on a regular basis and stay on it.
01:41:31.000I was up around the light, saw myself slumped on the floor, and then I came back into my body.
01:41:37.000But from that moment, I doubted whether I am just my body or whether there's more to me than that, more to all of us than that.
01:41:46.000Ancient Egyptian ideas about this realm being a theater of experience where we come to learn and to grow and develop, we're obliged constantly to Every day to make choices and those choices define us and those choices may be very small or they may be very large but we are learning hopefully from these and I just don't think that this is an accident.
01:42:11.000I don't commit to any of the monotheistic faiths but this is my belief system that this is a special place that we are here to learn and to grow and to develop in a world that has consequences where there will be consequences to the decisions that we make I like the Buddhist idea of going through multiple incarnations and eventually reaching a state of perfection where you embrace nirvana.
01:43:25.000And, you know, people oftentimes dwell on mistakes and think that that defines them.
01:43:30.000And it can be a real problem Particularly with young people that are insecure, that have had like some sort of a disastrous thing happen, like business failure, being fired, become a drug addict, go to jail, whatever it is, steal something.
01:43:46.000And then you're defined by the worst mistakes that you've made, and that becomes you forever.
01:43:52.000Which you may have made in a state of complete immaturity where you didn't even really fully understand what you were doing.
01:44:29.000It's the only way it gets to you and it's really important to be able to make mistakes and to learn from them.
01:44:33.000And that's another problem with leadership, which is that the whole leadership structure seeks to protect us from making our own sovereign decisions about our lives and to deny us the opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes.
01:44:50.000We've all got to be these perfect creatures that go through life producing and consuming and not causing any trouble.
01:44:56.000I think in regards to drugs, there is a realization.
01:45:01.000There's a reality, rather, that if we do make drugs legal for everyone, there are going to be people who try drugs that would not try them if they were illegal.
01:45:13.000And that there will be a period of time where human beings are going to have to figure out what to do and what not to do and adjust.
01:45:20.000And hopefully they could do this without propaganda.
01:45:23.000Hopefully they could do this without drug commercials that tell them what's good and what's bad.
01:45:27.000I mean, the fact that we still allow them to advertise drugs on television is so bizarre because what they're doing is romancing you into the idea that this is your solution.
01:45:41.000And oftentimes it's for people that are depressed or for people that, you know, like, and then you see these people at the cookout having a great time because they took this pill.
01:45:52.000But it's strange that that is legal because human beings are so easily influenced by advertising, by having something associated with joyous music and And these images of people having this festive gathering and laughing together and you're in a dark place.
01:46:12.000And you see that and like, that's what I want.
01:46:14.000And it's just trickery, this weird game that we're allowed to play on people.
01:46:36.000Because people get less efficient when they're depressed, so antidepressants make them perhaps, although I don't think antidepressants work.
01:47:12.000Whereas the psychedelics, they do challenge the status quo.
01:47:16.000They do lead people, and I've seen this again and again, and it's been the case with me, to question the existing power structure in society and to say there must be something better.
01:47:29.000It also makes you very aware of the frailty of human consciousness in regards to everyday life.
01:47:39.000There's a mechanism, there's a wiring, there's something underneath that, that's so much more profound, that ties us all together in some very bizarre way.
01:47:49.000And it's seemingly unavailable during normal states of consciousness because we evolved as a species that needed to survive.
01:47:59.000And you can't be dwelling on how you connect with nature and the way human beings communicate with each other when you're just trying to eat and live.
01:48:11.000You're trying to get eaten by cats or raided by a foreign tribe.
01:48:15.000And that's why probably these states are so inaccessible to normal consciousness because we would have never made it this far if we were just… But it's interesting that these states have only been demonized in the last 60, 70 years.
01:48:47.000It's also the way it captured the public zeitgeist, the way it captured people's Predetermined opinions on things.
01:48:53.000Because there's a certain group of people that don't investigate things and they prescribe to a predetermined notion of what's good and bad and what is safe and not safe and what's the right way and the wrong way to do things.
01:49:04.000And it's not a well thought out sort of philosophy.
01:49:08.000It's something that they've just sort of adopted.
01:49:10.000And they've adopted from their culture.
01:49:13.000And our culture has some very, very goofy ideas literally based on what happened It's a very crazy situation that we confront with the war on drugs.
01:49:41.000I think there's an issue of human rights which has just been completely neglected by the war on drugs that we the government can tell you what to experience in the inner sanctum of your personality and we will allow certain drugs which happen to make huge amounts of money for our friends in the pharmaceutical industry and we'll not only allow them,
01:50:01.000we'll celebrate them and we'll advertise them in every possible way.
01:50:16.000And one of the good things about the legalization of cannabis in whatever many states it is, 20 plus, is that all those prognostications, all those warnings that legalization would lead to catastrophe turn out not to be true.
01:50:49.000And there are experiences that are available and that have been known about for thousands of years all over the world that can help you grow as a human being.
01:51:10.000But the way we find this out is by letting them be legal and letting people who understand them explain to people what the dangers are, develop protocols based on effective dosages, and also explain what people can't do,
01:52:13.000But they would be available in a setting with experienced practitioners who know what they're doing, who know how best to offer these medicines to help people transition through the death process.
01:52:24.000And it's been shown that particularly psilocybin through these end-of-life fears, that it has an amazing effect.
01:52:43.000They feel that they're part of something wider and larger and bigger, that this body, this life, this time and place is only an incident in a much longer story.
01:52:54.000Which is to me one of the weird things about rigid atheism.
01:52:58.000This concept that when your brain shuts off, when your body dies, consciousness ends and it's just blank.
01:53:05.000And it's just our ego that wants us to believe that there's something more and greater afterwards.
01:53:14.000He's responsible for a lot of that thinking.
01:53:16.000Well, it's they don't want to buy into foolishness.
01:53:20.000And a lot of them believe that at least some of the beliefs of organized religion are just mythical, foolish notions that people attach themselves to in order to comfort themselves, but that they of the superior intellect don't need those comforts.
01:53:45.000If a scientist says, there is no life after death, we are just accidents of chemistry and biology, that is not a statement of scientific fact.
01:53:53.000Well, it's also the most arrogant ones.
01:56:09.000Should I? Yeah, there's a Pure Encapsulations has something that I take called macular support, and it has a bunch of nutrients that are crucial to preserving eyesight.
01:56:21.000Would you text me a little bit of information on that?
01:56:24.000Yeah, I have no affiliation with this company, by the way.
01:57:44.000It belongs to the class of medicines called triptans.
01:57:47.000I take it as a nasal spray and it will pretty much guaranteed stop a migraine within two hours.
01:57:55.000So if I have to do public speaking or come on your show and if I were to get a migraine, I could know within two hours I would be functional again.
01:58:08.000It starts often on one side of the head.
01:58:11.000And it just grows and grows and grows and it completely dominates you and there's a full body malaise and you feel sick and your stomach gets all knotted up.
01:58:18.000And if I don't treat it, I am looking at three to four days in a darkened room wearing an eye mask.
01:58:29.000The pain is agonizing and I get the sense of those are what in the midst of a bad migraine are one of the few times I just feel life is not worth living.
01:58:40.000So I rely on these triptans, but triptans turn out to be quite closely related to dimethyltryptamine.
01:58:48.000And on this – let's put that shot up again.
01:58:52.000On this session that I had with Francisco, I focused the whole session on please help me with my migraines.
01:59:00.000That was the whole thing it was about.
01:59:03.000And I didn't have the entity encounters and I didn't have many of the things that happened with ayahuasca, but I had, this is going to sound nuts to people who think I'm nuts, but I'm going to say it anyway.
01:59:14.000I had a circle of serpents that appeared in front of me and they were all intertwined around each other and they came closer and closer to my forehead and in the middle of them was a bright light and it came right down onto my forehead and I started to feel afraid.
01:59:31.000As one does in a deeply altered state of consciousness sometime.
01:59:34.000And I was kind of backing off and I said, I want this to stop.
01:59:36.000And a voice said to me, just shut up and get out of our way.
01:59:56.000And I can't help associating it directly with that ayahuasca experience and focusing my intention on that happening and Francisco helping me with that as well.
02:00:06.000So normally this migraine thing is a regular occurrence?
02:01:16.000They're real experts in working with it and the best people to work with.
02:01:22.000I'm bringing this up because I would like to share some information, if I may, about new DMT projects that are going on.
02:01:32.000As you're aware, the mainstream is gradually beginning to embrace psychedelics.
02:01:38.000We're finding Far from being the demonized substances that Richard Nixon and co.
02:01:44.000wanted us to believe they were, that they're incredibly helpful to people, whether it's with depression, whether it's with migraines, whether it's with end-of-life fears.
02:01:52.000Psychedelics are being tested and tried out in universities all around the world and producing very, very interesting results.
02:01:58.000Now, I know Brian mentioned this on your show, but there is this new technology which is extended DMT. When your eyes smoke DMT or vape it, we're looking at a 10-minute trip.
02:02:12.000It might linger a little bit longer than that, but it comes on really fast.
02:02:37.000With extended-release DMT, which has been given either as an injection or as an intravenous drip, you can keep volunteers in the peak DMT state for an hour or more than an hour, the peak state that you would get when you've just taken those four hits on the pipe.
02:02:53.000That state can be extended for an hour or more if the volunteer wishes it.
02:02:57.000Many of the studies that are doing this now give the volunteers the option to opt out and say, I've had enough.
02:04:09.000What this boils down to is focused on measuring whether a person's consciousness can extend past the physical body during trance or hypnotic states.
02:04:18.000And of course, if that were to check out in these investigations, we're now looking at opportunities for people to volunteer for these projects and to report their experiences in detail.
02:04:29.000They're going to be having people on DMT in one country and at the same time, simultaneously, people on DMT in another country.
02:04:35.000This work is happening in Switzerland as well.
02:04:37.000And seeing if there's some kind of out-of-body element.
02:04:40.000This is stuff that mainstream science wouldn't have touched a decade ago, but now is interested in it.
02:04:52.000That's the exciting potential of this research, is that we are so focused on the physical world that we think all exploration is to be technological, that we're going to explore other planets, we're going to explore the solar system, we're going to explore the universe.
02:05:23.000Why is the human body producing DMT as a natural endogenous brain hormone?
02:05:28.000If it doesn't have some very important function and maybe that function is to shake us out of this locked in state where we're locked into the physical realm and our needs to survive in that physical realm gives us a brief holiday from that and allows us to encounter a wider reality.
02:05:44.000That we've otherwise shut out from our consciousness.
02:05:49.000And I'm really, really happy that it is happening at the University of San Diego.
02:05:56.000Anybody who wants to find out more about it, it's down there at the bottom.
02:06:00.000You can go to the Center for Psychedelic Research at UCSD. There's a URL there.
02:06:05.000And the point of contact is the lead scientist, which is J1Dean at health.ucsd.edu.
02:06:13.000Anybody wants to find out more about this research, which is starting I believe in the spring of 2024, they can get in contact with John Dean and see if they're interested in enrolling in the investigation.
02:08:08.000It's madness that this is the resource that people go to when they're trying to find objective information on things and these people will remove published research from a distinguished scientist because of whatever stupid reason.
02:08:21.000There's only one word for it, and that's censorship.
02:08:23.000It's the kind of thing you expect in the Soviet Union or in North Korea, but it's not the kind of thing you expect in so-called democratic Western civilization.
02:08:32.000Not only that, but so-called democratic Western civilization on a website that's run by progressives.
02:09:14.000It was about him saying on a post that he would look forward To either some sort of a public debate, or it was Robert Kennedy Jr. I hope that more candidates submit to doing long-term conversations,
02:10:29.000Made speech talking points that they they talk about in this very blustery way and I go, okay, you're out of time You have 30 seconds left and you tell that to them and then they're done and you can't ask You can't stop them.
02:10:44.000You don't know that person You just know this speech that they've given exactly and that's the surface level sort of understanding posturing Yeah, it's supposed to look like a debate.
02:10:54.000It's also the fact that The format itself is such a terrible way to have long-form discussions.
02:11:02.000You have a time limit for each person.
02:11:42.000If you're on a network and someone starts talking about vaccine safety and the issues with certain ingredients and vaccines, people are like, hit the brakes.
02:12:24.000What do we know about these peer-reviewed studies?
02:12:27.000What do we know about the way they're allowed to access information?
02:12:31.000What do we know about the vested interest, financial?
02:12:34.000Vested interests involved in pursuing a very specific narrative, and has there been resistance to all these other points?
02:12:40.000These are the questions that need to be asked.
02:12:42.000These are interesting questions, and the fact that Huberman was censored because he thought it was a good idea that more people have long-form discussions is madness.
02:12:55.000And how could you get that kind of compliance With a supposedly progressive website to step in and censor someone over something not just benign but seemingly very useful.
02:13:37.000I know for a fact that my Wikipedia page, which announces that I'm a pseudoscientist and promote...
02:13:42.000Pseudoscientific ideas that my Wikipedia page has been captured by a group of people who have been intensely critical of me since the 1990s.
02:13:54.000That cannot be a fair and unbiased position.
02:13:57.000That's representing the position of a particular small group of people.
02:14:00.000And I think unfortunately for them, that knowledge, that understanding is out there with a great number of people.
02:14:07.000And people don't trust it the way they used to trust it.
02:14:09.000They used to trust it as this objective sort of crowdsourced, you know, information hub where you could find all sorts of really interesting...
02:14:41.000So I would say that political candidates should be willing to do long-form interviews with you or anybody else who's willing to do it.
02:14:48.000Then we're going to get to their hearts.
02:14:49.000We're going to see actually what kind of person they are.
02:14:52.000And as I've said before on your show, if I could make it compulsory, I would also require any person heading for high political office to have 12 sessions with ayahuasca.
02:15:24.000Either might end up leading in a much better way or might end up choosing not to be leaders at all.
02:15:29.000Well, that's what's fascinating about what's going on right now with the public's understanding of psychedelics and this new acceptance of it, that we are at the precipice of a global war.
02:15:39.000And we are also at the precipice of a global understanding of the benefits of psychedelics and they all seem to be battling it out for who wins this race.
02:15:50.000And it's a crazy thing for people to hear that psychedelics could save humanity.
02:15:58.000And the reason it's a crazy thing to hear is because we've had, what, 50, 60 years of propaganda, which has drilled itself into the brains of so many people.
02:16:08.000A lot of people just don't think about this at all.
02:16:15.000I was going to say that one of the great benefits that people are getting out of this is people on the right are now embracing psychedelics because they see the benefit that it has for soldiers, police officers, for vets, people with PTSD. Absolutely.
02:16:26.000People have experienced extreme violence in war.
02:16:44.000So in my circles of people that I know, military people and a lot of people that were very right-wing, they're now embracing that as like, okay, this is just more government bullshit.
02:16:56.000It's not that drugs are bad and hippies are losers and if you take drugs, you're not going to do anything with your life.
02:17:19.000And what they've done and the way they've done it so legally and so carefully and the way they've established these studies and showed the benefits.
02:17:28.000That it's opening people's eyes in a way that like...
02:17:38.000Some drugs may destroy some individuals.
02:17:40.000They can destroy some individuals, but the way to mitigate that is not making everybody a child that is to the will of the adult who doesn't even have these experiences.
02:17:49.000It's a better understanding of why and what's going on and what inherent trauma is causing people to gravitate towards these incredibly harmful drugs in the first place.
02:18:00.000And is there a way to mitigate that in our societies?
02:18:03.000Because we've made no effort to do that.
02:18:32.000Rick and Andrew together invented the technology that would allow DMTX, extended state DMT. Well, that was what he first did at the University of New Mexico, right?
02:18:43.000Rick Strassman is the godfather of this field.
02:18:46.000Somehow, in the early 90s, he got permission to enroll volunteers in a DMT study.
02:20:40.000Questions such as the ontology of the DMT space, is it real?
02:20:44.000Developing methods of communications with the entities, studying their language, all of this is going to be the subject of the Noonautics investigation.
02:20:53.000And the bottom line is that they've invited me to be a volunteer, which I certainly will be, and they would love to invite you if you feel like it.
02:21:32.000That's where it gets really weird with people.
02:21:34.000Like, what are you saying, NASA and SETI? And it sounds Ridiculous.
02:21:41.000But the only reason it sounds ridiculous is because for so many years we've been subjected to a mass of propaganda telling us that it is not ridiculous.
02:22:17.000If I could have the DMT back, the HDMI back, because if anybody wants to contact New Nautics to enroll in their project next year, I just want to give their address.
02:22:51.000If anybody's interested in this, these are breakthrough scientific endeavors, which are investigating a mystery that has been taboo for far too long.
02:22:59.000And the comparison with SETI and NASA is a good one.
02:23:03.000Because at the moment as a species we're devoting our explorations entirely into the physical realm.
02:23:12.000Yes, we may build high-tech spacecraft that can go even to other star systems.
02:23:17.000Maybe we will and that's a really important thing to do and a really useful thing to do.
02:23:20.000But while we remain largely ignorant about ourselves and what we're doing here and what's happening in our inner realms and what is revealed in altered states of consciousness, we haven't done enough.
02:23:31.000And there's a role for exploration in that realm too.
02:23:46.000Why is it that people from different countries and different cultures encounter clearly the same entities and receive the same messages from them?
02:23:55.000Do we all have some kind of brain module that just makes this up?
02:23:59.000Or as we were saying earlier, does it just open the door to a whole other level of reality that we're normally shut off from?
02:24:07.000And which may be extremely helpful to us.
02:24:10.000It may also be extremely dangerous to us.
02:24:37.000When you talk to people about parallel dimensions, that the notion of parallel dimensions has been accepted by science, like, what are you saying?
02:24:55.000It seems like something that people just say.
02:24:58.000It doesn't seem like something that – which is one of the weirder things about psychedelic experiences, that when you're there, you're like, how is this real?
02:25:30.000Yeah, Rick is one of those who suggested that the endogenous DMT is released in large quantities at the moment of death, that it may be a transition.
02:25:41.000That's why he calls it the spirit molecule.
02:25:42.000Yeah, and there's also the connection to dreams, which is very strange.
02:25:46.000Like, we're not exactly sure what dreams are made out of.
02:26:13.000And what is going on in normal survival consciousness that is sort of keeping that distraction from you saying, hey, listen, listen, listen.
02:27:01.000So many things in my life that I've watched, especially violent encounters, I see them over and over again.
02:27:08.000But whereas the dreams that we have, which are so wild when they're done, like some of them, I can't wait to tell people about them because they're so crazy.
02:27:16.000And then 10 minutes later, I can't remember what it was.
02:27:19.000How is that possible that something that is so incredibly interesting to you right after you wake up It just dissolves from your memory within minutes.
02:27:29.000Perhaps it's because of the noise of our society and our civilization which doesn't have time for that.
02:27:35.000If you go back to ancient cultures, all of them valued dreams.
02:27:38.000Our culture is rather unique in dismissing dreams as irrelevant nonsenses, little stories we tell ourselves in our subconscious.
02:27:47.000Ancient civilizations regarded dreams as extremely important and as a valid method of acquiring knowledge that could be useful.
02:27:56.000Maybe we should pay more attention to our dreams, try to understand them better, see what they're coming from.
02:28:02.000And remember also the saying, it's in Homer, I believe, that there are two kinds of dreams, that some dreams come through the gate of sawn ivory.
02:29:25.000There may be ways of study, yogic ways of examining what dreams are that could allow us to extract more information from them, and the same with DMT. I'm very fascinated by the yogic methods of achieving psychedelic states endogenously, particularly kundalini yoga.
02:30:09.000But one of the things in that issue is that human beings are equipped to experience altered states of consciousness.
02:30:17.000If altered states of consciousness were really bad for them, and if there's anything at all to evolutionary theory, evolution would have got rid of them.
02:30:25.000We wouldn't be able to access altered states of consciousness.
02:30:28.000The fact that they've been preserved in human beings, the fact that we have this capacity, suggests that somewhere in our story, even though we may be in a A very vulnerable state if we're under ayahuasca or smoked DMT. Something suggests that it is useful to us in some way.
02:30:48.000And it's been preserved in the genome, the capacity to access altered states of consciousness.
02:30:54.000Well, it's probably also one of the reasons why they made it a ceremony.
02:32:10.000Rather than that 10-minute rush of overwhelming experience is offering the possibility to spend an hour in it and to navigate it and explore it much more carefully.
02:32:20.000So I'm very interested in that and I think it is at least as valid as the exploration of outer space.
02:32:29.000And if it does turn out to be a mappable place, and if it does turn out that people are encountering the same entities and the same entities are trying to express the same information, that would be really, really fascinating.
02:32:46.000And I often wonder, I mean, many of these DMT, excuse me, alien abduction experiences, they happen while people are sleeping.
02:32:55.000And we know that, we think at least, that DMT is released in the brain during sleep.
02:33:02.000I often wonder if they're just accessing something that is there.
02:33:08.000That there is some sort of a realm that you can communicate with these things.
02:33:12.000Whatever these things are, and it sounds so, if you're a person that's completely sober and never done anything, I know it's going to sound kooky.
02:35:15.000I used to think that that was a good thing to do and I think there's a lot of young people that think that's a good thing to do, to attack people you don't like.
02:35:22.000I think it does something to you whether you like it or not.
02:35:27.000I think it has an effect on you whether you like it or not.
02:35:29.000There's things that I don't like about people and I will criticize behaviors and actions of specifically of like leaders of the world that I think are taking us down a terrible path and what their motivations are and but at the end of the day what we're doing here Is interacting with each other.
02:35:47.000And the more positive interactions that you can facilitate, the more that you can make your time and your communication with people positive, it will literally spread out from them.
02:35:58.000You can change the way people think about interacting with people just through your own interactions with them.
02:36:04.000I've met people like that where they're so interesting.
02:37:52.000I know that a lot of people like when someone interacts with their fans and I understand that.
02:37:57.000But it's just the possibility of it being bad for you is just too much.
02:38:04.000You could kind of cultivate an environment where only positive people interact with you, but then you're going to get some bullshit that way, too.
02:38:11.000You're going to get a distorted perception because you're censoring people, literally.
02:38:14.000It's better to just let people talk and just stay out of it and just do your best.
02:38:30.000On this issue of hurting other people or not or retribution, I'd just like to bring up that we were originally going to be here on the 24th – we're recording this on the 24th of October.
02:38:42.000We were going to be here doing a debate.
02:38:44.000There was going to be Dr. Flint Dibble, who's an American citizen, but he teaches at the University of Cardiff in Britain.
02:38:51.000He's an archaeologist, an experienced archaeologist, and he was one of the several archaeologists who most viciously and painfully attacked me after the release of Ancient Apocalypse.
02:39:02.000John Hoops at the University of Kansas was another.
02:39:05.000You, on our last show together, you issued a challenge for it.
02:39:46.000I know he's coming from a place of sincerity.
02:39:48.000I know he genuinely believes I'm wrong and I really welcome the opportunity to debate with him on your show openly for three hours to have a detailed discussion.
02:39:58.000But it's not his fault that he's not here today.
02:40:00.000It's because the chemotherapy has made it just impossible for him to function in this kind of setting.
02:40:07.000Well, we wish him well and we hope he recovers.
02:40:10.000And we are provisionally talking about coming back on your show in April 2024. When he hopes to be over the worst of the chemotherapy, to do that debate.
02:40:20.000And I look forward to it and I hope that it'll end up being a reasonable exchange between two human beings rather than two human beings hating on each other.
02:40:27.000Yeah, well I think we can make that real.
02:40:30.000Jamie, have you seen, there's been some talk of some new drug that they've found that's very effective for cancer.
02:41:44.000The problem is when these people that are creating these incredible drugs, these scientists and doctors and these people that are having these amazing medical advancements, they're connected to something that just wants to make money.
02:41:57.000The people that are selling the drugs and the people that are running the companies are completely different than the scientists that are legitimately developing these things, and many of them turn out to be very effective for all sorts of ailments and diseases.
02:42:18.000At least 12 anti-cancer mechanisms of action, nine research papers reviewed.
02:42:25.000So I think this stuff is supposed to be low cost and this is some of the speculation, the conspiracy theory about like why people are afraid of it.
02:42:36.000Well, I hope that Flint is aware of this and that it helps him to recover from his counsel.
02:42:50.000But there's been some reaction to this?
02:42:53.000I just found out about this a couple of days ago.
02:42:57.000So these research papers, Fen, go stop right there, has at least 12 proven anti-cancer mechanisms in vitro and in vivo.
02:43:05.000It disrupts microtubulate polymerization, a major mechanism, induces cell cycle, whatever that means, arrest, blocks glucose transport, and impairs glucose utilization by cancer cells, increases P53 tumor suppressor levels,
02:43:22.000inhibits cancer cell viability, inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion, induces apoptosis, induces autography, induces...
02:43:36.000They're trying to get me with all these words.
02:43:40.000Preoptosis and necrosis induces differentiation and senescence, inhibits tuner angiogenesis, reduces colony formation and inhibits stemness in cancer cells,
02:43:59.000inhibits drug resistance and sensitizes cells to conventional chemo as well as radiation therapy.
02:44:41.000But if that is the case, I mean, what an enemy of the people.
02:44:44.000They're preventing information and preventing people from using things.
02:44:49.000We've created a society that seems to be designed to make us sick, and then Big Pharma steps in with so-called remedies for it, which happen to make some people a lot of money.
02:44:58.000Yeah, well, it's certainly a narrative that this is the only way to go.
02:45:03.000The way to go is eat whatever you want and don't even think about your diet and your health.
02:45:07.000I have a friend who got over cancer and I said, did they talk to you about diet and health and vitamins?
02:45:13.000This person doesn't take any vitamins at all.
02:45:15.000And they're like, no, there's no discussion at all.
02:45:19.000So I send them some stuff about ketosis and what the studies have been done about ketosis and cancer.
02:45:26.000And then, I mean, it's one of the things that some doctors will tell you to do when you're going through cancer is to get on a ketogenic diet.
02:45:41.000And one of the things I would imagine that your doctor should tell you, like, hey, you should probably be more metabolically healthy as well.
02:46:29.000And I'd like to say on the record, I don't hate archaeologists.
02:46:35.000I know that there's a lot of great work that's done by archaeologists.
02:46:38.000I myself could not do the work I do were it not for the work that archaeologists have done out there in the field, painstakingly digging and producing evidence.
02:46:48.000I have huge respect for archaeologists.
02:46:51.000I think there's a very limited group within archaeology who have this domineer mentality and who seek to control the narrative.
02:46:58.000But by and large, archaeology is doing a good and a useful thing.
02:47:04.000It's unfortunate that I've been identified as a hate figure by a number of archaeologists.
02:47:09.000I think there's much more potential for cooperation.
02:47:12.000And I'm not the only person working in this field of the possibility of a lost civilization, consider Randall Carlson, consider Robert Schock.
02:47:20.000Manu Sefzada, who you don't know, but he's brilliant, taught himself Egyptian hieroglyphs.
02:47:26.000He can read the Egyptian hieroglyphs fluently.
02:47:28.000There's a lot of people working in this field whose information could be of use to archaeology if archaeology would just lower its threshold a little bit to ideas it doesn't like.
02:47:39.000And again, it's probably not most – most archaeologists are probably very curious about this.
02:47:45.000It's probably a very vocal minority and a power dynamic that exists in so many different aspects of civilization where groups of people control anything.
02:47:55.000They're very reluctant to give away that kind of power.
02:48:00.000Especially if what they're doing is just discovering ancient stuff.
02:48:04.000I mean, it's not even like you're creating anything.
02:48:06.000You're literally in control of the information that forms the narrative for ancient civilizations, which is something pretty much anyone who acquires the data can do.
02:48:27.000We need to understand our past better.
02:48:30.000And archaeologists are part of a mechanism for understanding our past better, but they're not the sole mechanism.
02:48:36.000Another thing that we talked about recently that I sent you was this new AI ability, that AI has the ability to translate some of these ancient languages now, which is really interesting.
02:48:52.000They're getting more out of languages that have already been translated, where there is something for the AI to work on.
02:48:59.000Whether AI could be deployed to decode the Indus Valley script, for example, that would be very interesting.
02:49:07.000The Easter Island script, the so-called Rongoronga tablets of Easter Island, fully developed script which nobody can read.
02:51:04.000So how would AI, without a Rosetta Stone, without something that connects two together, because that was one of the ways that they deciphered...
02:51:14.000If it weren't for the Rosetta Stone, we could not read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
02:51:18.000It so happened that a relatively late period of Egyptian history, when the Greeks were running Egypt, the Ptolemaic dynasty, That they wrote down a stella in three languages.
02:51:29.000In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the more recent form of ancient Egyptian called hieratic, and in Greek.
02:51:50.000I think there's a lot that's not understood in the ancient Egyptian texts, particularly their exploration of death and what happens after death.
02:51:58.000They put their best minds to work for thousands of years on that problem, and they came up with all kinds of interesting ideas.
02:52:04.000But at least, thanks to the Rosetta Stone, we can read their texts.
02:52:07.000We can read the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.
02:52:09.000We can read the book of what is in the Duat.
02:52:17.000So I hope AI will somehow be able to cross that divide without that initial key and be able to extract information from the Easter Island script.
02:52:27.000And I repeat again the Indus Valley script, which is incredibly important.
02:52:30.000It's 5,000 years old, completely undeciphered.
02:52:35.000Cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa had a very advanced civilization 5,000 years ago, and they had a script that we can't read.
02:52:44.000How many different scripts that we can't read exist?
02:53:07.000Imagine having the gall to say you know everything about the history of the earth when literally the discovery of one stone changed everything.
02:54:45.000I put it on my Instagram, and I also put their depiction of, I think, what they thought a whale looked like, which is really crazy looking.
02:56:06.000There are layers upon layers, depths upon depths.
02:56:08.000We're just scratching the surface right now.
02:56:10.000And I hope I've played some small part in scratching the surface, and I gain, pay tribute to archaeology for the work that archaeologists do.
02:56:16.000Well, that's very charitable of you, and you most certainly have played a large role, certainly for me.
02:56:21.000I remember when I used to read that book.
02:57:29.000Mexico is another fascinating culture.
02:57:31.000We've hardly had the opportunity to talk about it today, but there's just so much.
02:57:35.000And if I were to focus on a particular area of Mexico that needs further investigation, I would say the Olmec civilization around La Venta, Villa Hermosa, right up as far as Chichen Itza.
02:57:46.000That whole area of the Yucatan is just absolutely fascinating.
02:57:50.000And the features of the Olmecs are so unique.
02:59:52.000It's another thing, it's another discovery of the new world, an original plant, tree of the new world, which came to benefit the whole world.
03:00:04.000Rubber originally comes from the Amazon, rubber trees, but it found its way up into Mexico as well.
03:02:23.000The shadow is coming from, the sun is coming from the other way, so they'd have to be projecting a shadow onto it from this way, which is weird.
03:02:31.000It could be, it could be just a flash or light or something.
03:03:59.000What if they didn't have the Rosetta Stone?
03:04:01.000I'm really fascinated with AI's ability to interpret ancient languages and whether or not that could be applied to the Easter Island language.
03:04:40.000I'm not sure all AI – I'm not sure I love all AI. There's a lot of artificial intelligence involved in big social media like Facebook and so on and so forth.
03:05:41.000I think materialism makes people want to buy the newest, latest, greatest stuff, which fuels innovation, especially technological innovation.
03:05:49.000And I think that if you looked at humans from afar, and I've said this many times, so forgive me, but if you looked at humans from afar and you didn't have any understanding of us, what do they do?
03:05:58.000Well, they make better things every year.
03:06:01.000It seems to be like they have a bunch of other things that are going on, controlling resources and war, but that really seems to be about controlling of resources and money, and that seems to be involved in making better things.
03:06:13.000And they're using these better things to have more control over the people.
03:06:17.000They're using these better things to have better warfare, more effective weapons and weapons.
03:06:24.000The big money goes into that kind of thing, yeah.
03:06:26.000Right, and they lead to the emergence of an artificial being.
03:06:30.000I think that as our biology fails and people are looking for new alternatives to bad eyesight and all sorts of other things that are wrong with us, I mean, you have an artificial hip, right?
03:07:22.000And so I think our only alternative would be to emerge with it.
03:07:26.000That's the only way we're going to survive.
03:07:28.000Because I think the crudeness of the biological model that we exist in, like the crudeness of our physical bodies, is so difficult to escape.
03:08:51.000I mean, there's definitely a price you pay being connected and a price you pay being disconnected.
03:08:57.000But for me, I think the best way to do it is to I try to stay off of it most of the day and occasionally dip my toe just to see what the fuck is going on in the world.
03:10:30.000It's not very good yet, but here's just a quick example, just right here.
03:10:34.000Okay, for example, an experiment's participant listening to a speaker say, I don't have my driver's license yet, had their thoughts translated as, she has not even started to learn to drive yet.
03:12:01.000I mean, look, if you have someone that can do something like the pyramids, why would we assume that they wouldn't be able to also create a universal language?
03:12:10.000And who knows what kind of technology they're dealing with?
03:12:13.000I mean, we love to just apply what we know as the only technology that's available to an advanced civilization.
03:12:27.000It's one of my feelings about looking for a lost civilization is that the one thing we shouldn't do is look for ourselves in the past.
03:12:35.000We need to look for something very different from ourselves.
03:12:38.000A lot of archaeologists say, oh, if there was a lost civilization, they would have left plastics behind.
03:12:43.000Which rules out the possibility they might have decided not to develop plastics or might have decided – might have developed something much more effective.
03:12:51.000Well, there's also biodegradable plastics that exist right now.