The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2051 - Graham Hancock

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:13.000 Hello, Joe Rogan.

00:00:14.000 Good to see you, my friend.

00:00:15.000 Good to be back with you.

00:00:17.000 Congratulations on the success of your show.

00:00:18.000 It'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.

00:00:26.000 And the reviews have all been super positive for my friends, so I'm really excited about it.

00:00:30.000 Well, thank you for appearing on Ancient Apocalypse as well.

00:00:32.000 My pleasure, my pleasure.

00:00:34.000 It's a subject to me that is so unbelievably fascinating and so bizarre that it's controversial.

00:00:41.000 I do not understand.

00:00:43.000 I mean, we were just talking about this and I said, let's stop talking when we're getting coffee.

00:00:47.000 To me, it seems like there's things that are concrete, right?

00:00:53.000 We know when Genghis Khan lived.

00:00:55.000 We know when they built the 16th chapel.

00:00:58.000 We know...

00:00:59.000 We know a lot about the Parthenon and the Acropolis.

00:01:02.000 We know about 2,000 years ago.

00:01:03.000 When you start going way, way, way, way, way back, things get real sketchy.

00:01:08.000 And to not admit that seems so crazy when they find things when they're making apartment buildings sometimes.

00:01:16.000 They're digging into the ground.

00:01:17.000 They go, oh, hold on a second.

00:01:18.000 What is this?

00:01:18.000 Doesn't it happen in Mexico City all the time?

00:01:20.000 Yeah, it does.

00:01:21.000 And actually, that's how...

00:01:23.000 A lot of archaeology happens.

00:01:26.000 Somebody'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.

00:01:37.000 And this is part of the problem I have with...

00:01:41.000 With archaeology as a discipline, it likes to think of itself as scientific.

00:01:46.000 But what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past.

00:01:53.000 Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates?

00:02:07.000 Yeah, I think it's a complicated mixture of things.

00:02:13.000 First of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo.

00:02:23.000 You know, anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with.

00:02:28.000 And 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.

00:02:41.000 We've had lost civilizations before.

00:02:44.000 The Indus Valley civilization today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s.

00:02:51.000 It was found by accident.

00:02:52.000 Every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal New information.

00:02:57.000 But 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,

00:03:13.000 reaching a much wider audience, the reaction was just hysterical.

00:03:16.000 And it went on for a very long time.

00:03:19.000 And it appeared to be – it appeared to me – I don't think it's a conspiracy.

00:03:23.000 I don't think archaeologists are involved in a conspiracy.

00:03:26.000 I think the people who are attacking me genuinely believe in what they're saying and they genuinely think I'm harmful.

00:03:31.000 But that's like calling it the most dangerous show on Netflix.

00:03:35.000 How did they come up with that?

00:03:37.000 How is it harmful to be speculating about ancient structures?

00:03:43.000 It's interesting.

00:03:44.000 Yeah.

00:03:45.000 That's what I don't get.

00:03:46.000 The other thing is the racist angle.

00:03:49.000 Like, we're talking about the exact same people.

00:03:52.000 Yeah.

00:03:52.000 We're just talking about an older time.

00:03:54.000 It doesn't make any sense at all.

00:03:56.000 In fact, it kind of points to the superiority of the Egyptian race. 0.74

00:04:01.000 Absolutely.

00:04:02.000 I mean, whatever they did, however they did it, Is unbelievably extraordinary.

00:04:07.000 And I think pointing that out is amazing.

00:04:12.000 I 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.

00:04:23.000 Because there's concrete, irrefutable evidence, especially in terms of like Gobekli Tepe and some of the other structures.

00:04:30.000 I mean, this is wild stuff.

00:04:32.000 The idea that human beings had an advanced civilization 10,000, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago.

00:04:40.000 What happened?

00:04:41.000 That's what's really interesting.

00:04:43.000 What happened?

00:04:44.000 And 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.

00:04:57.000 There's still arguments about what caused it, but the fact that it was cataclysmic is not really disputed.

00:05:05.000 The accusations that were put against me and the show of being—the accusations included the words racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic.

00:05:18.000 They give you the full hand.

00:05:20.000 They give you one card off.

00:05:48.000 Those knowledge bringers are described as white-skinned.

00:05:51.000 And 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. 0.90

00:06:00.000 And that seems to me completely ridiculous.

00:06:04.000 Both in Mexico and in Peru and Bolivia, we have traditions.

00:06:08.000 We have them...

00:06:10.000 We have Viracocha.

00:06:11.000 We have Quetzalcoatl.

00:06:12.000 We have Bochica. 0.62

00:06:13.000 This is a pan-American myth. 0.99

00:06:15.000 And 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. 0.97

00:06:31.000 Of course, these are indigenous myths and traditions. 0.80

00:06:34.000 And 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.

00:06:45.000 Trevor Burrus And what is the rest of the argument?

00:06:47.000 What is the other side of it?

00:06:49.000 Well, the other side of the argument that it's inconceivable that the Spaniards made up these stories.

00:06:54.000 These stories were reported to the first Spanish visitors in Mexico and in Peru.

00:06:59.000 They were reported to them by indigenous peoples.

00:07:02.000 As indigenous myths and the fact that they're right spread across the Americas makes it very unlikely. 1.00

00:07:08.000 I 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.

00:07:19.000 I don't think we should take away these traditions from the indigenous people who reported them.

00:07:25.000 But it gave a very useful handle for people to attack this series on.

00:07:33.000 So the theory is that it was an uneven destruction, right?

00:07:39.000 And that some places fared better than other places in terms of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, right?

00:07:45.000 Yeah.

00:07:45.000 And that those people might have reclaimed a modicum of civilization.

00:07:51.000 Yeah, that's the idea.

00:07:52.000 And 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.

00:08:06.000 Actually, 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. 0.67

00:08:12.000 Northern Europe and North America were absolutely inhospitable wildernesses during the Ice Age. 0.94

00:08:19.000 They were frozen, they were dry, and they were dangerous.

00:08:23.000 And they were not the places that people would go.

00:08:25.000 People naturally gravitated south towards the equator, towards the tropics.

00:08:29.000 That's where I would expect to find traces of a lost civilization, and that's where I do find traces of a lost civilization.

00:08:35.000 I'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.

00:08:43.000 That 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.

00:08:50.000 You have to go down to the southern part of North America.

00:08:54.000 You have to go into Mexico.

00:08:54.000 You have to go into South America to really find an environment during the Ice Age that would have nurtured a high civilization.

00:09:02.000 And there's a lot of speculation as to why they weren't able to cross the Bering landmass too, right?

00:09:08.000 Well, again, this is an area where there has been a narrative that archaeology has sought to impose upon us.

00:09:15.000 And this was called the Clovis first idea.

00:09:18.000 There was a people who archaeologists called the Clovis people.

00:09:21.000 We don't know what they called themselves.

00:09:34.000 I think we're good to go.

00:09:41.000 Archaeology 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.

00:09:53.000 And 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.

00:10:05.000 But even then, they're reluctant to go very far back.

00:10:08.000 We've recently had these footprints in White Sands in New Mexico, 23,000 years old or so.

00:10:15.000 That's largely being accepted now.

00:10:17.000 But there are much earlier dates.

00:10:19.000 There's 130,000 years ago from the Cerruti Mastodon site near San Diego.

00:10:24.000 That's the one that's being disputed because they say it could have been rocks that crushed the bones and made them that way.

00:10:29.000 Yeah.

00:10:29.000 What I see again is an unfortunate mindset where a new and interesting idea is proposed, supported by masses of evidence and published in Nature.

00:10:38.000 Nature has a pretty high bar to what it accepts.

00:10:41.000 And then the critics look for any way to get rid of it.

00:10:47.000 Can I stop you here?

00:10:47.000 Are you aware of the boneyard in Alaska?

00:10:50.000 I've heard of it, and it sounds fascinating.

00:10:52.000 I don't think he's revealed much about that in public yet.

00:10:55.000 Well, it's an amazing, amazing discovery.

00:10:58.000 This guy's a gold miner, and he has this large piece of land in Alaska.

00:11:01.000 They're mining for gold, and they start finding, like, tusks and bones.

00:11:05.000 In one area that's only a few acres...

00:11:08.000 They found thousands and thousands of woolly mammoth bones and tusks and saber-toothed tiger.

00:11:16.000 Was it saber-toothed tiger?

00:11:17.000 No.

00:11:18.000 It was short-faced bear.

00:11:20.000 They found all these like- All the megafauna.

00:11:22.000 Many animals that weren't even supposed to exist in Alaska.

00:11:27.000 And he's like, look, we have the bones of it.

00:11:29.000 Yeah.

00:11:30.000 One of the things they found recently was bones that were sawed, clearly sawed.

00:11:36.000 Human workmanship.

00:11:37.000 But like a sophisticated tool.

00:11:39.000 Let me see if you can pull it up so you can see how it looked.

00:11:42.000 Clearly cut.

00:11:43.000 Isn't that amazing?

00:11:44.000 Absolutely.

00:11:46.000 So they're trying to find out what the dates on these are.

00:11:49.000 That was my next question.

00:11:50.000 Have they dated it?

00:11:51.000 They just got these recently.

00:11:53.000 This is fairly recent.

00:11:54.000 So I believe he's had some issues with universities not giving back his stuff and selling off his stuff.

00:12:03.000 Oh dear.

00:12:03.000 Yeah.

00:12:04.000 Well, he recently started a bone rush in the East River.

00:12:09.000 Because 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.

00:12:19.000 Because they had so much of it, they dumped it in the East River.

00:12:21.000 And, you know, they were balking at it.

00:12:23.000 But meanwhile, these people found it there.

00:12:25.000 So here it goes.

00:12:26.000 I think many of you are intrigued by these Ice Age bones found in the Boneyard in Alaska.

00:12:30.000 If you zoom in, you'll see that it's been sanded or somehow been worked down to a smooth finish on the end.

00:12:35.000 I'm going to carbon date one of them.

00:12:36.000 I'll post the results when I do.

00:12:38.000 So this was three weeks ago, so it's probably going to take a little longer.

00:12:41.000 But look how smooth it is on that one bottom. 0.56

00:12:43.000 It's perfectly cut.

00:12:44.000 And we'll look forward to seeing the dating results.

00:12:46.000 But 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.

00:12:56.000 Not 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.

00:13:06.000 So they're going through these layers of things, and they're finding an unbelievable amount of animals that died in this area.

00:13:13.000 Just a mass die-out.

00:13:15.000 Yes.

00:13:15.000 And what would cause a mass die-out?

00:13:17.000 Not human hunting.

00:13:19.000 I'm strongly opposed to what they call the overkill hypothesis.

00:13:23.000 This 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.

00:13:33.000 And to me, for a couple of reasons, that doesn't make sense.

00:13:36.000 It doesn't make sense, first of all, because hunter-gatherers we know in the world today do not wipe out their prey animals.

00:13:42.000 We're good to go.

00:14:02.000 I think we're good to go.

00:14:13.000 I think?

00:14:34.000 Like Tunguska. 0.69

00:14:35.000 Exactly like Tunguska.

00:14:37.000 The Tunguska event is a recent example of that.

00:14:40.000 30th 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.

00:14:52.000 Wildfires burning, you get these impacts smashing into the Earth's...

00:14:57.000 Bursting in the air over forests, it caused huge fires and that's why you get enormous amounts of charcoal as a result.

00:15:05.000 And 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.

00:15:13.000 And that's what brought temperatures down at the beginning of the younger dryers. 0.58

00:15:18.000 We can argue there are alternative theories.

00:15:20.000 Maybe solar activity was involved.

00:15:22.000 Robert Schock prefers a change in solar activity and, you know, kudos to Robert.

00:15:26.000 He's a brilliant scientist and he's put his neck on the line by advocating a much older Sphinx. 0.92

00:15:32.000 Any scientist these days in the field of archaeology who sticks his neck out and says that the archaeological narrative is wrong immediately gets massively...

00:15:42.000 I think that's most unfortunate.

00:15:45.000 A couple of points I'd like to make about this.

00:15:48.000 First 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.

00:15:58.000 It's not a targeted search.

00:15:59.000 It's kind of random.

00:16:01.000 Something's happening and archaeologists go in there.

00:16:03.000 And then there's huge areas of the world that have had very little archaeology done in them.

00:16:10.000 Those include the Amazon rainforest where I've just been.

00:16:14.000 I've been three weeks in the Brazilian Amazon and another couple of weeks in Peru.

00:16:19.000 And there are extraordinary revelations coming out of the Amazon rainforest.

00:16:25.000 Up until very recently, had very little archaeology done.

00:16:29.000 You're talking about six million square kilometers of the Earth's surface, which has hardly been touched by archaeology.

00:16:34.000 And now it is being touched by archaeology, thanks to LIDAR, which is identifying enormous structures under the canopy.

00:16:41.000 We'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.

00:16:51.000 All of these things are recent discoveries which says we should be thinking again about the Amazon.

00:16:56.000 Same 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.

00:17:06.000 Yes, there's been some marine archaeology, but not enough to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.

00:17:12.000 And the same with the Sahara Desert, 9 million square kilometers.

00:17:15.000 A 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.

00:17:26.000 They said, we know that there was no lost civilization during the Ice Age.

00:17:32.000 And my question to them is, how can they possibly know that when they've looked at relatively small areas of the Earth?

00:17:38.000 The picture is not complete.

00:17:40.000 They should be saying, we don't think there was a lost civilization during the Ice Age.

00:17:43.000 Fine.

00:17:44.000 But to say we know there wasn't, that's completely wrong.

00:17:47.000 Well, it's silly and it's also – it becomes more and more of a problem the more things get discovered.

00:17:53.000 And the more they push back harder and more emotionally and more religiously.

00:17:57.000 It's really kind of crazy the way they behave as if they have like an accurate map.

00:18:03.000 Like the way they viewed some of the older hieroglyphs that depict civilizations that were 30,000 years ago, like kings and the lineage.

00:18:11.000 The king lists from ancient Egypt go back 30 plus thousand years.

00:18:14.000 But they want to pretend that those are myth.

00:18:16.000 Yeah.

00:18:17.000 And yet, for their chronology of ancient Egypt, they actually use the king lists.

00:18:22.000 The moment those king lists start giving dates that fall within dates that archaeologists like.

00:18:28.000 Everything before those dates, they say, oh, they just made it up.

00:18:31.000 How crazy is that?

00:18:32.000 Wouldn't it be a fascinating alternative?

00:18:35.000 If you were an archaeologist to go, you know what?

00:18:38.000 Maybe this king's list is legit.

00:18:40.000 Maybe this thing really is 30, 40,000 years old.

00:18:44.000 And maybe that explains a lot.

00:18:45.000 And now we have to figure out how.

00:18:47.000 How'd they do it?

00:18:48.000 It would be a fascinating alternative.

00:18:50.000 But unfortunately, it's not the way that archaeology works at the moment.

00:18:54.000 I repeat, a lot of archaeologists have accused me of accusing them of a conspiracy against me and trying to suppress my...

00:19:02.000 Well, they're just trying to make you look like a kook. 0.95

00:19:03.000 Yeah, I don't see any conspiracy.

00:19:05.000 I 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.

00:19:17.000 And that's a sad state of affairs.

00:19:19.000 Science should embrace and explore new and different ideas.

00:19:23.000 And particularly when it comes to the human past.

00:19:27.000 Look, I mean, if...

00:19:29.000 If I get in an airplane, I do want the pilot to be a properly qualified pilot.

00:19:34.000 I want him to have undergone all the training and to be really good at what he does.

00:19:40.000 But flying an airplane and studying the human past are two different things.

00:19:44.000 And archaeologists often compare themselves to airline pilots.

00:19:46.000 They 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?

00:19:52.000 And what...

00:19:53.000 I say is you've got blinkers on.

00:19:56.000 You'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.

00:20:07.000 And that's where we get into a kind of religious aspect of this.

00:20:11.000 That they become the high priests of the past.

00:20:13.000 Well, like Zahi Hawass is an excellent example in Egypt. 0.99

00:20:16.000 Zahi is an excellent example.

00:20:18.000 It does not want to even entertain the notion that there's some sort of a gap in the knowledge of history.

00:20:26.000 If you just say the word Atlantis to Zahi Hawass, he goes berserk. 0.99

00:20:32.000 He absolutely goes nuts.

00:20:35.000 And that's irrational too since we know that the Atlantis story comes from Plato.

00:20:42.000 We know that Plato said the source of that story was in ancient Egypt in the temple of Neath at Sais in the Delta.

00:20:49.000 An ancestor, Solon, visited that temple and was told the story which he put into the word.

00:20:54.000 Atlantis is not an ancient Egyptian word.

00:20:56.000 That's one of the problems.

00:20:57.000 But he called it Atlantis.

00:20:59.000 But 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.

00:21:15.000 It's told very clearly in the Edfu building text, which fortunately have now been completely translated Sadly only into German.

00:21:23.000 I hope we'll see the full English translation in due course.

00:21:26.000 But 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.

00:21:34.000 So 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... 1.00

00:21:43.000 Throwing it away.

00:21:44.000 And also, archaeologists should not seek to isolate the story of Atlantis from other flood myths and traditions all around the world.

00:21:52.000 And that's a problem too.

00:21:54.000 I 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.

00:22:05.000 Destruction of human beings and of animals.

00:22:08.000 A few survivors who seek to restart civilization.

00:22:11.000 It's a global story, not a single story told by Plato.

00:22:14.000 And 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?

00:22:22.000 I mean, it's just very strange to try to deny that.

00:22:26.000 Again, we have this… Especially with the physical evidence.

00:22:28.000 Yeah, especially with the physical evidence.

00:22:30.000 And it's interesting with the physical evidence like Gobekli Tepe.

00:22:35.000 Which is 11,600 years old.

00:22:37.000 I 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.

00:22:46.000 It 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.

00:22:53.000 And then we discover Gobekli Tepe.

00:22:54.000 I think we're good to go.

00:23:14.000 What archaeology is doing is trying to finesse Gobekli Tepe. 1.00

00:23:18.000 They're trying to say, oh, there was this gradual buildup to Gobekli Tepe.

00:23:22.000 And they now talk about people who they call the Natufians.

00:23:25.000 Again, we don't know what they call themselves, who were predecessors of Gobekli Tepe around 14,000 years ago.

00:23:33.000 And they show...

00:23:34.000 Things that look like a tiny little stone wall that they built.

00:23:38.000 The sort of thing that you can find, a dry stone wall that you can find anywhere in Wales to this day, you know.

00:23:43.000 And this is supposed to be a prequel to Gobekli Tepe.

00:23:46.000 I'm sorry, you just don't start off making dry stone walls and then wake up one morning and create 20 ton megaliths in huge stone circles.

00:23:54.000 Perfectly astronomically aligned as we have at Gobekli Tepe.

00:23:57.000 Not only that, but how?

00:24:00.000 What did they do?

00:24:02.000 Where are you getting those 20-ton megaliths from?

00:24:05.000 How far do they have to transport?

00:24:07.000 In the case of Gobekli Tepe, not far.

00:24:09.000 How far?

00:24:10.000 Hundreds of meters.

00:24:11.000 I'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.

00:24:20.000 It would have been a 30-ton megalith.

00:24:22.000 They clearly intended to release it from the bedrock, but it had a fault, so they They left it alone.

00:24:27.000 The issue of the quarries for the rock at Gobekli Tepe is not too big a problem.

00:24:33.000 But the transportation of those?

00:24:34.000 Even the transportation, you get enough people working together and they can move large stones.

00:24:40.000 That's not in dispute.

00:24:42.000 But that's where the question comes.

00:24:44.000 How do you get enough people together?

00:24:46.000 How do you have the organizational skills?

00:24:48.000 Where do you have the mindset that plans something like this at the beginning?

00:24:51.000 And that is the problem that is not answered in the case of Gobekli Tepe, that happening suddenly.

00:24:57.000 And what were they using for tools?

00:24:59.000 They're supposed to have just been using stone.

00:25:01.000 There's not supposed to have been any metals at that period.

00:25:04.000 Not even brass?

00:25:05.000 Not even brass, not even copper.

00:25:07.000 I have a complicated view on Gobekli Tepe.

00:25:11.000 Let's say it's my hypothesis.

00:25:13.000 It's not a fact.

00:25:15.000 I don't claim this is a fact.

00:25:16.000 I 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. 0.99

00:25:27.000 And that's the weirdest thing of all because previously archaeology always used to say hunter-gatherer cultures did not have...

00:25:35.000 The 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.

00:25:43.000 So it used to be said that hunter-gatherers couldn't do that.

00:25:46.000 Now archaeologists have backpedaled on that and they're saying, well, yeah, clearly hunter-gatherers did it.

00:25:50.000 The 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.

00:26:04.000 During those 1,000 years, the population of Gobekli Tepe transitions from being hunter-gatherers to being agriculturalists.

00:26:11.000 So we see two new ideas suddenly appearing at Gobekli Tepe.

00:26:15.000 Enormous megalithic architecture.

00:26:17.000 And a shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture.

00:26:20.000 And 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.

00:26:38.000 And they sought to introduce a new way of thinking.

00:26:41.000 I think Gobekli Tepe was created as a project to mobilize the local community, to give them something to work on, to bring them together.

00:26:49.000 And it's not an accident that during that thousand years they transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture.

00:26:55.000 I don't see massive technical complications in creating Gobekli Tepe except those very precise alignments.

00:27:03.000 But what I do see is a sudden appearance of something that shouldn't have been there.

00:27:09.000 And that requires explanation.

00:27:11.000 How did they determine the emergence of agriculture versus agriculture, that it existed in some areas and not others, like it does now?

00:27:21.000 Like you can go to the Amazon and you can see hunter-gatherers and then you can go to Sao Paulo and see a major metropolitan city.

00:27:29.000 I was just in Manaus and it's fascinating actually.

00:27:32.000 They have a tower up there on the edge of the jungle.

00:27:34.000 You've got that tower 150 meters up and on one side extending endlessly, infinitely into the distance is the Amazon rainforest.

00:27:43.000 Turn the other way and there's the city of Manaus.

00:27:47.000 Wow.

00:27:47.000 Looking at you with its skyscrapers.

00:27:50.000 That's got to be wild.

00:27:51.000 It's a wild sight to see.

00:27:53.000 And actually, the interesting thing about the Amazon Joe is it's been grievously misunderstood over the years.

00:28:02.000 And fortunately, archaeology is beginning to come to terms with it.

00:28:06.000 There was agriculture in the Amazon going back a very long way, going back at least 10,000 years, maybe further.

00:28:13.000 And 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.

00:28:24.000 Recent 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.

00:28:35.000 And how do they know that it's deliberate?

00:28:37.000 Because they find in it the same ingredients.

00:28:39.000 And amongst those ingredients are always broken bits of ceramics.

00:28:44.000 That's one of the odd things.

00:28:45.000 They seem to be part of what makes it work.

00:28:48.000 Really?

00:28:48.000 Ceramics?

00:28:49.000 Ceramics.

00:28:50.000 Mixed in there with dung, with human refuse, all deliberately put in there.

00:28:57.000 Not an accidental dung heap, but a place that human beings said, we're going to make this ground fertile.

00:29:03.000 Because rainforest soils are not particularly fertile.

00:29:06.000 The fertility of the Amazon comes entirely from the fall of leaves onto the soil.

00:29:11.000 It re-fertilizes itself.

00:29:12.000 But to grow crops on the Amazon is a very different prospect.

00:29:15.000 And this is where terra preta really comes into its own.

00:29:18.000 And I've been standing in a pit with an archaeologist there, a terra preta pit, and you can see this beautiful rich soil.

00:29:24.000 And it is a mystery.

00:29:25.000 It constantly replenishes itself.

00:29:27.000 It never gets used up.

00:29:29.000 Settlers seek it out, seek out areas of terra preta. 0.96

00:29:32.000 And it fits with this notion that – no longer a notion.

00:29:35.000 It's a fact that there was a population of millions in the Amazon 10,000 years ago.

00:29:41.000 And they were living a highly productive, sophisticated life.

00:29:45.000 They were using agriculture.

00:29:46.000 They also gardened the Amazon.

00:29:49.000 The hyperdominant trees in the Amazon are all food-bearing trees.

00:29:53.000 The Brazil nut tree, for example, was a huge, tall tree.

00:29:58.000 It's a food bearing tree and they exist in far greater numbers than they should do if they develop naturally.

00:30:04.000 Humans manipulated the Amazon and made it serve human needs thousands and thousands of years ago.

00:30:10.000 And then we have these enormous structures.

00:30:16.000 I think?

00:30:34.000 But 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.

00:30:51.000 Those 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.

00:31:03.000 Enormous embankments, ditches and in geometrical forms.

00:31:08.000 So you get enormous squares, enormous circles.

00:31:11.000 You get a circle within a square.

00:31:13.000 They keep repeating these geometrical images and they're thousands of years old.

00:31:19.000 When we were down there just recently, we had a local LiDAR guy working with us.

00:31:24.000 These days, you don't have to even use an airplane to find things with LiDAR.

00:31:28.000 You can fly LiDAR off a drone.

00:31:30.000 And 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.

00:31:43.000 And this is bizarre and puzzling.

00:31:47.000 They 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.

00:31:56.000 They reckon that there's thousands of these things still under the rainforest canopy and there's a huge untold story.

00:32:02.000 So one of the places I would look for a lost civilization is the Amazon rainforest.

00:32:07.000 How do they know that the terra preta replenishes itself?

00:32:10.000 How does it do that?

00:32:12.000 It's something to do with microbes and bacteria that are in the soil.

00:32:17.000 And they keep on regenerating.

00:32:20.000 They don't get used up.

00:32:21.000 It's a kind of miracle.

00:32:23.000 It's not fully understood.

00:32:25.000 Nobody can say they fully understand terra preta.

00:32:27.000 But 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.

00:32:35.000 Is there a way to reproduce that in America?

00:32:38.000 Attempts have been made to reproduce it and biochar is one of the words that comes to mind.

00:32:43.000 There's even indications that some of the modern indigenous peoples of the Amazon are still creating terra preta. 0.92

00:32:51.000 This is a whole mystery that needs to be investigated much further.

00:32:54.000 The oldest examples are more than 8,000 years old and that's just in the areas that have been surveyed.

00:33:00.000 Very likely terra preta goes back much, much, much earlier than that.

00:33:05.000 Because it's such an issue with modern farmlands where they have to use these modern fertilizers.

00:33:11.000 Which are not helpful in many ways.

00:33:13.000 And they run off.

00:33:14.000 The topsoil is worn out.

00:33:16.000 So if they could figure out a way to reproduce terra preta...

00:33:20.000 This would be one of the many ways in which our so-called high-tech industrialized society could learn from indigenous cultures.

00:33:28.000 We 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.

00:33:44.000 How did they do that?

00:33:46.000 There's 11 ingredients in curare.

00:33:49.000 And those ingredients are not active on their own.

00:33:52.000 You have to cook them all together to get this poison, which is a muscle relaxant.

00:33:57.000 Why a muscle relaxant?

00:33:59.000 Because 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.

00:34:06.000 You want it to drop to the ground.

00:34:09.000 Ayahuasca is another Amazonian invention. 1.00

00:34:12.000 And again, it consists of several ingredients, two in particular.

00:34:16.000 Neither of which are active on their own, but which only work when cooked together.

00:34:21.000 So what I see in the Amazon is traces of a lost science, a scientific mindset.

00:34:28.000 Can I show some pictures of these deoglyphs?

00:34:31.000 Please.

00:34:31.000 We have to hook up the magical HDMI. And I'll just show a few slides of them.

00:34:44.000 I forget which side the HDMI is in.

00:34:46.000 I think it's in that side.

00:34:48.000 Careful with the water.

00:34:50.000 Yeah.

00:34:53.000 Got it?

00:34:55.000 Okay.

00:34:58.000 Are we on screen?

00:35:01.000 We will be momentarily.

00:35:03.000 Here we go.

00:35:04.000 Yeah, so this shows the Amazon.

00:35:07.000 6.7 million square kilometers.

00:35:09.000 There's still 5.5 million left covered by rainforest.

00:35:12.000 That's bigger than the entire subcontinent of India.

00:35:15.000 And hardly any archaeology has been done.

00:35:17.000 And the archaeology that is being done is fascinating.

00:35:21.000 And it's particularly in the state of Acre, in the southwest of Brazil, that we're seeing these extraordinary geoglyphs.

00:35:29.000 Now 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.

00:35:44.000 We're looking at the latest LiDAR discoveries, and there I'm about to take off in a plane with these two guys.

00:35:49.000 It was just incredible to fly over there.

00:35:51.000 I'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.

00:36:05.000 And what's the conventional explanation for these things?

00:36:07.000 There is no conventional explanation because really it's only begun to be studied.

00:36:12.000 I'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.

00:36:19.000 And I want to pay tribute to Eugene Zhang.

00:36:21.000 Who 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?

00:36:36.000 Eugene Jong.

00:36:37.000 He's a brilliant, brilliant guy.

00:36:39.000 Eugene Jong.

00:36:39.000 J-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.

00:36:48.000 That's amazing.

00:36:49.000 So we're looking at Fazenda Sipoal here, where we have an octagon with rounded corners.

00:36:54.000 And then this is Santa's shot of the same place.

00:36:57.000 And you can see what's going on.

00:36:58.000 You see the smoke in the background there?

00:37:00.000 That's the Amazon burning. 1.00

00:37:02.000 That's settlers clearing the Amazon to create more farms.

00:37:05.000 But in the foreground, we have this enormous geometrical event, which is a huge oval surrounding a square.

00:37:14.000 And did they find this once they started clearing?

00:37:17.000 This was found as a result of the clearances.

00:37:19.000 That's how archaeologists became aware that these things exist.

00:37:24.000 So before that, this was completely covered with trees?

00:37:26.000 Completely covered with rainforest.

00:37:28.000 It's a sort of mixed blessing or mixed curse, if you like, because the clearances made it possible for us to know that these things exist. 1.00

00:37:35.000 But the clearances ultimately will destroy the entire Amazon if they're allowed to continue.

00:37:41.000 On the left, a square surrounding a circle.

00:37:45.000 And here's a couple of Santa's shots of Jaco Sarr.

00:37:48.000 You can see there's a large square earthwork and a circle in it.

00:37:51.000 That's almost, not quite, but almost like the Greek exercise of squaring the circle.

00:37:55.000 It's like geometrical exercises are taking place here in the Amazon.

00:38:00.000 And again, a square with these curious...

00:38:04.000 Scallops cut into the side of it and a circle.

00:38:08.000 There's just so much of this stuff.

00:38:11.000 Takino, absolutely giant, giant geoglyph.

00:38:15.000 And these things really, on the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't exist.

00:38:19.000 They involve enormous expenditure of effort.

00:38:22.000 Creating these earthworks is a huge job.

00:38:25.000 If there were...

00:38:26.000 If there was a lot of stone in the Amazon, I think we'd see stone circles on them as well.

00:38:30.000 There's one place further north called Rego Grande where there is an earthwork with a stone circle in it because stone is locally available.

00:38:38.000 So do you think this was the base of a structure?

00:38:41.000 Like what is the speculation?

00:38:42.000 No, I don't think so.

00:38:43.000 I've talked to indigenous people there who still respect and revere them.

00:38:47.000 And 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.

00:38:57.000 For 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.

00:39:08.000 And they were...

00:39:09.000 They were undertaking visionary journeys, perhaps using ayahuasca.

00:39:15.000 Of course, the Amazonian peoples are experts in the properties of indigenous plants.

00:39:22.000 So this is their folklore?

00:39:24.000 This is their story?

00:39:26.000 Yes, this is the story of indigenous people.

00:39:29.000 I talked to an Alpurina elder.

00:39:33.000 And he said, we don't know exactly why these places were made.

00:39:37.000 They were made so long ago, but we respect them, we revere them, and we think that they were used by shamans in the distant past.

00:39:45.000 So they were aware of them before the clearing?

00:39:47.000 Yeah, they were aware of them before the clearing, and they revere them.

00:39:50.000 Yes, they used them, and they still have community gatherings in them.

00:39:54.000 No, they weren't a base for structures.

00:39:56.000 I'm drawing attention here to Severino Calazans, this large square on the left there, which has...

00:40:02.000 Coincidentally, the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

00:40:05.000 It just shows you the size of that enormous earthwork.

00:40:09.000 But it's a mystery.

00:40:11.000 More work needs to be done, and much more needs to be surveyed.

00:40:14.000 And thanks to LIDAR, that can be done non-invasively.

00:40:19.000 Spot these things.

00:40:20.000 Very small teams can go in and do a bit of excavation there and figure out what was going on.

00:40:24.000 I think the story is going to go back further and further into the past.

00:40:27.000 Is there any evidence of wood structures?

00:40:31.000 Like did they make buildings out of wood back then?

00:40:34.000 Not that I'm aware of.

00:40:36.000 When did people start using wood as a structure?

00:40:38.000 I think you can trace wood back as a structure hundreds of thousands of years.

00:40:42.000 But when do they start using it?

00:40:45.000 If you see the ancient Mayan civilizations, what you find in the Amazon, you don't find ancient wood structures, do you?

00:40:53.000 I think that's largely an artifact of the fact that wood doesn't preserve very well.

00:40:57.000 Right.

00:40:57.000 So how do we know that there weren't wood structures?

00:41:00.000 There may well have been.

00:41:01.000 There may well have been, which have just rotted away and gone.

00:41:06.000 There may well have been wooden structures there.

00:41:08.000 Because it kind of looks like foundations.

00:41:10.000 It does look like foundations and it's just a very weird thing.

00:41:14.000 But I think the main point is… Someone made it.

00:41:17.000 Someone made it and it involved a very large amount of organized labor in order to make it.

00:41:22.000 There had to be the will and the intent in order to do that.

00:41:25.000 It's interesting that the patterns are geometrical.

00:41:28.000 And are they geometrical like with the perfect length?

00:41:31.000 Yes, yes.

00:41:32.000 They're very, very good.

00:41:36.000 Fazenda Parana and Severina Kalasanz have both aligned to true astronomical north.

00:41:41.000 That's different from Compass North.

00:41:43.000 That requires astronomy.

00:41:45.000 You can't get true north without using astronomy.

00:41:48.000 So 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.

00:41:58.000 It's a good mystery.

00:42:00.000 The other thing is the geometrical patterns are very common experience in ayahuasca visions in altered states of consciousness.

00:42:10.000 Our culture tends to despise altered states of consciousness, although fortunately that's changing.

00:42:14.000 But in the Amazon and many indigenous cultures, they're regarded as extremely important.

00:42:19.000 That we can't confine ourselves to the everyday, wide awake state of consciousness that requires us to interface with the physical world.

00:42:27.000 There are other states of consciousness which are also valuable and which bring teachings.

00:42:31.000 And it's just one of those facts that most people who drink ayahuasca, most of the time, at some point, will experience geometrical visions.

00:42:38.000 So there's a question, is there a connection here between the use of ayahuasca and the geometrical patterns?

00:42:46.000 There'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.

00:42:57.000 Eight kilometers long, covered in rock paintings.

00:43:00.000 The rock paintings are dated more than 12,000 years old.

00:43:04.000 They show extinct megafauna.

00:43:07.000 They show giant sloths which went extinct during the Younger Dryas, for example.

00:43:12.000 And they also show the kind of entities that are seen in ayahuasca visions.

00:43:17.000 They show the same sort of patterns, the same geometric patterns that are seen in ayahuasca.

00:43:20.000 So there's a sense that...

00:43:21.000 Do you have any images of this place?

00:43:23.000 Cera de la Lindosa.

00:43:25.000 You're connected to the...

00:43:27.000 Yeah, I don't have images of la Lindosa on here.

00:43:29.000 Oh, maybe you could Google it.

00:43:31.000 But if...

00:43:32.000 Or give the plug back to Jane. 0.99

00:43:34.000 Yeah, I'll give the plug back.

00:43:34.000 I was trying to Google it and I didn't find anything.

00:43:36.000 I might have spelled or guessed wrong.

00:43:39.000 How do you spell it?

00:43:40.000 La Lindosa.

00:43:42.000 La Lendosa?

00:43:42.000 Yeah.

00:43:44.000 Let me just...

00:43:45.000 I got it.

00:43:47.000 I got it.

00:43:47.000 You got it?

00:43:48.000 Yeah.

00:43:49.000 You're going to have to give him the cord real quick, and then he'll give it back to you.

00:43:52.000 Okay.

00:43:52.000 There you go.

00:43:58.000 It's literally an 8-kilometer Sistine Chapel in the Colombian Amazon.

00:44:03.000 That's the other thing.

00:44:04.000 I mentioned there's not a lot of rock in the Amazon.

00:44:06.000 Where there is rock, they used it.

00:44:08.000 There's rock paintings all over the Amazon where rock is available.

00:44:12.000 These kind of things, yeah, that's it.

00:44:15.000 These are characteristic of ayahuasca visions, but in this case they're more than 12,000 years old.

00:44:21.000 Now, does that prove they were using ayahuasca 12,000 years ago?

00:44:24.000 No.

00:44:24.000 That's very similar to like a tryptamine vision.

00:44:27.000 Totally.

00:44:28.000 Totally.

00:44:28.000 It does suggest that some tryptamine was being accessed at that time and resulting in these visionary images.

00:44:37.000 Boy, they were shitty drawers, weren't they? 0.95

00:44:39.000 Their drawing was terrible. 0.99

00:44:41.000 But bear in mind that they're clambering a hundred feet up a sheer cliff in order to...

00:44:48.000 Still, guys, do a better job. 0.98

00:44:49.000 It's ridiculous.

00:44:50.000 Create these paintings. 0.99

00:44:51.000 The people were so fat.

00:44:53.000 Are those people or sea turtles?

00:44:54.000 What are those things?

00:44:56.000 It's really interesting to see.

00:44:57.000 So this is 11,000 how old?

00:45:00.000 12,000 plus.

00:45:01.000 12,000 plus?

00:45:02.000 Yeah, 12,000 plus years old.

00:45:04.000 It's interesting because if you see the paintings that they found in that cave in France, those are 30 plus thousand years old, right?

00:45:10.000 Oh yeah, there's paintings in France if you go to Chauvet, you're looking 36,000 years old.

00:45:17.000 Can you go to those, James?

00:45:17.000 Hollenstein-Stadel in Germany.

00:45:20.000 That's that amazing Werner Herzog documentary.

00:45:22.000 They often have...

00:45:24.000 I think it was the Cave of Dreams.

00:45:26.000 Cave of Dreams, yeah.

00:45:27.000 They often have...

00:45:28.000 We're looking at Lascaux.

00:45:30.000 Hang on.

00:45:31.000 On the...

00:45:32.000 Yeah, we're looking at Lascaux there.

00:45:34.000 The bull painting there is interesting.

00:45:36.000 They were better artists.

00:45:38.000 I have to confess, this art is very good.

00:45:42.000 Jamie, if you go to the NPR, the painting of a bull, one step left from where you are, that one.

00:45:49.000 This is very interesting.

00:45:51.000 There has been an argument made by a couple of astronomers that what is depicted there is the constellation of Taurus.

00:45:59.000 And 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.

00:46:11.000 Why do they think that that represents the constellation?

00:46:14.000 Because of the six little dots which are not, I think, on the head.

00:46:19.000 I think they're somewhere behind, not in this picture.

00:46:22.000 Which is often how the Pleiades are seen.

00:46:25.000 Actually, there are seven Pleiades.

00:46:27.000 But often, to the naked eye, you see six.

00:46:31.000 And the positioning of the Pleiades in relation to the constellation of Taurus is the basis for that argument.

00:46:37.000 It could be.

00:46:38.000 I'm not sure.

00:46:39.000 It's so long since I've looked at this.

00:46:40.000 But I know that there are six dots there.

00:46:43.000 So this cave art was going on all around the world.

00:46:47.000 Some of the oldest art has been found in Indonesia.

00:46:50.000 Oh, here it is.

00:46:50.000 Here's the...

00:46:52.000 Yeah, there's the Pleiades, the whole argument about the Pleiades.

00:46:56.000 It's those dots, exactly.

00:46:58.000 The ones you pointed to above the back of the ball.

00:47:01.000 One, two, three, four, five, six.

00:47:03.000 That is how the Pleiades are often seen with the naked eye.

00:47:06.000 Can you go back to the other image?

00:47:08.000 Yeah.

00:47:09.000 Wow.

00:47:11.000 It's an argument.

00:47:12.000 It'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.

00:47:26.000 It'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.

00:47:35.000 The sun rises against the background of a different constellation every month.

00:47:40.000 And 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?

00:47:47.000 We're cut off from the skies by light pollution, but the ancients were not.

00:47:51.000 What a fascinating concept that they knew about the constellations 30-plus thousand years ago.

00:47:56.000 Yeah, and I believe they did.

00:47:57.000 And we see that again in Gobekli Tepe in Pillar 43 in Enclosure D. You see a constellation that we recognize as Sagittarius.

00:48:06.000 Brian 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.

00:48:26.000 That's right.

00:48:27.000 Yeah.

00:48:27.000 So I'll send you this, Jamie.

00:48:29.000 You sent that to me as well.

00:48:30.000 Yes, I did.

00:48:30.000 Yeah.

00:48:31.000 This is very wild, right?

00:48:34.000 Because that's...

00:48:35.000 What is that species?

00:48:35.000 Well, half a million...

00:48:36.000 Half a million years ago is pre-anatomically modern humans.

00:48:41.000 The earliest example of anatomically modern humans so far found is about 300,000 years and that's from Morocco.

00:48:50.000 But there's a new thinking going on now.

00:48:54.000 What about the Neanderthals who we know that anatomically modern humans interbred with? 0.53

00:48:58.000 Maybe the Neanderthals are just another anatomically modern human form. 0.99

00:49:02.000 Maybe they're not a different species.

00:49:05.000 They're homo Neanderthalensis as opposed to homo sapiens. 0.95

00:49:09.000 But maybe it was all one and there were different forms of human beings at that time.

00:49:14.000 In that case, these wooden structures would fit within the Neanderthal time frame.

00:49:19.000 This 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.

00:49:27.000 Brian was talking about homonaledi.

00:49:30.000 I think this is homonaledi.

00:49:31.000 This is from South Africa?

00:49:32.000 I think that's what they're talking about.

00:49:35.000 I believe that's what they were talking about.

00:49:37.000 Wooden structure from Zambia.

00:49:41.000 Homo naledi is in South Africa, and it is fascinating.

00:49:44.000 And Lee Berger, who I mentioned to you...

00:49:47.000 Here it is.

00:49:47.000 A species similar to Homo naledi.

00:49:50.000 Yeah.

00:49:51.000 See, Homo...

00:49:52.000 How do you say that word?

00:49:53.000 Homo naledi.

00:49:54.000 No, the other one.

00:49:54.000 Homo heidelbergensis.

00:49:57.000 Heidelberg.

00:49:57.000 Something...

00:49:58.000 Some remains found near Heidelberg in Germany, but...

00:50:00.000 So this is what it says.

00:50:02.000 We don't know exactly what species made the structure, but Homo... 0.54

00:50:05.000 How do you say it again?

00:50:06.000 Homo... 0.90

00:50:06.000 Heidelbergensis. 0.90

00:50:08.000 Heidelbergensis, or a species similar to Homo naledi.

00:50:11.000 Might be candidates.

00:50:12.000 Yeah.

00:50:12.000 Interesting.

00:50:13.000 So Homo naledi is interesting.

00:50:15.000 That's the result of a National Geographic explorer in residence called Lee Berger.

00:50:21.000 And 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.

00:50:33.000 And, of course, immediately this was published.

00:50:37.000 And it was published in a Netflix documentary.

00:50:40.000 The 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.

00:50:49.000 Whereas 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.

00:50:58.000 Whereas saying, no, it's impossible, just closes all the doors.

00:51:02.000 Well, what are the alternative explanations for why they had mass burial sites inside of a cave?

00:51:06.000 They fell there, something like that.

00:51:09.000 All of them?

00:51:10.000 Yeah, all of them.

00:51:11.000 Over many, many, many years?

00:51:12.000 And 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.

00:51:24.000 Well, it does make sense, though, that ancient human species would slowly learn the things that we learned.

00:51:31.000 They would slowly pick up tool making.

00:51:33.000 They would slowly pick up the ability to harness fire.

00:51:36.000 And that as time went on, as the species became more sophisticated and more advanced, as it evolved, it would just refine those methods.

00:51:45.000 Yeah, that does make sense.

00:51:46.000 The question is, when did it happen?

00:51:48.000 This is why I sometimes wear a t-shirt, and I did on the last show with you, which says stuff just keeps on getting older.

00:51:55.000 Yes.

00:51:56.000 And 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.

00:52:05.000 It wasn't so long ago that anatomically modern humans were thought to be just 50,000 years old.

00:52:10.000 Now, 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.

00:52:22.000 But then we find 196,000 years ago from Ethiopia and then more recently 300,000 years ago.

00:52:41.000 Very fascinating also that the oldest known ones are from Africa.

00:52:45.000 Yeah.

00:52:46.000 And obviously, that's where Egypt is.

00:52:48.000 Yes, that's exactly where Egypt is.

00:52:50.000 And, you know, we must recognize Egypt as an African culture.

00:52:54.000 That is what the ancient Egyptians were.

00:52:57.000 I believe their language belonged to the Hamitic language family, which is closely related to the Somali language, for example, in East Africa.

00:53:07.000 African culture, incredibly sophisticated, incredibly advanced, doing stuff that we just don't know how to do today. 0.95

00:53:15.000 Archaeologists will tell you they could build the Great Pyramid, but I defy them to do that.

00:53:19.000 The Great Pyramid is literally impossible.

00:53:21.000 It's something that doesn't make any sense.

00:53:23.000 It certainly doesn't make sense as the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh, which is what we're told it was.

00:53:29.000 Well, 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. 0.59

00:53:45.000 Time capsule.

00:53:46.000 Because it's so insanely sophisticated that you're forced to sort of reckon with this idea that something might have existed before us.

00:53:53.000 Yeah, definitely.

00:53:54.000 And it incorporates all kinds of interesting math.

00:53:56.000 It incorporates pi, which again is supposed to have been discovered by the Greeks.

00:54:00.000 It incorporates the dimensions of the earth on a particular scale.

00:54:04.000 There's a lot about the Great Pyramid which suggests that it was...

00:54:11.000 We're good to go.

00:54:37.000 Rising up through the center of the pyramid.

00:54:39.000 But now we know there's a second one above it that hasn't been explored yet.

00:54:43.000 And that's a result of scanned pyramids.

00:54:45.000 There's corridors and passageways that we didn't know were there.

00:54:47.000 So the Great Pyramid is gradually, bit by bit, revealing its secrets.

00:54:52.000 And 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.

00:55:02.000 How do they access the second grand gallery?

00:55:06.000 Scanning.

00:55:07.000 I mean humans.

00:55:08.000 How can humans get into it?

00:55:09.000 Well, that's a very good question.

00:55:12.000 It's there.

00:55:13.000 The question is, at what point was it made?

00:55:17.000 It should have been part of the original construction of the Great Pyramid.

00:55:21.000 As they were building the Great Pyramid, they created one grand gallery and they created Is it the same size?

00:55:26.000 It looks to be the same size, yeah.

00:55:28.000 From the scanning.

00:55:29.000 The 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.

00:55:41.000 And the Grand Gallery is one of the wonders of the world.

00:55:42.000 So it could have artifacts in it?

00:55:44.000 It could have artifacts in it.

00:55:45.000 Same goes for those shafts that cut through the walls of the so-called Queen's Chamber and King's Chamber. 0.97

00:55:52.000 I resist these names that archaeologists have applied to the Great Pyramid.

00:55:56.000 I resist the notion that it was the tomb of Khufu.

00:55:59.000 I 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.

00:56:07.000 But then they just changed their minds and abandoned it.

00:56:11.000 And then they built the one that's now called the Queen's Chamber.

00:56:13.000 That was intended to be for Khufu, but they abandoned that as well.

00:56:16.000 Then they went up the Grand Gallery and they created the so-called King's Chamber.

00:56:20.000 And because it has a sarcophagus in it and for no other reason, that is said to have been the original burial place of Khufu.

00:56:27.000 It's not enough evidence in my view.

00:56:29.000 And the connections to Khufu are from hieroglyphs depicting his vision that if he uncovered the Sphinx, he would become the Pharaoh of Egypt.

00:56:38.000 Isn't there something along those lines?

00:56:40.000 There is something along those lines.

00:56:42.000 And 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.

00:56:51.000 And he put between the paws of the Sphinx a stella, which is called the dream stella.

00:56:57.000 And in it, he records a dream that he had, that at that time the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand.

00:57:04.000 And the dream was that he should clear the Sphinx.

00:57:07.000 The Sphinx requested him or ordered him. 0.99

00:57:10.000 To free it of sand and reveal it again in its true form.

00:57:14.000 This was at least 1,200 years after the Sphinx is supposed to have been built, 4,500 years ago.

00:57:21.000 But 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.

00:57:29.000 And 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.

00:57:42.000 Well, 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.

00:57:53.000 When the Sahara was In a number of occasions during the Ice Age, incredibly fertile.

00:58:00.000 Very, very nurturing environment with huge river systems running through it and lakes.

00:58:05.000 It's not disputed that that was the case.

00:58:07.000 It was a kind of environment that would have nurtured human civilization.

00:58:11.000 And 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.

00:58:17.000 Of course, that's expensive.

00:58:18.000 And then Egypt itself is in the Sahara.

00:58:21.000 Didn't they find fossilized whale bones in the Sahara?

00:58:24.000 Yeah, that would go back a lot further.

00:58:26.000 That would go back to millions of years, to a time when the oceans were different, perhaps even hundreds of millions of years.

00:58:32.000 So Sahara at one point was an ocean?

00:58:35.000 As many places were.

00:58:36.000 Wow.

00:58:37.000 Pretty much anywhere where you find limestone was once covered by ocean.

00:58:42.000 The world has changed.

00:58:43.000 The world is constantly changing.

00:58:44.000 It's like one of those magic kids' toys where you pull a lever and it wipes out the diagram you just made.

00:58:49.000 Yeah.

00:58:51.000 The 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.

00:59:05.000 It'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,

00:59:21.000 many, many resources.

00:59:22.000 Absolutely.

00:59:22.000 We're talking about a completely different Sahara.

00:59:25.000 And shock's evidence is of a thousand years of heavy rainfall.

00:59:28.000 That'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.

00:59:38.000 Just as further north it changed the climate and made it much colder in the Sahara, it became much wetter.

00:59:43.000 And it's that period of rains that are the most likely culprit for weathering the Sphinx in the way it is.

00:59:49.000 But it could have stood there thousands of years before that.

00:59:51.000 There's also very clear evidence that the face in the Sphinx is much younger, right?

00:59:55.000 No doubt about that whatsoever.

00:59:57.000 The evidence takes – excuse me – frog in my throat.

01:00:02.000 There's a little cough button if you want to hit that.

01:00:04.000 Do I have a cough button?

01:00:05.000 Yeah, you have a little red button there.

01:00:07.000 Is that this red button here?

01:00:08.000 Yeah, if you feel it coming on, just press it over.

01:00:10.000 I'll do that.

01:00:12.000 Where were we, Joe?

01:00:13.000 The Sphinx's face.

01:00:14.000 Yeah.

01:00:14.000 Much younger.

01:00:15.000 The first problem is the ancient Egyptians were masters of proportion. 0.99

01:00:19.000 The ancient Egyptian art is rightly world-famous for its quality, and they didn't get things out of proportion.

01:00:25.000 They wouldn't make that elementary error when they create this giant statue, carving it out of solid bedrock.

01:00:31.000 But the head of the Sphinx is way too small in relation to the body.

01:00:36.000 It looks like the head of a pin.

01:00:38.000 It doesn't fit with that 270 foot long, 70 foot high body.

01:00:43.000 It looks very much as though the Sphinx once had a much larger head.

01:00:48.000 Can you show us a photo of it, Jamie?

01:00:50.000 It's also much less weathered, right?

01:00:53.000 And it's much less weathered.

01:00:54.000 And this is, again, where Egyptology tries to attach the Sphinx to a particular period.

01:01:01.000 Egyptology claims that's the face of Kafre, who was the successor to Khufu.

01:01:06.000 It doesn't look like any known statues of Khafre that I can see, but let's not worry about that.

01:01:14.000 It wears the headdress that's worn by the Sphinx, best looked at in the picture top left or the Quora picture.

01:01:24.000 That headdress is called the Nemes headdress.

01:01:27.000 It's the classic headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. 0.97

01:01:30.000 Not, in my view, Khafre, but the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. 0.82

01:01:35.000 But it's on a head that is way too small by comparison with the body.

01:01:39.000 And 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.

01:01:51.000 It was a lion with a huge mane.

01:01:53.000 And that that head sticking up above the plateau got very heavily eroded.

01:01:58.000 And 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.

01:02:06.000 Does 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.

01:02:23.000 Completely symmetrical.

01:02:25.000 I'm actually not sure whether that's the case with the Sphinx.

01:02:28.000 I 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.

01:02:35.000 But the question is what was it carved from?

01:02:37.000 What was it cut down from?

01:02:39.000 So the geology, the precipitation-induced weathering is one of the evidence, pieces of evidence for a much older Sphinx.

01:02:47.000 But the other thing is the astronomy, the fact that the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker.

01:02:52.000 You know, if you...

01:02:53.000 I stand looking due east at Giza or anywhere in the northern hemisphere on the spring equinox.

01:03:01.000 There's three key moments of the year, four actually.

01:03:03.000 There's the winter and summer solstice and there's the equinoxes, the spring and fall equinoxes.

01:03:08.000 On the summer solstice, the sun rises far to the north of east.

01:03:11.000 On the winter solstice, it rises far to the south of east.

01:03:14.000 But on the equinoxes, it aligns perfectly due east.

01:03:18.000 And that's what the Sphinx is.

01:03:19.000 It's aligned perfectly to due east.

01:03:21.000 And it's gazing at the horizon.

01:03:23.000 And then we come to this contentious issue of who discovered those zodiacal constellations.

01:03:27.000 Because the Sphinx, 12,500 years ago, was gazing at dawn on the spring equinox at the constellation of Leo.

01:03:35.000 In other words, this lion monument on the ground was looking at its own celestial counterpart in the sky.

01:03:41.000 Egyptologists dismiss that.

01:03:43.000 They say that nobody had any idea of the constellations until the Greeks.

01:03:46.000 I just think they're wrong.

01:03:48.000 So astronomy...

01:03:49.000 And geology together combine to invite us to consider the possibility that the Sphinx may be much older than 4,500 years old.

01:03:59.000 And didn't the Greeks learn from the Egyptians as well?

01:04:04.000 Not only did they learn, but they said they learned.

01:04:06.000 The Greeks were very honest about it.

01:04:08.000 They sat at the feet of the ancient Egyptians.

01:04:11.000 They said they learned everything they knew from the ancient Egyptians.

01:04:13.000 But somehow...

01:04:15.000 Archaeology has rewritten the narrative and gives far too much to the Greeks.

01:04:19.000 Ancient Greek was a wonderful culture, magical culture, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful work, but a relatively recent culture.

01:04:27.000 And it was channeling knowledge from much earlier times, in a way.

01:04:32.000 Ancient Greece is the meeting point between the lost ancient world and the modern world in which we live.

01:04:40.000 And that's why the Greeks and the Greek texts are so useful to us.

01:04:43.000 And that's why I think the Atlantis story is a very important story.

01:04:46.000 Well, it's also we do that today.

01:04:48.000 If you look at the Lincoln Monument and you look at the Parthenon, I mean, we mimic ancient Greek history.

01:04:56.000 Architecture today.

01:04:58.000 Absolutely.

01:04:59.000 We're still copying it.

01:05:00.000 And what were the ancient Greeks copying?

01:05:02.000 They were copying the Egyptians. 1.00

01:05:04.000 It just completely makes sense.

01:05:05.000 Go to the temple of Karnak.

01:05:07.000 Go to the temple of Luxor.

01:05:08.000 You're looking at the model for the later Greek temples.

01:05:13.000 They followed that example and they were honest about it.

01:05:16.000 It's modern archaeology that has kind of rewritten the story and given way too much to the Greeks.

01:05:20.000 When 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?

01:05:41.000 I've not seen evidence of a cylindrical drill at Gobekli Tepe, but what you do see I'm gonna press that red button.

01:05:51.000 There you go.

01:05:53.000 What you do see at Gobekli Tepe is pillars with carvings in relief on them.

01:06:00.000 Three-dimensional.

01:06:00.000 Three-dimensional carvings which stand out.

01:06:03.000 That means that all of the stone around the carving had to be cut away.

01:06:06.000 It wasn't a matter of incising the carving into the stone.

01:06:09.000 You had to remove the stone around it and leave it standing proud.

01:06:13.000 Much more sophisticated.

01:06:14.000 And it's much more sophisticated.

01:06:15.000 And it's on the oldest so far identified pillar in Gobekli Tepe, which maybe Jamie can call up.

01:06:21.000 It's Pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe.

01:06:26.000 Any chance of getting that up?

01:06:29.000 It's a remarkable piece of ancient art.

01:06:34.000 It's definitely 11,600 years old.

01:06:37.000 So often...

01:06:39.000 Yeah, the Tepe telegrams, for example, will show it.

01:06:43.000 On the right there, another wonderful piece of relief carving.

01:06:47.000 But there, Pillar 43, this vulture...

01:06:54.000 Is in exactly the position of the constellation of Sagittarius.

01:06:58.000 And the disc over its wing suggests the sun against the background of the constellation of Sagittarius.

01:07:05.000 Below it we have a scorpion, so like the constellation of Scorpio, and roughly in the right place.

01:07:10.000 Above it we have a serpent descending a bit like Ophiuchus.

01:07:14.000 It seems to speak to a knowledge of astronomy at an ancient time.

01:07:18.000 Again, it's controversial, but a lot of work has been done on this.

01:07:21.000 But the point is the carving of that is highly sophisticated at 11,600 years old.

01:07:28.000 That creature, whatever it is, Jamie, that one that's sort of black and white, that image in the center says visual arts cork.

01:07:35.000 Yeah, click on that one.

01:07:36.000 That one's amazing.

01:07:37.000 It's amazing.

01:07:38.000 They cut away the whole pillar to leave that creature there, which itself is hard to identify.

01:07:44.000 Is it a crocodile?

01:07:45.000 We found something very similar in Peru, as a matter of fact.

01:07:49.000 Well, the proportions are off for a crocodile.

01:07:51.000 It looks more like a cat.

01:07:52.000 Yeah, I think it looks more like some kind of feline, but exactly what creature it is is hard.

01:07:57.000 Something with a tail.

01:07:58.000 Yeah, it's hard to identify.

01:08:01.000 This is all so interesting to me.

01:08:04.000 When 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?

01:08:19.000 You can do stuff with stone tools.

01:08:22.000 So they use harder stone to carve this stone.

01:08:25.000 That's the argument.

01:08:26.000 Is there evidence of these stones?

01:08:28.000 No, not that I'm aware of.

01:08:30.000 There 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.

01:08:40.000 It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

01:08:43.000 It's the same with the incredible work that you find at Cuzco and Sacsayhuaman in Peru.

01:08:50.000 Again, they're not supposed to have had – this is supposedly recent.

01:08:54.000 I think it's much older.

01:08:55.000 The Incas are not supposed to have had metal tools.

01:08:58.000 They're supposed to have done all the work with stone tools. 0.93

01:09:00.000 I think it's a reach.

01:09:01.000 I think we're looking at a technology we don't understand.

01:09:04.000 So one of them looks like a wild boar, that one to the left, Pinterest?

01:09:07.000 Yeah, definitely a wild boar.

01:09:09.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:09:10.000 So that's identifiable, which is interesting when you look at the other ones that aren't that identifiable.

01:09:15.000 Yeah, some of them are identifiable.

01:09:17.000 Yeah, I don't know what that is.

01:09:19.000 What's that one supposed to be?

01:09:20.000 That's a fox.

01:09:21.000 A fox.

01:09:22.000 But interestingly, coming out of it are these streamers.

01:09:25.000 And my colleague Martin Swetman from the University of Edinburgh has suggested that that is representing meteors coming down from the sky.

01:09:36.000 Those streamers out of the tail of the fox.

01:09:38.000 And the fox was a constellation.

01:09:39.000 What's that little fellow right there, Jamie?

01:09:41.000 It says, in Turkey, right to the left of your cursor?

01:09:44.000 Yeah, right there.

01:09:44.000 What's that?

01:09:46.000 A human form.

01:09:49.000 Is that another one from somewhere else?

01:09:51.000 No, no.

01:09:53.000 I'm not sure which site that is from.

01:09:55.000 It could be from Gobekli Tepe, judging by the feline figures beside it.

01:09:59.000 Let's find out.

01:10:04.000 Ad blocker.

01:10:05.000 Oh, you gotta subscribe.

01:10:09.000 That was the ad blocker?

01:10:18.000 Too complicated.

01:10:19.000 Is it letting you go back?

01:10:21.000 Okay.

01:10:22.000 How do they...

01:10:24.000 We have those images from ancient Sumer, which are 6,000 years old or so, that show what appears to be the solar system.

01:10:34.000 So how do they...

01:10:36.000 Well, first of all, let's remember ancient Sumer was in Mesopotamia.

01:10:41.000 Yes.

01:10:41.000 And Mesopotamia, the Greek word means between the rivers.

01:10:45.000 And the rivers referred to are the Tigris and the Euphrates.

01:10:48.000 And where is Gobekli Tepe?

01:10:50.000 Right between the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

01:10:53.000 Here it is.

01:10:53.000 Hard to grasp relief of man holding his phallus found in Turkey.

01:10:58.000 Which site?

01:10:59.000 Which site?

01:10:59.000 San Liofer is the big city nearby.

01:11:01.000 That's where you need to go if you want to go to Gobekli Tepe. 0.76

01:11:04.000 I'm not saying which site it was.

01:11:07.000 Can I see that image again?

01:11:08.000 It could be Karahan Tepe, where I've been.

01:11:12.000 But I haven't seen that figure.

01:11:13.000 It looks like he's covering his fowl.

01:11:15.000 It's like he's embarrassed.

01:11:16.000 Or maybe he's pregnant. 0.71

01:11:18.000 Look, maybe he's the first pregnant man. 0.68

01:11:20.000 We don't know.

01:11:21.000 We don't know what it means.

01:11:23.000 I don't know what it means. 1.00

01:11:24.000 But he's definitely honing his dick. 1.00

01:11:25.000 That's for sure. 1.00

01:11:26.000 It seems like it.

01:11:27.000 It seems like maybe he's peeing.

01:11:29.000 What is he doing?

01:11:31.000 What is he doing?

01:11:32.000 I don't know and we don't know.

01:11:34.000 The problem is no written texts have come down to us from that time.

01:11:38.000 So everything in a sense is speculation.

01:11:40.000 What isn't speculation is the dating.

01:11:44.000 I have grave doubts about carbon dating in many cases.

01:11:49.000 Because carbon dating doesn't date stone.

01:11:51.000 It dates organic materials.

01:11:53.000 So the notion that you can date a megalithic site with carbon dating is questionable right away.

01:11:58.000 But 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.

01:12:11.000 I have that problem with the huge Moai statues in Easter Island.

01:12:16.000 They're not carbon dated.

01:12:17.000 What'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.

01:12:28.000 In the case of Gobekli Tepe, one of the very special things about it is that it was deliberately buried.

01:12:34.000 They ran that site for about a thousand years from 11,600 to say 10,600 years ago and then they closed it down.

01:12:42.000 And they went to great effort to fill up all the enclosures with rubble and to create a hill over the top of it.

01:12:50.000 And that's why Gobekli Tepe then remained untouched for the next 10,000 years.

01:12:55.000 There's no danger of contamination with younger carbon from a later culture.

01:12:59.000 The 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.

01:13:13.000 There are later dates from Gobekli Tepe.

01:13:15.000 It wasn't all built in one go.

01:13:17.000 But it stopped around 1,000 or maybe 1,200 years after it started as though they had achieved what they wanted to achieve.

01:13:26.000 The population had all become agriculturalists.

01:13:29.000 We move on into the Holocene, into the modern age.

01:13:32.000 And it's that moment of transition following an enormous cataclysm that really fascinates me.

01:13:38.000 Trevor Burrus So if they attribute the constellations to ancient Greece, What do they say about the clay tablets from Sumer?

01:13:48.000 I've not seen any archaeologist who attributes knowledge of the constellations to the ancient Sumerians.

01:13:53.000 That's a bit too late.

01:13:54.000 The Babylonians maybe.

01:13:56.000 Pull 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.

01:14:09.000 In relatively the correct sizes.

01:14:12.000 Relatively.

01:14:13.000 I wouldn't be surprised by that.

01:14:15.000 In terms of what's the bigger one, what's the smaller one?

01:14:16.000 I 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.

01:14:30.000 Again, this is something that archaeology has dismissed, but I think it's a possibility that's worthy of inquiry.

01:14:36.000 No, it's not that one.

01:14:38.000 That's a different one.

01:14:40.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:14:41.000 There we go.

01:14:42.000 So there's the sun, and it's surrounded by the planets that we're aware of.

01:14:47.000 Yeah, it's kind of hard to interpret that any other way, isn't it?

01:14:50.000 I mean, it seems like that's what it is.

01:14:54.000 It seems like the solar system.

01:14:55.000 Yes.

01:14:56.000 Even the way the sun is depicted is the way a little kid depicts the sun.

01:15:01.000 Yeah.

01:15:01.000 And it's also depicted as a star as well as the sun, the circuit disk of the sun, and the sun is a star.

01:15:08.000 It's such a strange image.

01:15:09.000 The suggestion is much greater knowledge of the universe than is supposed to have existed at that time.

01:15:16.000 And this is Sumer.

01:15:17.000 Sumer is supposedly the first civilization, the oldest civilization on Earth.

01:15:21.000 It goes back about 6,000 years.

01:15:24.000 But then what about the prequels to Sumer?

01:15:26.000 Let's take Gobekli Tepe into account because it's so close to Sumer.

01:15:30.000 And 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.

01:15:44.000 I don't think it's an accident that Gobekli Tepe is where it is.

01:15:48.000 Is there images of this explosion in the sky?

01:15:52.000 No.

01:15:52.000 There's an artist's impression of the explosion in the sky.

01:15:56.000 But do they have evidence on the ground like you can see with Tunguska where it's all flattened?

01:16:01.000 Yes.

01:16:01.000 Ancient – 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.

01:16:12.000 This is not caused by village fires.

01:16:14.000 This is the characteristic fingerprint of a cosmic impact.

01:16:18.000 Platinum, iridium, carbon microspherules, all of these impact proxies are found in abundance at Abu Huraira.

01:16:27.000 Is there a cleared area that's similar to what looks like in Togoska?

01:16:30.000 The problem with Abu Huraira is that it's now underwater.

01:16:34.000 The Aswan High Dam flooded it.

01:16:37.000 But 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.

01:16:52.000 So when was this dam?

01:16:53.000 When did this take place?

01:16:55.000 60s?

01:16:56.000 Something like that.

01:16:57.000 Something like that.

01:16:58.000 I think Abu Huraira has been underwater since the 60s or certainly the 70s.

01:17:02.000 Maybe the 70s.

01:17:03.000 What a bummer.

01:17:04.000 What a bummer.

01:17:05.000 But in this case, thank you archaeology for preserving soil and materials from that site, which allow this work to be done.

01:17:15.000 There's no doubt that a cataclysmic event took place there.

01:17:17.000 There's just a whole bunch of new papers published in the last two or three weeks on Abu Huraira.

01:17:22.000 Which are further consolidating this evidence that it was subject to a very large air burst.

01:17:28.000 And 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.

01:17:39.000 It'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,

01:17:56.000 whether they're able to thrive because there's an abundance of resources.

01:17:59.000 And then it seems those are the places where they create these incredible structures, like the Mayans. 0.93

01:18:05.000 And where you go to a place like North America, 20,000 years ago, it was a It was unbelievably inhospitable.

01:18:11.000 It was terrifying and filled with all sorts of predators.

01:18:16.000 Massive predators.

01:18:17.000 Much like parts of Africa, right? 0.92

01:18:19.000 I mean, we had a North American lion, which is bigger than the African lion, the North American cheetah.

01:18:24.000 There was all sorts of the short-faced bear.

01:18:27.000 Saber-toothed tigers.

01:18:28.000 Yeah.

01:18:28.000 All sorts of animals that would make it really difficult to thrive.

01:18:31.000 You don't want to meet one of those.

01:18:33.000 No.

01:18:33.000 So 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.

01:18:50.000 Waste of time looking for any sign of a lost civilization there.

01:18:53.000 Northern Europe, waste of time.

01:18:54.000 Because it was also a frozen wasteland.

01:18:57.000 But 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.

01:19:14.000 Yeah, that's what's really interesting about just the history of North America in general.

01:19:19.000 Is 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.

01:19:35.000 Yes.

01:19:36.000 I think we must give full credit to hunter-gatherer civilizations who might do a bit of agriculture on the side.

01:19:44.000 These are the masters of survival on our planet, not us.

01:19:48.000 They were the ones who kept the species alive.

01:19:50.000 They were the ones after the younger Dryas who kept the species alive, in my view, because they knew how to survive.

01:19:56.000 And I've made this point before, but if such a cataclysm were to occur to our civilization today, and I don't think it would take much...

01:20:05.000 To bring our civilization down.

01:20:07.000 A full-scale nuclear war, end of the story for technological civilization of the 21st century.

01:20:14.000 Another comet impact, something like the Younger Dryas happening again.

01:20:18.000 Sudden sea level rises.

01:20:20.000 Consider how many cities we have built along coastlines.

01:20:23.000 A 30-foot sea level rise would destroy them.

01:20:25.000 And the psychological nature of our civilization is very entitled.

01:20:31.000 We tend to feel we've got it all made.

01:20:33.000 We take it all for granted.

01:20:34.000 We're not equipped to think about disaster descending upon us.

01:20:39.000 So 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. 0.99

01:20:54.000 They would be the ones who would preserve them and allow them to continue forwards.

01:20:58.000 And 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.

01:21:08.000 And I think that's what happened 12,800 years ago.

01:21:11.000 Well, it seems like there's so much compelling evidence that that's the case.

01:21:15.000 I just – I get so puzzled and baffled by the resistance to it because it's just interesting.

01:21:21.000 Well, 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.

01:21:27.000 All human beings are territorial in their own way and archaeologists are no exception.

01:21:32.000 They're territorial.

01:21:33.000 They've defined their territory.

01:21:35.000 They 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.

01:21:50.000 It's an appealing idea and it makes sense in lots of ways, but there isn't room in that.

01:21:55.000 For an earlier civilization to have emerged and been destroyed.

01:22:00.000 And that's why the idea is attacked.

01:22:02.000 Because if that idea were true, then the foundations on which archaeology has built the House of History would collapse.

01:22:09.000 It's so unfortunate.

01:22:11.000 So unfortunate that they just don't jump in and enjoy these new discoveries.

01:22:16.000 In a way...

01:22:17.000 And redefine things.

01:22:18.000 In a way, I've been glad to have received the...

01:22:24.000 Vituperative level of attack from archaeology that I did because it shows I've pressed their buttons.

01:22:29.000 It shows there's something they feel they need to cancel here.

01:22:34.000 There's something they feel they need to get rid of.

01:22:36.000 It's the most dangerous show on television.

01:22:38.000 The most dangerous show on Netflix.

01:22:39.000 An absurd idea.

01:22:42.000 Really crazy.

01:22:43.000 But that's cancel language, you know.

01:22:45.000 That's the language you use.

01:22:46.000 Also, you call somebody anti-Semitic or racist or white supremacist or misogynist.

01:22:52.000 All of those are easy labels, which...

01:22:55.000 These days just need to be applied to a person.

01:22:57.000 Nobody even investigates or goes to see.

01:22:59.000 I think that works less and less now than it ever has before.

01:23:03.000 I hope so.

01:23:04.000 Because I think people are catching on.

01:23:05.000 Yeah, people are catching on.

01:23:06.000 It's pretty clear.

01:23:07.000 And also the belief that everything they read is true, especially from mainstream media, that's been grossly eroded.

01:23:16.000 This is one of the reasons why – I'm going to press that cough button.

01:23:22.000 This is one of the reasons why my work has not been cancelled and hasn't disappeared because archaeology dislikes it.

01:23:29.000 Because the general public today distrust experts and with good reason.

01:23:33.000 There's a good reason to distrust experts.

01:23:35.000 We've been told so many lies by experts over such a long period of time.

01:23:40.000 They so often are confident, absolutely certain that they're right and they turn out later to be wrong.

01:23:47.000 That any intelligent person begins to wonder, are these experts really the only people we should listen to?

01:23:52.000 And anyway, I want to think for myself.

01:23:54.000 I don't want to be told what to think.

01:23:59.000 I want a diverse range of information and then I will draw my conclusions from it.

01:24:04.000 I'm not speaking of me.

01:24:05.000 I'm speaking of the general public.

01:24:07.000 And I think that attitude is growing.

01:24:09.000 But at the same time, there still is a slavish adherence to the words of experts.

01:24:15.000 And we've seen that again and again in recent years, you know, science.

01:24:21.000 Well, no.

01:24:22.000 Science is a work in progress.

01:24:24.000 Science often gets things wrong.

01:24:26.000 And because science says something is so doesn't mean it is so.

01:24:30.000 It shouldn't be a religion.

01:24:31.000 It shouldn't be like a dictate from a high priest.

01:24:35.000 It should be one bit of information that is supplied to the public to make up their own minds on it.

01:24:40.000 Well, it's also the reality of your book in 1995 being dismissed, and now you see so much evidence, it shows that it's true.

01:24:48.000 That's got to be very satisfying for you.

01:24:50.000 It is.

01:24:51.000 As time has gone on, more and more of what you were...

01:24:56.000 Yeah, it is satisfying to me.

01:24:58.000 For 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.

01:25:11.000 But the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis didn't exist then.

01:25:15.000 So I looked into a number of possibilities that might have resulted in a cataclysm at that time.

01:25:21.000 Then, 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,

01:25:38.000 exactly the window that I was proposing.

01:25:40.000 So, yes, that's very pleasant to see.

01:25:44.000 The discovery of Gobekli Tepe.

01:25:45.000 You know, Gobekli Tepe, they began excavations in 1996, a year after I published Fingerprints of the Gods.

01:25:51.000 But those excavations began to become public knowledge in the 2000s.

01:25:57.000 And the fact that we now have a giant, sophisticated, megalithic site sitting in Turkey, and not alone.

01:26:04.000 Karahan Tepe, there's about 10 other sites in that same neighborhood.

01:26:09.000 Again, 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.

01:26:18.000 It'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. 0.96

01:26:35.000 Who knows what it was like for thousands of years.

01:26:38.000 Thousands of years.

01:26:39.000 Of survival.

01:26:42.000 That there was a method of preserving knowledge.

01:26:46.000 That those survivors of the cataclysm were not just looking at their immediate time.

01:26:52.000 They were also looking to the future.

01:26:54.000 How can we pass down knowledge to the future?

01:26:56.000 And one of the ways you can pass down knowledge to the future is something like the Great Pyramid, which...

01:27:01.000 So big it can't be destroyed.

01:27:03.000 And another way you can pass down knowledge to the future is in wonderful stories that people will keep on telling.

01:27:09.000 And those stories may contain scientific information.

01:27:12.000 The storyteller doesn't even need to know that information.

01:27:14.000 As long as he or she tells the story true, the information will be passed on.

01:27:18.000 And we are a storytelling species.

01:27:20.000 So that's why I take myths very, very seriously.

01:27:23.000 I think they are important evidence of our past.

01:27:25.000 I think archaeology is making a mistake in ignoring myths, and it needs to pay much, much more attention to them.

01:27:32.000 Now, surely there's been positive reactions to the Netflix show.

01:27:38.000 I've had masses of positive reactions from the general public.

01:27:43.000 And those reactions seem to say that people love the show.

01:27:47.000 And it was a big hit on Netflix.

01:27:49.000 It got number one for quite a while.

01:27:53.000 It was a very, very successful series.

01:27:55.000 The public reaction to it is very positive.

01:27:59.000 I've been writing about these possibilities since the early 1990s, the possibility of a lost civilization.

01:28:06.000 The 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.

01:28:23.000 People would come up to me in various places, often because they'd seen me on your show.

01:28:28.000 Since the Netflix show, that recognition factor has increased enormously.

01:28:32.000 In every airport I go to, I'm stopped.

01:28:34.000 People want to take pictures with me, which I'm delighted to do because I would be nothing without my readers.

01:29:05.000 You must have been younger.

01:29:08.000 Actually, she was in her 50s and she was with her family and she said, I just want you to know that not all archaeologists hate your work.

01:29:16.000 I found your work very, very useful.

01:29:19.000 That's nurturing.

01:29:19.000 That's encouraging to me to hear that kind of thing.

01:29:23.000 And 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.

01:29:31.000 Yeah.

01:29:31.000 And I think I am over some kind of target here.

01:29:35.000 Truth will come out in due course.

01:29:37.000 Whether it happens in my lifetime or much later, I don't know.

01:29:41.000 But I'm sure we're missing a part of our story.

01:29:44.000 My fear is that it's going to repeat itself and we're not going to learn before it happens.

01:29:49.000 That's an unfortunate character of the human race, that we do not learn from past mistakes.

01:29:55.000 And, you know, we live in a world now Dominated by hatred, dominated by competing nationalism, dominated by competing religions.

01:30:07.000 I 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. 1.00

01:30:17.000 I think that the three of them are behind so much of the trouble and chaos and hatred in the world.

01:30:23.000 It's okay to have your religious faith.

01:30:25.000 That's great.

01:30:26.000 But to say my faith is right and your faith is wrong, that's the first step on the road to ruin.

01:30:31.000 And that's what's happening today is these exclusive religious ideas that compel people to behave in really obnoxious ways towards each other.

01:30:40.000 There's nothing more dangerous than ideas sometimes.

01:30:43.000 And ideas have driven so much of the conflict in the world.

01:30:47.000 Look at the ideas behind Hitler's rise to power and the conflicts that resulted. 0.57

01:30:52.000 People bought into those ideas and it led to disaster.

01:30:55.000 And that is happening in the world today, most unfortunately.

01:30:58.000 It's exactly happening.

01:30:59.000 That's what's so terrifying.

01:31:00.000 And if A full-scale nuclear war does happen.

01:31:05.000 God help us.

01:31:06.000 God help us.

01:31:07.000 I mean, there might not be a human race to reinvent itself.

01:31:11.000 It's perfectly possible.

01:31:12.000 We could become completely extinct.

01:31:14.000 And nature has a way of doing that.

01:31:17.000 It happened to the dinosaurs too.

01:31:19.000 Well, the chickens survived.

01:31:23.000 Nature got rid of the dinosaurs.

01:31:24.000 They were not fit to survive in the new world that was created by that impact six million years ago.

01:31:31.000 They were not suited for survival in that world.

01:31:33.000 And 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.

01:31:47.000 I'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.

01:31:57.000 The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams.

01:31:59.000 I love the cultural diversity of humanity.

01:32:02.000 This is one of the beautiful things about the human race.

01:32:04.000 So many different cultures bring different important pieces to the party.

01:32:08.000 I love that.

01:32:09.000 I would never seek to get rid of that.

01:32:11.000 But underneath that cultural diversity, we are human beings.

01:32:14.000 We love our families.

01:32:16.000 We have hopes and ambitions for the future.

01:32:18.000 We have dreams.

01:32:19.000 All of us do.

01:32:20.000 Whatever side of a particular argument we're on, you get down to that basic level, we're all the same.

01:32:27.000 I believe what unites us as a species is much more significant than what divides us.

01:32:33.000 And 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.

01:32:43.000 It'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.

01:33:04.000 Subtle in the United States, but it's still control.

01:33:06.000 It's still mind control.

01:33:07.000 It's control, and it's unfortunate that that's still the way human beings are behaving in this age of information.

01:33:14.000 Yeah.

01:33:15.000 That we're forced into these paradigms.

01:33:17.000 We're trapped by these systems.

01:33:19.000 Very much so.

01:33:19.000 That existed essentially back when we were tribal cultures.

01:33:23.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

01:33:23.000 And, you know, the leader, and the leader tells the group who the enemies are, and this is the same shit that's been going on forever. 0.99

01:33:29.000 The same shit. 1.00

01:33:30.000 And also... 1.00

01:33:32.000 The notion that we need leaders at all is a questionable notion in my mind.

01:33:38.000 I'm not sure human beings do need leaders.

01:33:40.000 We need administrators, organizers.

01:33:43.000 We live in large, complex societies.

01:33:45.000 There's a need for organization.

01:34:03.000 Or who I feel attracted to or I feel who offers some hope.

01:34:07.000 I think you had Robert Kennedy Jr. on the show.

01:34:10.000 To me, he's an interesting American politician.

01:34:13.000 I don't know a whole lot about American politics, but he seems to be a free thinker.

01:34:19.000 My litmus test for any leader in an advanced industrialized country is what's his position on drugs?

01:34:26.000 What's his position on the war on drugs, his or her position?

01:34:29.000 Are they going to maintain this strict control, this legal penalties for people choosing to alter their own state of consciousness?

01:34:39.000 Or 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?

01:34:51.000 Even if those choices annoy others, we should still have the right to make those choices.

01:34:56.000 And I don't see many politicians who are saying actually what we should do is legalize all drugs.

01:35:01.000 I think we should.

01:35:02.000 I think all drugs should be legalized and then accompanied with wise advice.

01:35:06.000 There's no evidence that the war on drugs has had any success in controlling the – there are dangerous drugs.

01:35:13.000 There are drugs that I would not advise people to take.

01:35:17.000 The way to do it is not to impose draconian penalties on people for exploring their own consciousness.

01:35:23.000 The way to do it is to offer wise advice which people take seriously. 0.98

01:35:27.000 Right 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.

01:35:35.000 So 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.

01:35:49.000 I think the age of 21 is a good age.

01:35:51.000 I think teenagers can suffer quite badly from drug use and I think it would be a good idea if they didn't.

01:35:57.000 But I know from having had teenage children myself that teenagers will by and large do what they want to do.

01:36:04.000 Especially if you tell them not to.

01:36:06.000 Especially if you tell them not to.

01:36:07.000 Which is the problem with America versus Europe in regards to drinking.

01:36:11.000 Yeah.

01:36:12.000 Elaborate on that?

01:36:13.000 Well, in America, you can't drink at all until you turn 21. And so drinking is this forbidden fruit that they get excited about.

01:36:22.000 If you go to Italy, young kids can drink wine.

01:36:26.000 Sure.

01:36:27.000 They do it all the time.

01:36:28.000 I don't think they have the levels of alcoholism that we do.

01:36:31.000 I'm sure they don't.

01:36:32.000 I'm sure they don't.

01:36:33.000 I think there's a big part of human nature, especially young humans.

01:36:36.000 They rebel against authority figures.

01:36:39.000 Yes.

01:36:39.000 They don't believe you have it all figured out.

01:36:41.000 They see that you're flawed.

01:36:42.000 Yeah.

01:36:43.000 They see that you're just a person.

01:36:44.000 You're just an older person.

01:36:45.000 But an older person that's imparting your rule of law on them, then they want to rebel.

01:36:50.000 Often 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.

01:36:58.000 Terrible things will happen if you legalize all drugs.

01:37:00.000 I'm sorry.

01:37:01.000 All drugs are already available illegally.

01:37:03.000 Anybody can get access to them when they want to.

01:37:06.000 The war on drugs has not worked.

01:37:09.000 And kudos to those states in America.

01:37:12.000 What is it now?

01:37:13.000 22 states that have legalized cannabis?

01:37:16.000 There's quite a few.

01:37:16.000 And some of them have even decriminalized psilocybin.

01:37:20.000 Oregon.

01:37:20.000 Yeah.

01:37:21.000 Now, this is very interesting.

01:37:22.000 And this connects with a fundamental American value as I see it, which is the value of individual freedom.

01:37:28.000 Individuals, adults, not children, should be allowed to make decisions about their own health and their own bodies.

01:37:34.000 Without some authority figure preaching to them or even sending them to jail.

01:37:39.000 Well, not only that, but authority figures that have no experience in these drugs.

01:37:42.000 Zero experience.

01:37:43.000 Especially when they use the term drugs.

01:37:46.000 The problem with that term is it's a blanket that you throw over a bunch of different psychoactive substances that have wildly different results.

01:37:54.000 And non-psychoactive substances because aren't pharmacies called drugstores in America?

01:37:58.000 Yeah.

01:37:59.000 Well, and they do have drugs.

01:38:01.000 I mean, they are selling sanctioned drugs.

01:38:03.000 Yeah.

01:38:04.000 Many pharmaceutical drugs are very heavyweight and very, very, very dangerous.

01:38:08.000 The antidepressants, for example.

01:38:10.000 I've had experience with antidepressants.

01:38:12.000 They're horrible.

01:38:13.000 Seroxat and Prozac, back in the 90s, I had a long depression.

01:38:16.000 They didn't help me.

01:38:17.000 They made me worse.

01:38:19.000 And when people ask me, I advise them, stay away from the selective serotonin and reuptake inhibitors.

01:38:26.000 They are not good things.

01:38:28.000 But, of course, if somebody wants to take them, that's also their free choice.

01:38:32.000 There's also real results that show that when you're exercising, it's 1.25 times more effective than taking SSRIs for depression.

01:38:43.000 A regular exercise is one of the most effective methods of mitigating some depression.

01:38:49.000 There'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.

01:38:58.000 But no doubt, exercise is extremely helpful.

01:39:01.000 I know if I take a long walk, I feel much better after the walk than I did before.

01:39:06.000 I don't do it enough.

01:39:07.000 I need to do it more.

01:39:08.000 I need to start practicing what I preach.

01:39:10.000 Yeah, I do it regularly.

01:39:11.000 If I don't, it drives me nuts.

01:39:13.000 I feel the difference.

01:39:15.000 If I take a couple of days off, there's this creeping level of anxiety that enters into me.

01:39:20.000 This weird discomfort with the world.

01:39:23.000 And when I exercise, that goes away.

01:39:25.000 For me, it's real clear.

01:39:27.000 Just as a physical medicine, it's something that I need to do.

01:39:31.000 It's definitely the first stop if you're trying to get rid of depression.

01:39:35.000 It's just so bizarre that a culture that makes things like psilocybin illegal legalizes opiates.

01:39:42.000 It legalizes prescription use of opiates.

01:39:45.000 And if you've seen any of the docu...

01:39:47.000 Like 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.

01:39:59.000 Terrible idea.

01:40:00.000 It's nuts.

01:40:01.000 Terrible idea.

01:40:02.000 It's nuts.

01:40:03.000 And that same culture making... 0.91

01:40:05.000 And very often what happens is that the individual who's been prescribed opiates for pain...

01:40:10.000 The doctor withdraws a prescription.

01:40:12.000 Then they have to go on the black market to acquire it.

01:40:15.000 Yeah.

01:40:15.000 If they become addicted and they start abusing it, then they have to go find it somewhere else.

01:40:20.000 The whole thing is a disastrous mess.

01:40:23.000 At my age, which is now 73, I can't avoid being aware that my time on this planet is limited.

01:40:32.000 My work, my studies, my experiences over the years have left me with absolutely no fear of death.

01:40:39.000 I do regard it as the beginning of the next great adventure.

01:40:42.000 It's something that I think is going to be fascinating and interesting.

01:40:46.000 But can I just finish?

01:40:48.000 I fear pain.

01:40:49.000 I do fear pain.

01:40:51.000 Really severe pain.

01:40:52.000 The pain of a lingering terrible cancer, for example.

01:40:56.000 If I found myself in that situation, that's an appropriate situation to take opiates.

01:41:01.000 Their heroin and heroin derivatives can be useful in the management of pain.

01:41:06.000 But otherwise, I would steer completely clear of them.

01:41:10.000 But yeah, the next great adventure.

01:41:12.000 What do you think that is?

01:41:14.000 Where are you getting this belief from?

01:41:17.000 And what do you think it is?

01:41:18.000 A lot of it comes from the work I've done with ayahuasca over the years.

01:41:23.000 It goes back to a near-death experience I had in my late teens.

01:41:27.000 Massive electric shock.

01:41:28.000 I left my body...

01:41:31.000 I was up around the light, saw myself slumped on the floor, and then I came back into my body.

01:41:37.000 But 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.

01:41:46.000 Ancient 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.

01:42:09.000 This is my belief system.

01:42:11.000 I 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.

01:42:38.000 But some come back.

01:42:39.000 The bodhisattvas, they choose not to go to nirvana. 1.00

01:42:42.000 They come back as teachers to teach human beings how to better and improve their lives.

01:42:47.000 That idea is uniquely terrifying to people that you live life over and over again until you get it right.

01:42:52.000 And I don't necessarily understand why, because I have the initial impulse to be terrified of it as well, but yet I really enjoy life.

01:43:02.000 Yeah.

01:43:03.000 Like, if I had to do this one again, like, I probably wouldn't like my childhood, but my childhood made me who I am today.

01:43:10.000 Yeah.

01:43:14.000 I really wish I didn't make them, but I did and they make me who I am today.

01:43:19.000 And you learned from them.

01:43:20.000 I learned from them.

01:43:21.000 I understand life better because of mistakes.

01:43:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:43:25.000 And, you know, people oftentimes dwell on mistakes and think that that defines them.

01:43:30.000 And 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.

01:43:46.000 And then you're defined by the worst mistakes that you've made, and that becomes you forever.

01:43:52.000 Which you may have made in a state of complete immaturity where you didn't even really fully understand what you were doing.

01:43:57.000 Oftentimes is the case.

01:43:58.000 And, you know, even older people that make mistakes.

01:44:01.000 Like, this idea that you should know by a certain time.

01:44:04.000 Like, look, this is a constant evolving adventure that we're all on.

01:44:09.000 And if you're a person who's 35 years old and you feel like, oh my god, how could I fuck this up so bad at 35? 0.99

01:44:16.000 I'm such a loser. 0.97

01:44:18.000 No, this is just what happens with humans. 0.98

01:44:20.000 These are mistakes.

01:44:21.000 People make mistakes and you've got to be able to rebound and learn from it.

01:44:25.000 And that's the process of growth.

01:44:27.000 That's the only way it gets to you.

01:44:29.000 It's the only way it gets to you and it's really important to be able to make mistakes and to learn from them.

01:44:33.000 And 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.

01:44:50.000 We've all got to be these perfect creatures that go through life producing and consuming and not causing any trouble.

01:44:56.000 I think in regards to drugs, there is a realization.

01:45:01.000 There'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.

01:45:11.000 Because now they're sanctioned.

01:45:13.000 And 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.

01:45:20.000 And hopefully they could do this without propaganda.

01:45:23.000 Hopefully they could do this without drug commercials that tell them what's good and what's bad.

01:45:27.000 I 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.

01:45:41.000 And 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.

01:45:50.000 I know.

01:45:50.000 You're like, I want to go to the cookout.

01:45:51.000 It's propaganda.

01:45:52.000 But 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.

01:46:12.000 And you see that and like, that's what I want.

01:46:14.000 And it's just trickery, this weird game that we're allowed to play on people.

01:46:19.000 It's money-making trickery.

01:46:20.000 That's what it is.

01:46:21.000 I mean, the pharmaceutical companies are the biggest drug pushers in the world.

01:46:25.000 Literally.

01:46:26.000 And they get full governmental support in order to do that.

01:46:33.000 Why are antidepressants out there?

01:46:36.000 Because people get less efficient when they're depressed, so antidepressants make them perhaps, although I don't think antidepressants work.

01:46:45.000 They certainly didn't work for me.

01:46:47.000 Perhaps make them more malleable, more amenable members of society.

01:46:53.000 Alcohol isn't too much of a threat to society.

01:46:55.000 Yeah, it's a very dangerous drug.

01:46:57.000 It causes thousands of deaths.

01:46:59.000 It causes violence.

01:47:00.000 It causes road accidents.

01:47:02.000 But it doesn't challenge the status quo.

01:47:04.000 People are not drinking a beer or a bottle of wine and having thoughts that are anti-establishment.

01:47:11.000 That tends not to be what happens.

01:47:12.000 Whereas the psychedelics, they do challenge the status quo.

01:47:16.000 They 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.

01:47:25.000 There must be some other way.

01:47:29.000 It also makes you very aware of the frailty of human consciousness in regards to everyday life.

01:47:39.000 There'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.

01:47:49.000 And it's seemingly unavailable during normal states of consciousness because we evolved as a species that needed to survive.

01:47:59.000 And 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.

01:48:11.000 You're trying to get eaten by cats or raided by a foreign tribe. 1.00

01:48:15.000 And 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.

01:48:30.000 They weren't demonized before that.

01:48:31.000 Well, that we allow the goofiest government ever, the Nixon administration. 0.75

01:48:35.000 The Nixon administration.

01:48:36.000 Define the war on drugs.

01:48:38.000 Yeah, literally and to stop the civil rights movement and to stop the anti-war movement.

01:48:42.000 Yeah.

01:48:42.000 That's literally why they did it.

01:48:43.000 It's a very sinister process indeed.

01:48:47.000 It's also the way it captured the public zeitgeist, the way it captured people's Predetermined opinions on things.

01:48:53.000 Because 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.

01:49:04.000 And it's not a well thought out sort of philosophy.

01:49:08.000 It's something that they've just sort of adopted.

01:49:10.000 And they've adopted from their culture. 0.98

01:49:13.000 And 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.

01:49:41.000 I 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,

01:50:01.000 we'll celebrate them and we'll advertise them in every possible way.

01:50:04.000 But other drugs we will not allow.

01:50:08.000 That's very un-American. 0.85

01:50:09.000 America is a country that celebrates and that enshrines individual freedom.

01:50:15.000 And I love that about America.

01:50:16.000 And 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.

01:50:30.000 Not at all. 1.00

01:50:30.000 State by state, America is proving that the war on drugs is full of shit. 1.00

01:50:34.000 It's just time for the federal authorities to catch up. 1.00

01:50:37.000 Yeah.

01:50:37.000 And it's time for the federal authorities to realize that this prohibition is bad for them as well.

01:50:44.000 Yeah.

01:50:45.000 It's bad for the human species.

01:50:47.000 It's bad for you as an individual.

01:50:49.000 And 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.

01:50:59.000 Absolutely.

01:51:00.000 Not everybody.

01:51:01.000 Some people shouldn't take it.

01:51:02.000 Some people have all sorts of medical conditions and psychological conditions that don't make it safe for them.

01:51:10.000 Definitely.

01:51:10.000 But 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,

01:51:28.000 why they should I think?

01:51:50.000 She runs the Beckley Foundation.

01:51:52.000 Amanda has been very effective over the years in getting legislation changed and in funding research into psychedelics.

01:52:00.000 And one of the things I know that Amanda is looking at is hospices that offer psychedelic therapy.

01:52:06.000 And I think that would be very useful.

01:52:10.000 You're not obliged to take the psychedelics.

01:52:12.000 It's a free choice.

01:52:13.000 But 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.

01:52:24.000 And it's been shown that particularly psilocybin through these end-of-life fears, that it has an amazing effect.

01:52:34.000 It has an amazing effect.

01:52:35.000 People in a terminal condition with cancer who've been terrified of death stop being afraid of death anymore.

01:52:41.000 It's not consuming them anymore.

01:52:43.000 They 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.

01:52:54.000 Which is to me one of the weird things about rigid atheism.

01:52:58.000 This concept that when your brain shuts off, when your body dies, consciousness ends and it's just blank.

01:53:05.000 And it's just our ego that wants us to believe that there's something more and greater afterwards.

01:53:09.000 So annoying that.

01:53:10.000 Well, it's just weird.

01:53:11.000 Richard Dawkins.

01:53:12.000 The selfish gene.

01:53:14.000 He's responsible for a lot of that thinking. 0.63

01:53:16.000 Well, it's they don't want to buy into foolishness.

01:53:20.000 And 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.

01:53:36.000 That's right.

01:53:36.000 And they can embrace the darkness.

01:53:38.000 And their intellects are so superior that they don't realize that they themselves are practicing a religion.

01:53:43.000 Yeah.

01:53:43.000 That is a religious belief.

01:53:45.000 If 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.

01:53:53.000 Well, it's also the most arrogant ones.

01:53:54.000 That's an opinion. 0.83

01:53:55.000 The most arrogant ones are the ones that don't have the psychedelic experiences.

01:53:59.000 That's true.

01:53:59.000 The people that have had psychedelic experiences, they waffle on those ideas a little bit.

01:54:04.000 They go, well...

01:54:05.000 I don't know what that was.

01:54:06.000 There's no doubt that psychedelic experiences change people.

01:54:10.000 And by and large, they change people in a positive way.

01:54:13.000 I'm not saying that drugs can't be harmful.

01:54:15.000 They can be.

01:54:16.000 I'm going to use that general word because it's just the word in our language.

01:54:21.000 But by and large, the psychedelics are very positive in their effects and in their consequences.

01:54:29.000 Kind of brings me to the issue of DMT. DMT, of course, is the – could we plug in the HDMI cable, Jamie?

01:54:41.000 DMT is the active ingredient of ayahuasca.

01:54:46.000 Dimethyltryptamine, arguably the most powerful visionary substance known to science.

01:54:52.000 I first encountered DMT in ayahuasca in 2003. Just let me type something in here.

01:55:02.000 My page has gone away.

01:55:05.000 Perhaps it'll come back.

01:55:09.000 So this is interesting.

01:55:10.000 You take your glasses off to see your computer better?

01:55:12.000 Yeah, because I've got another pair which are for close-up, but I can't even bother to put them on.

01:55:16.000 These are distance glasses.

01:55:17.000 I can see you clearly, but everything here is a blur.

01:55:21.000 When are we going to fix that?

01:55:22.000 I don't know.

01:55:24.000 No backups.

01:55:25.000 There we go.

01:55:26.000 My friend Ari got his eyes fixed.

01:55:27.000 He got Lasix, and then his eyes got worse.

01:55:30.000 Yeah.

01:55:32.000 They were fixed for a while, and then as macular degeneration continued to set in, they got bad again.

01:55:39.000 He's like, what?

01:55:40.000 I got an operation.

01:55:41.000 It went bad again.

01:55:42.000 This has happened to my wife, Santa.

01:55:44.000 She's had artificial retinas or whatever they are put in, and it helped for a while, but now she's needing more glasses to wear on them.

01:55:52.000 See, these are my short-distance glasses.

01:55:55.000 Got it.

01:55:55.000 I have another pair in the middle.

01:55:57.000 So I've got three pairs.

01:55:58.000 It's a bit cumbersome, but I will not have surgery for it.

01:56:02.000 Have you ever taken supplements that help your macular degeneration stop?

01:56:08.000 No, I haven't.

01:56:09.000 Should 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.

01:56:21.000 Would you text me a little bit of information on that?

01:56:24.000 Yeah, I have no affiliation with this company, by the way.

01:56:26.000 Just something that I buy.

01:56:28.000 But they work for you?

01:56:28.000 Yeah.

01:56:29.000 My vision still sucks, but it sucked up until a level, and it didn't get worse. 0.93

01:56:34.000 That's good to know. 0.80

01:56:35.000 Yeah, and it didn't get worse, and it coincided with me taking supplements.

01:56:39.000 Just being really religious about it.

01:56:42.000 Can I show you a couple more pictures?

01:56:46.000 Sure.

01:56:47.000 What do you got here?

01:56:48.000 So that's my first experience with ayahuasca.

01:56:51.000 I'm with Don Francisco Montes Schuna, who's an Amazonian shaman in Iquitos.

01:56:56.000 And this is 2003. And we are picking leaves from the chacruna bush.

01:57:02.000 It's called Cicotria viridis.

01:57:04.000 And those leaves contain DMT. And then 20 years later, here I am With Francisco again.

01:57:13.000 I've got less hair, and Francisco has definitely aged as well.

01:57:17.000 And this was about three weeks ago.

01:57:19.000 I had an ayahuasca session then.

01:57:22.000 One of the most, in some ways, one of the most helpful sessions that I've ever had.

01:57:29.000 I suffer from migraines.

01:57:32.000 Very bad migraine headaches.

01:57:33.000 They're a curse of my life.

01:57:35.000 I'm taking a pharmaceutical medication.

01:57:39.000 I carry it still everywhere with me.

01:57:42.000 Which is a triptan.

01:57:44.000 It belongs to the class of medicines called triptans.

01:57:47.000 I take it as a nasal spray and it will pretty much guaranteed stop a migraine within two hours.

01:57:55.000 So 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.

01:58:02.000 What is a migraine like?

01:58:04.000 What does it feel like?

01:58:05.000 Hell on earth.

01:58:06.000 The worst conceivable pain.

01:58:08.000 It starts often on one side of the head.

01:58:11.000 And 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.

01:58:18.000 And if I don't treat it, I am looking at three to four days in a darkened room wearing an eye mask.

01:58:27.000 I'm so sensitive to light.

01:58:29.000 The 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.

01:58:37.000 Get me out of here.

01:58:38.000 I just don't want any more of this.

01:58:40.000 So I rely on these triptans, but triptans turn out to be quite closely related to dimethyltryptamine.

01:58:48.000 And on this – let's put that shot up again.

01:58:52.000 On this session that I had with Francisco, I focused the whole session on please help me with my migraines.

01:59:00.000 That was the whole thing it was about.

01:59:03.000 And 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.

01:59:14.000 I 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.

01:59:31.000 As one does in a deeply altered state of consciousness sometime.

01:59:34.000 And I was kind of backing off and I said, I want this to stop.

01:59:36.000 And a voice said to me, just shut up and get out of our way. 0.83

01:59:39.000 We're trying to help you. 0.96

01:59:42.000 And I said, okay.

01:59:43.000 And I surrendered.

01:59:44.000 And I let it go the full course.

01:59:47.000 The net result is that in the three weeks since then, when I might have taken 15 or 20 of those pharmaceutical medicines, I've taken one.

01:59:55.000 Just one.

01:59:56.000 And 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.

02:00:06.000 So normally this migraine thing is a regular occurrence?

02:00:10.000 Regular.

02:00:10.000 And it's got worse.

02:00:11.000 It started when I was about 19. And as I've got older, many people, it doesn't happen.

02:00:15.000 In my case, it's just got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.

02:00:18.000 And it was accompanied.

02:00:19.000 It's related to epilepsy.

02:00:21.000 I had a massive epileptic seizures back in 2017. I think I told you about it.

02:00:26.000 It put me in induced coma for 48 hours.

02:00:29.000 I'm a neurological mess, you know, but I'm grateful to the fact that I've had three weeks now of relief.

02:00:35.000 From these horrific migraine symptoms and I can't help feeling that this ayahuasca session had a lot to do with it.

02:00:42.000 And it's the DMT in ayahuasca which is undoubtedly the active ingredient.

02:00:49.000 The mystery and why it's science is that the other ingredient of the brew is the ayahuasca vine.

02:00:55.000 Now, taken orally, neither the leaves that contain DMT nor the vine are psychoactive.

02:01:01.000 You have to cook them together to get the psychoactive brew called ayahuasca.

02:01:05.000 And that's quite a miracle out of the tens of thousands of different species of plants and trees in the Amazons.

02:01:09.000 But these guys are...

02:01:12.000 The Amazon is their pharmacy.

02:01:13.000 They know every plant, every tree.

02:01:15.000 They understand all their properties.

02:01:16.000 They're real experts in working with it and the best people to work with.

02:01:22.000 I'm bringing this up because I would like to share some information, if I may, about new DMT projects that are going on.

02:01:32.000 As you're aware, the mainstream is gradually beginning to embrace psychedelics.

02:01:38.000 We're finding Far from being the demonized substances that Richard Nixon and co.

02:01:44.000 wanted 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.

02:01:52.000 Psychedelics are being tested and tried out in universities all around the world and producing very, very interesting results.

02:01:58.000 Now, 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.

02:02:12.000 It might linger a little bit longer than that, but it comes on really fast.

02:02:16.000 It's ferociously powerful.

02:02:19.000 The sense of entering a seamlessly convincing parallel realm is ferociously powerful.

02:02:25.000 It can be scary, but it's so overwhelming and so sudden and so enormous that by the end of it, You kind of wonder what happened there.

02:02:35.000 It's hard to process the experience.

02:02:37.000 With 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.

02:02:53.000 That state can be extended for an hour or more if the volunteer wishes it.

02:02:57.000 Many of the studies that are doing this now give the volunteers the option to opt out and say, I've had enough.

02:03:02.000 I don't want more of this.

02:03:04.000 But by and large, most people go through it.

02:03:06.000 So there's two projects which are now underway.

02:03:09.000 And one of them is at the University of California, San Diego.

02:03:13.000 It was launched with a $1.5 million donation from philanthropist Eugene Jong.

02:03:20.000 I've put a link to a story there from USCD about this research.

02:03:27.000 But what he's doing is he's infusing psychedelic doses of intravenous DMT for 60 minutes.

02:03:32.000 It's Dr. John Dean who's leading it.

02:03:35.000 He's using fMRI to study the extended state DMT. He's looking at the entity phenomenon particularly.

02:03:43.000 Vast number of people who've worked with DMT experience encounters with entities, and those entities communicate telepathically. 0.98

02:03:50.000 Of course, the mainstream would say, that's rubbish, it's just your brain on drugs.

02:03:53.000 But it's a mystery, and they're going to decode these visual activities. 0.97

02:03:59.000 And the...

02:04:09.000 What this boils down to is focused on measuring whether a person's consciousness can extend past the physical body during trance or hypnotic states.

02:04:18.000 And 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.

02:04:29.000 They're going to be having people on DMT in one country and at the same time, simultaneously, people on DMT in another country.

02:04:35.000 This work is happening in Switzerland as well.

02:04:37.000 And seeing if there's some kind of out-of-body element.

02:04:40.000 This is stuff that mainstream science wouldn't have touched a decade ago, but now is interested in it.

02:04:45.000 And that's a very positive thing.

02:04:48.000 Well, if we can get proof of a mappable realm.

02:04:51.000 Yes.

02:04:52.000 That'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.

02:05:08.000 Great.

02:05:08.000 But what about exploring inner space?

02:05:10.000 What about finding out who and what we are?

02:05:12.000 What about the possibility of a chemical gateway that leads you to a realm that you're just not capable of accessing without it?

02:05:18.000 That's what I think DMT is.

02:05:20.000 And the fact that it's actually endogenously produced?

02:05:22.000 Yes.

02:05:23.000 Why is the human body producing DMT as a natural endogenous brain hormone?

02:05:28.000 If 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.

02:05:44.000 That we've otherwise shut out from our consciousness.

02:05:47.000 This is a hypothesis to explore.

02:05:49.000 And I'm really, really happy that it is happening at the University of San Diego.

02:05:56.000 Anybody who wants to find out more about it, it's down there at the bottom.

02:06:00.000 You can go to the Center for Psychedelic Research at UCSD. There's a URL there.

02:06:05.000 And the point of contact is the lead scientist, which is J1Dean at health.ucsd.edu.

02:06:13.000 Anybody 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.

02:06:26.000 You have a hint to Elon Musk in this?

02:06:29.000 This is not my words.

02:06:31.000 Whose words are these?

02:06:32.000 These are words that have been sent to me by the team.

02:06:35.000 The team says we're looking to raise about 20 million to make all this happen within three to five years.

02:06:40.000 Hint, maybe Elon Musk would be interested in supporting, as he has mentioned, DMT multiple times on Twitter and other public spheres.

02:06:47.000 He's the guy you go to.

02:06:49.000 Well, exactly.

02:06:51.000 They've raised $1.5 million and that gets the project started thanks to Eugene Jong.

02:06:55.000 But to take this project to the next level, they need more money.

02:06:59.000 And this is a highly creditable institution offering something very interesting.

02:07:04.000 Well, he might be willing to do it because he's willing to offer Wikipedia $1 billion to change their name to Dickipedia.

02:07:11.000 That would be a billion dollars really well spent because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of lies. 1.00

02:07:19.000 It is full of bullshit. 1.00

02:07:21.000 It is full of propaganda. 1.00

02:07:22.000 It is full of dishonesty.

02:07:23.000 I can say this from my own knowledge of my particular sphere.

02:07:27.000 There is so much misinformation put out on Wikipedia.

02:07:30.000 If it's the case in a sphere I know about, I bet it's the case in every other sphere as well.

02:07:33.000 Do you know what they did with Andrew Huberman, who's a professor at Stanford?

02:07:36.000 No.

02:07:37.000 They didn't like something that he supported.

02:07:40.000 I forget what it was.

02:07:41.000 So they removed his research page.

02:07:43.000 So all of his published research is no longer on his Wikipedia page, at least wasn't.

02:07:49.000 And they locked it.

02:07:50.000 Typical.

02:07:51.000 Which is just insane.

02:07:52.000 Like, you can't remove a man's distinguished scientific work because you don't agree with...

02:07:58.000 I don't even remember what it was.

02:08:00.000 It's cancel culture.

02:08:02.000 But it's insane because you're dealing with a legitimate academic.

02:08:05.000 It's...

02:08:06.000 Utter madness. 0.99

02:08:08.000 It'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. 0.98

02:08:21.000 There's only one word for it, and that's censorship. 0.77

02:08:23.000 It'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.

02:08:32.000 Not only that, but so-called democratic Western civilization on a website that's run by progressives.

02:08:40.000 Isn't being a progressive about...

02:08:43.000 An objective assessment of all the information and relaying it in a way that enriches the public's understanding of the subject.

02:08:51.000 Not lying or lying by removing information.

02:08:57.000 It's insane.

02:09:00.000 Basically, the attitude behind it is one of enormous hubris and pride.

02:09:05.000 These people are saying the public aren't able to make up their own minds on things, so we'll make up their minds for them.

02:09:10.000 It's so offensive and so wrong.

02:09:13.000 Oh, I remember what it was about.

02:09:14.000 It 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,

02:09:30.000 that he enjoyed it.

02:09:31.000 Like, what would be controversial about having candidates submit to long-form conversations?

02:09:39.000 I think it should be compulsory.

02:09:42.000 Yeah.

02:09:42.000 I mean, electing somebody president of a big country like the United States is a huge and serious responsibility.

02:09:48.000 Right.

02:09:48.000 Let's subject that person to three hours of Joe Rogan.

02:09:51.000 Let's not.

02:09:52.000 Well, no, let's.

02:09:54.000 Because you're one of the few shows that does do these very extended three-hour in-depth interviews.

02:10:01.000 Yeah.

02:10:01.000 And I would like to see all political candidates put themselves up for that.

02:10:05.000 These stage debates that happen between candidates are just rubbish, just pointless.

02:10:09.000 It's a terrible means of getting to the bottom of things and even getting to know a person. 0.85

02:10:14.000 It's terrible because it's so performative.

02:10:17.000 It's so rehearsed.

02:10:18.000 Imagine if you went on a date with someone and you're on a date and you say to this person, so, you know, what do you do for a living?

02:10:26.000 And they have this, like, pre...

02:10:29.000 Made 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.

02:10:41.000 You can't oh, that's interesting.

02:10:42.000 How'd you get involved now?

02:10:43.000 It's not a conversation.

02:10:44.000 You 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.

02:10:54.000 It's also the fact that The format itself is such a terrible way to have long-form discussions.

02:11:02.000 You have a time limit for each person.

02:11:05.000 You have to cut for commercials.

02:11:06.000 You're doing it in front of a live audience, which is very performative in the first place.

02:11:11.000 Like who gets the cheers and who gets the laughs like they win and they're dunking on each other. 0.97

02:11:16.000 It's ridiculous. 0.98

02:11:17.000 It's such a ridiculous way. 0.99

02:11:19.000 But I don't want to talk to them. 0.96

02:11:21.000 I talked to Kennedy because I was just...

02:11:24.000 I know that there's this narrative that he's a kook and he's an anti-vaxxer and none of those things are true.

02:11:30.000 And I wanted him to explain himself.

02:11:32.000 And he said that that was the first time in 18 years...

02:11:36.000 Of talking about this stuff.

02:11:37.000 That someone has actually just let him talk.

02:11:39.000 And no one's jumped in.

02:11:41.000 Because people are...

02:11:42.000 If 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.

02:11:54.000 This has been refuted.

02:11:55.000 What you're saying is not true.

02:11:57.000 The FDA says this and that and this.

02:11:59.000 And they have to.

02:12:00.000 They have to jump in.

02:12:01.000 The executives would be in their ear.

02:12:02.000 The producers would be in their ear.

02:12:04.000 Jump in.

02:12:05.000 They'll put up things that stop them. 0.73

02:12:08.000 Like, let the guy talk.

02:12:09.000 At the end of what he says, then ask him, how did you come to these conclusions?

02:12:14.000 Have you ever steel-manned the opposing positions?

02:12:17.000 Are there times where you've questioned what you believe?

02:12:21.000 Have you been vaccinated yourself?

02:12:24.000 What do we know about these peer-reviewed studies?

02:12:27.000 What do we know about the way they're allowed to access information?

02:12:31.000 What do we know about the vested interest, financial?

02:12:34.000 Vested interests involved in pursuing a very specific narrative, and has there been resistance to all these other points?

02:12:40.000 These are the questions that need to be asked.

02:12:42.000 These 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.

02:12:53.000 What are they afraid of?

02:12:54.000 What are you afraid of?

02:12:55.000 And 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.

02:13:07.000 But positive.

02:13:10.000 It's another sign of the mess that we live in today.

02:13:14.000 And unfortunately, Wikipedia is the first port of call for anybody who wants some quick information on a subject.

02:13:21.000 And because it's got the word pedia after it, they may think it's an authentic encyclopedia.

02:13:26.000 It's not.

02:13:27.000 It's an engine for promoting particular points of view.

02:13:30.000 And that's very unfortunate because I don't think it started off as that.

02:13:33.000 No, I don't think it did either.

02:13:34.000 It's been captured.

02:13:36.000 It's been captured.

02:13:37.000 I know for a fact that my Wikipedia page, which announces that I'm a pseudoscientist and promote...

02:13:42.000 Pseudoscientific ideas that my Wikipedia page has been captured by a group of people who have been intensely critical of me since the 1990s.

02:13:52.000 So that cannot be an encyclopedia.

02:13:54.000 That cannot be a fair and unbiased position.

02:13:57.000 That's representing the position of a particular small group of people.

02:14:00.000 And I think unfortunately for them, that knowledge, that understanding is out there with a great number of people.

02:14:07.000 And people don't trust it the way they used to trust it.

02:14:09.000 They used to trust it as this objective sort of crowdsourced, you know, information hub where you could find all sorts of really interesting...

02:14:19.000 It was a beautiful idea.

02:14:20.000 Yeah, it's a beautiful idea.

02:14:22.000 Any idea that has too much power and control like that, like Wikipedia does, they just capture it. 0.58

02:14:29.000 And they just say, okay, we'll just use this to promote a very specific narrative and fuck the truth. 0.99

02:14:34.000 And that idea of fuck the truth, that's bad for everybody. 1.00

02:14:38.000 That's bad for them. 1.00

02:14:39.000 That's bad for everybody.

02:14:40.000 Very bad.

02:14:41.000 So 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.

02:14:48.000 Then we're going to get to their hearts.

02:14:49.000 We're going to see actually what kind of person they are.

02:14:52.000 And 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.

02:15:04.000 12 is a lot to ask.

02:15:24.000 Either might end up leading in a much better way or might end up choosing not to be leaders at all.

02:15:29.000 Well, 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.

02:15:39.000 And 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.

02:15:50.000 And it's a crazy thing for people to hear that psychedelics could save humanity.

02:15:55.000 But I think they probably could.

02:15:57.000 I think they could too.

02:15:58.000 And 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.

02:16:08.000 A lot of people just don't think about this at all.

02:16:11.000 Can I mention the other DMT project?

02:16:13.000 If we could put it up again.

02:16:15.000 I 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.

02:16:26.000 People have experienced extreme violence in war.

02:16:29.000 Exactly.

02:16:29.000 And it gives them a complete reset that is not available in any other way that we're currently aware of.

02:16:36.000 Exactly.

02:16:37.000 Those results are published.

02:16:39.000 They're available.

02:16:39.000 And any reasonable person can review them and say, hang on.

02:16:42.000 My ideas about this are wrong. 0.98

02:16:44.000 So 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. 0.96

02:16:56.000 It'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. 0.98

02:17:02.000 It's a different narrative now. 0.97

02:17:03.000 It's like, oh, they've lied to us about that too.

02:17:06.000 And now that that's...

02:17:09.000 It's being shared amongst conservative people because of the benefits it has on troops.

02:17:14.000 And I think that's one of the more important things about MAPS, which is an amazing organization.

02:17:18.000 MAPS is a fantastic organization.

02:17:19.000 Amazing.

02:17:19.000 And 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.

02:17:28.000 That it's opening people's eyes in a way that like...

02:17:31.000 Step by step.

02:17:31.000 Yeah.

02:17:32.000 It's not about drugs destroying society.

02:17:34.000 Yes, some drugs destroy society. 1.00

02:17:37.000 Some of them do.

02:17:38.000 Some drugs may destroy some individuals.

02:17:40.000 They 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.

02:17:49.000 It'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.

02:18:00.000 And is there a way to mitigate that in our societies?

02:18:03.000 Because we've made no effort to do that.

02:18:05.000 No.

02:18:05.000 None whatsoever.

02:18:07.000 It's all Band-Aids.

02:18:08.000 It's all Band-Aids.

02:18:10.000 It needs to be thought through much more carefully than it is.

02:18:15.000 The other outfit are called Nunautics.

02:18:18.000 They are the spearhead for a scientist called Andrew Gallimore, who's a neuroscientist at the University of Okinawa in Japan.

02:18:27.000 And he is one of the inventors together with Rick Strassman.

02:18:30.000 I think you've had Rick in your show.

02:18:32.000 Rick 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?

02:18:43.000 Rick Strassman is the godfather of this field.

02:18:46.000 Somehow, in the early 90s, he got permission to enroll volunteers in a DMT study.

02:18:52.000 And it was a breakthrough study.

02:18:54.000 The book was DMT, The Spirit Molecule.

02:18:56.000 Fantastic, intriguing results where people who are not comparing notes are reporting encounters with the same...

02:19:03.000 I was in the documentary about that, too.

02:19:05.000 You were.

02:19:06.000 You presented that documentary.

02:19:07.000 I remember that.

02:19:08.000 Was it in black and white, that documentary?

02:19:10.000 I don't know.

02:19:11.000 I think I was in black and white.

02:19:13.000 I think you were.

02:19:14.000 Whatever it was, it really worked well.

02:19:15.000 And it introduced this to the public for the first time.

02:19:18.000 It's an amazing thing to watch that go from being so incredibly fringe when I was made aware of it.

02:19:26.000 I think the first time I was aware of it was like listening to Art Bell on Coast to Coast talking to Terence McKenna.

02:19:34.000 Right.

02:19:34.000 The late great Terence McKenna.

02:19:36.000 The late great.

02:19:36.000 I think that was the first person I'd ever heard talk about it.

02:19:41.000 Yeah.

02:19:41.000 And then, of course, getting a hold of through Psychedelic Salon, getting a hold of those old recordings.

02:19:48.000 I don't know if he still makes Psychedelic Salon.

02:19:51.000 Is that still a podcast?

02:19:53.000 That was an amazing podcast where it was all like Alan Watts and Timothy Leary and so many of Terence's lectures that had been recorded.

02:20:03.000 And you get a chance to listen to these discussions.

02:20:06.000 They were so fascinating.

02:20:07.000 Is this still around?

02:20:08.000 I love the way Terence lives on through the internet.

02:20:11.000 Yeah, I lost my HDMI. It's still there.

02:20:15.000 It's still there.

02:20:15.000 I'll just finish on this.

02:20:16.000 Lorenzo is the host and he's been on the podcast as well.

02:20:19.000 New Nautix, they're deploying Andrew Gallimore's technology.

02:20:25.000 They have the support of a government.

02:20:29.000 I'm not allowed to say which.

02:20:30.000 They're going to be initiating this project early next year.

02:20:35.000 Typically, people will go there for a week.

02:20:38.000 They will volunteer.

02:20:40.000 Questions such as the ontology of the DMT space, is it real?

02:20:44.000 Developing methods of communications with the entities, studying their language, all of this is going to be the subject of the Noonautics investigation.

02:20:53.000 And 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.

02:21:02.000 Look, it's in there.

02:21:03.000 You've obtained clearance for both you and Joe Rogan to experience extended state DMT complementary.

02:21:09.000 Whoa.

02:21:10.000 What was the other – you had another slide that you showed just a brief moment ago that was connecting it to SETI and NASA. Yeah.

02:21:17.000 They were saying that much like what SETI and NASA do for – where was it?

02:21:23.000 There it is.

02:21:23.000 Yeah.

02:21:24.000 So pave the way for the next frontier in consciousness research akin to NASA and SETI for the mind.

02:21:30.000 Yeah.

02:21:31.000 That's right.

02:21:32.000 That's where it gets really weird with people.

02:21:34.000 Like, what are you saying, NASA and SETI? And it sounds Ridiculous. 0.96

02:21:41.000 But 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. 0.98

02:21:52.000 Right. 0.94

02:21:53.000 Telling us that it's ridiculous. 0.95

02:21:54.000 Right. 0.87

02:21:54.000 This is the problem. 0.87

02:21:56.000 That mindset has been almost engraved in stone in human consciousness.

02:22:00.000 Yeah.

02:22:01.000 And overcoming it will be very difficult.

02:22:04.000 UAP. So UAP project.

02:22:06.000 Sort of.

02:22:07.000 How interesting.

02:22:09.000 Well, what do you think is going on with the UAP phenomenon?

02:22:13.000 Do you want to talk more about what you're talking about?

02:22:15.000 I just want to say one more thing.

02:22:17.000 If 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.

02:22:30.000 Okay, Jamie can do that.

02:22:31.000 He'll pull that up.

02:22:32.000 Let's just get the HDMI on.

02:22:37.000 What's interesting is...

02:22:39.000 So here it is.

02:22:39.000 No, this is...

02:22:41.000 You need to put the HDMI in my...

02:22:42.000 I mean, this is right here.

02:22:44.000 Oh, that's the Neonautics website.

02:22:45.000 Okay, so that's who you would contact.

02:22:48.000 There you are.

02:22:48.000 That's right.

02:22:49.000 That's exactly what's needed.

02:22:51.000 If anybody's interested in this, these are breakthrough scientific endeavors, which are investigating a mystery that has been taboo for far too long.

02:22:59.000 And the comparison with SETI and NASA is a good one.

02:23:03.000 Because at the moment as a species we're devoting our explorations entirely into the physical realm.

02:23:12.000 Yes, we may build high-tech spacecraft that can go even to other star systems.

02:23:17.000 Maybe we will and that's a really important thing to do and a really useful thing to do.

02:23:20.000 But 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.

02:23:31.000 And there's a role for exploration in that realm too.

02:23:35.000 Not simply random explanation.

02:23:37.000 Anybody who wants to take DMT is welcome to as far as I'm concerned.

02:23:41.000 But targeted exploration to see what happens in the DMT state.

02:23:45.000 What are these entities?

02:23:46.000 Why is it that people from different countries and different cultures encounter clearly the same entities and receive the same messages from them?

02:23:55.000 Do we all have some kind of brain module that just makes this up?

02:23:59.000 Or 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?

02:24:07.000 And which may be extremely helpful to us.

02:24:10.000 It may also be extremely dangerous to us.

02:24:12.000 Who knows?

02:24:12.000 But without exploring, we're never going to find out.

02:24:15.000 Well, we do have physicists that talk about neighboring dimensions that are inaccessible.

02:24:22.000 So this is not like a completely new concept.

02:24:25.000 No, it's not.

02:24:26.000 It's not a new concept.

02:24:27.000 That notion of parallel dimensions is already accepted largely by science.

02:24:32.000 And this is a technology for exploring those parallel dimensions.

02:24:36.000 That's one that sounds so abstract.

02:24:37.000 When you talk to people about parallel dimensions, that the notion of parallel dimensions has been accepted by science, like, what are you saying?

02:24:44.000 Like, what does that mean?

02:24:46.000 Like, parallel dimensions.

02:24:48.000 And unless you've had a psychedelic experience, it does seem super abstract.

02:24:53.000 It seems...

02:24:55.000 It seems like something that people just say.

02:24:58.000 It 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?

02:25:05.000 How is this real and this accessible?

02:25:08.000 How is this this close?

02:25:09.000 And how does my mind make this?

02:25:11.000 Yeah.

02:25:11.000 My own mind.

02:25:12.000 That's the famous Terence McKenna quote, everyone's holding.

02:25:16.000 Because, like, it's illegal, but it's literally a part of your body.

02:25:19.000 It's part of our bodies.

02:25:20.000 It's like making blood illegal.

02:25:21.000 And there is a reason why.

02:25:23.000 And Rick Strassman is one of those who've suggested – I'm going to press that button.

02:25:28.000 Keep forgetting.

02:25:30.000 Yeah, 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.

02:25:41.000 That's why he calls it the spirit molecule.

02:25:42.000 Yeah, and there's also the connection to dreams, which is very strange.

02:25:46.000 Like, we're not exactly sure what dreams are made out of.

02:25:50.000 No, we're not.

02:25:50.000 And why is the experience of dreams very similar to the experience of psychedelic states in that world?

02:25:56.000 Once it's over, you have a very profound memory initially, and then it sort of slips through your fingers.

02:26:01.000 Yeah.

02:26:01.000 And it kind of goes away, just like a dream.

02:26:03.000 Just like a dream.

02:26:04.000 So many dreams I've had where I wake up and I'm like, wow, I'm never going to forget that.

02:26:08.000 And then it's gone.

02:26:10.000 Yeah.

02:26:10.000 It's gone like almost immediately afterwards.

02:26:12.000 I'm like, how is that possible?

02:26:13.000 And what is going on in normal survival consciousness that is sort of keeping that distraction from you saying, hey, listen, listen, listen.

02:26:22.000 That's not here.

02:26:23.000 Here you've got to worry about lions and tigers and bears, oh my. 0.91

02:26:26.000 So when you get out there in the real world, you can't be thinking about your dreams and tripping balls.

02:26:31.000 You've got to survive.

02:26:32.000 Yeah.

02:26:32.000 And so it seems to be like some sort of a survival mechanism that's in place.

02:26:37.000 Yeah.

02:26:41.000 Dissolving of that memory.

02:26:43.000 They're both very similar in that regard.

02:26:45.000 If you see a car accident, it's burned in your mind for a long time.

02:26:51.000 I mean, you might have a distorted version of it because the human memory is very flawed.

02:26:55.000 But you will remember the trauma of like...

02:26:58.000 You'll see it.

02:27:00.000 You'll see it over and over again.

02:27:01.000 So many things in my life that I've watched, especially violent encounters, I see them over and over again.

02:27:08.000 But 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.

02:27:16.000 And then 10 minutes later, I can't remember what it was.

02:27:19.000 It's gone.

02:27:19.000 How 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.

02:27:29.000 Perhaps it's because of the noise of our society and our civilization which doesn't have time for that.

02:27:35.000 If you go back to ancient cultures, all of them valued dreams.

02:27:38.000 Our culture is rather unique in dismissing dreams as irrelevant nonsenses, little stories we tell ourselves in our subconscious.

02:27:47.000 Ancient civilizations regarded dreams as extremely important and as a valid method of acquiring knowledge that could be useful.

02:27:55.000 Maybe we could learn from that.

02:27:56.000 Maybe we should pay more attention to our dreams, try to understand them better, see what they're coming from.

02:28:02.000 And 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.

02:28:15.000 They're meaningless.

02:28:16.000 They're just flim-flam. 0.94

02:28:17.000 But some dreams come through the gate of horn, a gate, a simple gate carved from horn.

02:28:22.000 And those dreams are true telling.

02:28:24.000 So the ancients distinguished between dreams that are just flim-flam and dreams that bring real important information to us.

02:28:30.000 And they devoted their energies and their time to studying those dreams in a way that we don't.

02:28:35.000 So if we want to insult somebody, we call that person a dreamer in our society today.

02:28:40.000 Perhaps we should regard that as a compliment instead.

02:28:43.000 But it's true.

02:28:44.000 It vanishes very quickly.

02:28:46.000 One of the weird things about dreams is when I use a lot of cannabis, I stop dreaming.

02:28:52.000 Or if I don't stop dreaming, I don't remember the dreams at any rate.

02:28:55.000 And the moment I stop, if I stop cannabis for three, four days, they come back.

02:29:00.000 They flood back in.

02:29:03.000 Usually they're interesting.

02:29:04.000 I had one dream recently.

02:29:07.000 Nightmare.

02:29:08.000 But I think it's pretty predictable.

02:29:10.000 I think that was my mind just creating it.

02:29:12.000 I was tied to a chair and burnt alive.

02:29:14.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:29:16.000 That's what a lot of archaeologists want to do to me.

02:29:19.000 So I think I was just realizing that experience.

02:29:23.000 So dreams disappear quickly.

02:29:25.000 There 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.

02:29:43.000 I've talked to people who've done it.

02:29:44.000 I've never bothered learning it and getting into it to the point where I could do it.

02:29:49.000 But the people that I trust that have done it say you can achieve very DMT-like states through Kundalini practice.

02:29:55.000 But that they tell you during the practice not to try to achieve those states and not to dwell on that.

02:30:01.000 That's not what it's about.

02:30:03.000 I think the more ways that...

02:30:07.000 We talk about survival.

02:30:09.000 But one of the things in that issue is that human beings are equipped to experience altered states of consciousness.

02:30:17.000 If 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.

02:30:25.000 We wouldn't be able to access altered states of consciousness.

02:30:28.000 The 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.

02:30:48.000 And it's been preserved in the genome, the capacity to access altered states of consciousness.

02:30:54.000 Well, it's probably also one of the reasons why they made it a ceremony.

02:30:59.000 Yes.

02:30:59.000 Where there's people that watch over you.

02:31:02.000 There's a very specific protocol, the way they handle it, the set and setting.

02:31:08.000 And it's not everyone doing it all at the same time where the entire village is vulnerable.

02:31:13.000 No.

02:31:13.000 The control of set and setting is what shamans in traditional cultures are masters of.

02:31:20.000 They create a ceremony around this.

02:31:23.000 The Icaros, the songs that are sung by shamans during Ayahuasca journey, themselves become visible in the Ayahuasca experience.

02:31:31.000 You can begin to see them as pathways that you can follow.

02:31:35.000 There is knowledge.

02:31:37.000 There are ways and means to explore these states.

02:31:40.000 It's just a relatively recent thing that we live in a society that has demonized these things.

02:31:45.000 You know, thanks to Richard Nixon and his cohorts.

02:31:49.000 It's amazing how long that's lasted.

02:31:52.000 So long.

02:31:52.000 Once something gets ingrained in society, it's very difficult to remove it.

02:31:56.000 And it's a big struggle.

02:31:57.000 And many people's lives have been ruined, not by drugs, but by the punishments they've received for possessing and using drugs.

02:32:03.000 Those ruin lives.

02:32:10.000 Rather 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.

02:32:20.000 So I'm very interested in that and I think it is at least as valid as the exploration of outer space.

02:32:27.000 Well, it's certainly promising.

02:32:29.000 And 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.

02:32:42.000 A huge paradigm shift.

02:32:44.000 Yeah, a huge paradigm shift.

02:32:46.000 And I often wonder, I mean, many of these DMT, excuse me, alien abduction experiences, they happen while people are sleeping.

02:32:55.000 And we know that, we think at least, that DMT is released in the brain during sleep.

02:33:02.000 I often wonder if they're just accessing something that is there.

02:33:08.000 That there is some sort of a realm that you can communicate with these things.

02:33:12.000 Whatever 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.

02:33:20.000 So just knowing that I'm aware.

02:33:22.000 And it'll be used against you by somebody.

02:33:23.000 You can't.

02:33:24.000 At this point.

02:33:25.000 But it's like they're talking to you.

02:33:28.000 And they understand you in a way you don't even understand you.

02:33:32.000 And they can explain things in a way that just like complete, you go, oh, okay, I get it.

02:33:39.000 You know, one of the things that I've experienced in it that is so bizarre...

02:33:43.000 Is the notion of what your energy does to other people and what that energy does to other people that experience it.

02:33:49.000 Absolutely.

02:33:50.000 Like you see a very clear, like a pathway, the ripples of it all.

02:33:54.000 You see this bizarre connection that we have with each other.

02:33:57.000 We oftentimes want to ignore that because we want to pretend that we're alone and I'll figure it out. 1.00

02:34:02.000 I'm by myself and fuck the world. 0.88

02:34:05.000 But no, you're like weirdly connected to everyone in some way. 0.99

02:34:09.000 Sort of strange way that you can't see.

02:34:13.000 And in that way, these plant medicines, strangely, are moral teachers.

02:34:19.000 They are moral teachers.

02:34:21.000 They show us our own behavior.

02:34:23.000 They hold up a mirror to ourselves.

02:34:25.000 Things that we haven't even admitted to ourselves that we said or did are shown to us I have a problem with anger.

02:34:53.000 It's a long, slow process.

02:34:55.000 I'm dealing with my anger much more than I would have in the past.

02:34:59.000 I'm much more aware of the impact that something I say may have on another person.

02:35:05.000 I need to be careful about what I say because I don't want to hurt other people.

02:35:09.000 I want to give love and I want to receive love.

02:35:11.000 Yeah, I don't even want to hurt people that I don't like.

02:35:14.000 No, that's right.

02:35:15.000 I 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.

02:35:22.000 I think it does something to you whether you like it or not.

02:35:27.000 I think it has an effect on you whether you like it or not.

02:35:29.000 There'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.

02:35:47.000 And 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.

02:35:58.000 You can change the way people think about interacting with people just through your own interactions with them.

02:36:04.000 I've met people like that where they're so interesting.

02:36:07.000 Don't forget the red button.

02:36:08.000 There you go.

02:36:10.000 I've met people that are – the way they think is so interesting that it's profoundly affected the way I think.

02:36:15.000 And then I've taken from them whatever admirable characteristics that they had and I said, you know what?

02:36:22.000 I really like that.

02:36:22.000 I want to embody that in myself.

02:36:25.000 That's a really good position to take because the idea of changing the world is too big an idea for anybody to grasp.

02:36:32.000 No individual is going to change the world.

02:36:34.000 But what we can do is change ourselves.

02:36:37.000 We can become more positive, more nurturing, more helpful, less cruel, and kinder people.

02:36:43.000 Those are very simple steps to take, and they tend not to be taken.

02:36:47.000 And that's one area where I'm convinced psychedelics do help.

02:36:51.000 Yeah, just don't engage in unnecessary conflict.

02:36:54.000 And retribution.

02:36:55.000 Yeah.

02:36:55.000 This retributive notion that somebody hurt me, so I got to hurt them back.

02:37:00.000 It just creates a cycle of endless violence and negativity.

02:37:03.000 It's also bad for you.

02:37:05.000 I know you don't believe it because you have this desire to lash out, but it's bad for you.

02:37:11.000 Oh, yeah.

02:37:11.000 Absolutely.

02:37:12.000 And then we come to social media.

02:37:15.000 Oh my god, which accentuates all the worst characteristics.

02:37:18.000 Accentuates all the worst characteristics.

02:37:19.000 And takes away all the social cues and the real personal interactions that you get with a person looking in their eyes and hurting them.

02:37:26.000 Absolutely right. 1.00

02:37:26.000 You feel like you just say hurtful things and fuck that person because they're a this and I'm a that. 1.00

02:37:31.000 I'm allowed to do that. 0.99

02:37:34.000 I remember you said something to me that I thought was rather wise at the time.

02:37:37.000 You said you never look at the comments on social media and you said why?

02:37:42.000 You said if the comment is positive, it's just going to blow up my ego.

02:37:45.000 And if it's negative, it's going to make me feel miserable.

02:37:48.000 Neither one is useful, so better to avoid.

02:37:50.000 I think that was really good advice.

02:37:51.000 It's not good for you.

02:37:52.000 I know that a lot of people like when someone interacts with their fans and I understand that.

02:37:57.000 But it's just the possibility of it being bad for you is just too much. 0.96

02:38:04.000 You 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. 0.90

02:38:11.000 You're going to get a distorted perception because you're censoring people, literally.

02:38:14.000 It's better to just let people talk and just stay out of it and just do your best.

02:38:19.000 Just always be judging yourself.

02:38:21.000 Always be assessing your own thinking.

02:38:23.000 The only person we've got a right to judge actually is ourselves.

02:38:26.000 And we're good at it if we're really trying.

02:38:28.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:38:30.000 On 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.

02:38:42.000 We were going to be here doing a debate.

02:38:44.000 Yes.

02:38:44.000 There was going to be Dr. Flint Dibble, who's an American citizen, but he teaches at the University of Cardiff in Britain.

02:38:51.000 He'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.

02:39:02.000 John Hoops at the University of Kansas was another.

02:39:05.000 You, on our last show together, you issued a challenge for it.

02:39:10.000 A debate.

02:39:10.000 And I said I'd be willing to debate any serious archaeologist who was willing to debate me.

02:39:16.000 John Hoops at the University of Kansas immediately backed out.

02:39:19.000 He wouldn't debate at all.

02:39:20.000 But finally, Flint Dibble said he would.

02:39:22.000 He would like to take up that challenge.

02:39:24.000 And the sad thing is that Flint – this is open knowledge because Flint and I published a joint statement on social media.

02:39:32.000 Flint is suffering from a bad cancer right now.

02:39:35.000 It was diagnosed after he accepted the challenge.

02:39:39.000 He's on heavyweight chemotherapy and I feel for him.

02:39:43.000 He's been hateful to me.

02:39:45.000 I don't want to hate him back.

02:39:46.000 I know he's coming from a place of sincerity.

02:39:48.000 I 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.

02:39:58.000 But it's not his fault that he's not here today.

02:40:00.000 It's because the chemotherapy has made it just impossible for him to function in this kind of setting.

02:40:07.000 Well, we wish him well and we hope he recovers.

02:40:09.000 We hope he recovers.

02:40:10.000 And 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.

02:40:20.000 And 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.

02:40:27.000 Yeah, well I think we can make that real.

02:40:30.000 Jamie, have you seen, there's been some talk of some new drug that they've found that's very effective for cancer.

02:40:37.000 Have you seen this?

02:40:40.000 Starts with an F. I'm trying to remember what the hell it's called.

02:40:43.000 I saw a story about that as well.

02:40:44.000 Yeah.

02:40:45.000 Let me try to find it here.

02:40:47.000 I know I have it saved in my Instagram, I think.

02:40:53.000 Give me one second here.

02:40:56.000 Saved.

02:40:57.000 It's either I saved it on Instagram or I saved it on Twitter.

02:41:01.000 Let me find it here.

02:41:03.000 Starts with an F. It's some sort of a very low-cost drug that's being repurposed.

02:41:13.000 I think it's some sort of an anti-parasitic drug that's being repurposed and is having supposedly remarkable results.

02:41:23.000 You've heard of this as well?

02:41:24.000 I've heard something about it.

02:41:25.000 I haven't looked at it in depth, but I did catch a headline about that.

02:41:30.000 And this is where we can also say that modern science isn't all bad, you know?

02:41:35.000 There's a lot of good stuff in modern science.

02:41:37.000 I found it.

02:41:37.000 Here it is.

02:41:38.000 Yes.

02:41:39.000 No, of course.

02:41:40.000 Modern science is amazing.

02:41:43.000 The problem is money.

02:41:44.000 The 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.

02:41:57.000 The 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.

02:42:10.000 So I sent this to you, Jamie.

02:42:12.000 Overlooked miracle drug for cancer.

02:42:14.000 Why Big Pharma fears fenbestazole.

02:42:18.000 At least 12 anti-cancer mechanisms of action, nine research papers reviewed.

02:42:25.000 So 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.

02:42:36.000 Well, I hope that Flint is aware of this and that it helps him to recover from his counsel.

02:42:44.000 That's very good to know.

02:42:46.000 I hope he's interested in even just examining it.

02:42:48.000 Oh, I think it will be.

02:42:49.000 I hope so.

02:42:50.000 But there's been some reaction to this?

02:42:53.000 I just found out about this a couple of days ago.

02:42:57.000 So these research papers, Fen, go stop right there, has at least 12 proven anti-cancer mechanisms in vitro and in vivo.

02:43:05.000 It 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,

02:43:22.000 inhibits cancer cell viability, inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion, induces apoptosis, induces autography, induces...

02:43:36.000 They're trying to get me with all these words.

02:43:40.000 Preoptosis and necrosis induces differentiation and senescence, inhibits tuner angiogenesis, reduces colony formation and inhibits stemness in cancer cells,

02:43:59.000 inhibits drug resistance and sensitizes cells to conventional chemo as well as radiation therapy.

02:44:06.000 Interesting.

02:44:07.000 It sensitizes cells to chemotherapy.

02:44:09.000 A very similar drug in the same family has already been approved by the FDA. And that is mebendazole.

02:44:17.000 And it is in several clinical trials right now for brain cancers and colon cancers.

02:44:23.000 So why are no fenbendazole clinical trials for cancer?

02:44:28.000 The answer seems rather obvious.

02:44:30.000 It's very cheap, it's safe, and it seems to be effective.

02:44:33.000 Very effective.

02:44:34.000 Exactly.

02:44:35.000 Interesting.

02:44:36.000 Big Pharma don't see a margin in it.

02:44:39.000 I mean, if that, who knows?

02:44:41.000 But if that is the case, I mean, what an enemy of the people.

02:44:44.000 They're preventing information and preventing people from using things.

02:44:49.000 We'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.

02:44:58.000 Yeah, well, it's certainly a narrative that this is the only way to go.

02:45:03.000 The way to go is eat whatever you want and don't even think about your diet and your health.

02:45:07.000 I have a friend who got over cancer and I said, did they talk to you about diet and health and vitamins?

02:45:13.000 This person doesn't take any vitamins at all.

02:45:15.000 And they're like, no, there's no discussion at all.

02:45:18.000 I'm like, okay.

02:45:19.000 So I send them some stuff about ketosis and what the studies have been done about ketosis and cancer.

02:45:26.000 And 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.

02:45:36.000 There could be some benefits to that.

02:45:38.000 You want to cover all your bases.

02:45:40.000 If something's wrong.

02:45:41.000 And one of the things I would imagine that your doctor should tell you, like, hey, you should probably be more metabolically healthy as well.

02:45:47.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:45:47.000 Absolutely.

02:45:49.000 We are what we eat.

02:45:51.000 Yeah.

02:45:51.000 Literally.

02:45:52.000 Yeah.

02:45:52.000 I know it sounds so, again, abstract, but the food that you consume is literally the building blocks of your physical tissue.

02:46:00.000 It's the first step in a healthy life, actually, is the decisions you make about food.

02:46:05.000 Yeah.

02:46:06.000 How controversial.

02:46:07.000 How wacky.

02:46:08.000 Someone get to Wikipedia right now and call a pseudoscientist.

02:46:12.000 Absolutely.

02:46:13.000 Yeah.

02:46:14.000 So back to Flint Dibble.

02:46:16.000 So hopefully he will do well with this and come through it on the other end and we'll have a respectful conversation.

02:46:22.000 And, you know, maybe we both can learn something or all three of you.

02:46:26.000 Yeah.

02:46:26.000 All three of us can learn something.

02:46:27.000 That's what I hope.

02:46:29.000 And I'd like to say on the record, I don't hate archaeologists.

02:46:35.000 I know that there's a lot of great work that's done by archaeologists.

02:46:38.000 I 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.

02:46:48.000 I have huge respect for archaeologists.

02:46:51.000 I think there's a very limited group within archaeology who have this domineer mentality and who seek to control the narrative.

02:46:58.000 But by and large, archaeology is doing a good and a useful thing.

02:47:04.000 It's unfortunate that I've been identified as a hate figure by a number of archaeologists.

02:47:09.000 I think there's much more potential for cooperation.

02:47:12.000 And I'm not the only person working in this field of the possibility of a lost civilization, consider Randall Carlson, consider Robert Schock.

02:47:19.000 Many others.

02:47:20.000 Manu Sefzada, who you don't know, but he's brilliant, taught himself Egyptian hieroglyphs.

02:47:26.000 He can read the Egyptian hieroglyphs fluently.

02:47:28.000 There'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.

02:47:39.000 And again, it's probably not most – most archaeologists are probably very curious about this.

02:47:45.000 It'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.

02:47:55.000 They're very reluctant to give away that kind of power.

02:47:59.000 Absolutely.

02:48:00.000 Especially if what they're doing is just discovering ancient stuff.

02:48:04.000 I mean, it's not even like you're creating anything.

02:48:06.000 You'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.

02:48:20.000 Yeah, definitely.

02:48:21.000 And should be encouraged to do.

02:48:24.000 We need to know about our past.

02:48:27.000 We need to understand our past better.

02:48:30.000 And archaeologists are part of a mechanism for understanding our past better, but they're not the sole mechanism.

02:48:36.000 Another 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.

02:48:52.000 They're getting more out of languages that have already been translated, where there is something for the AI to work on.

02:48:59.000 Whether AI could be deployed to decode the Indus Valley script, for example, that would be very interesting.

02:49:07.000 The Easter Island script, the so-called Rongoronga tablets of Easter Island, fully developed script which nobody can read.

02:49:12.000 Oh, really?

02:49:13.000 Do you know that Easter Island, back in the 19th century, was subjected to slave raids?

02:49:19.000 The slavers were Peruvian slave raiders.

02:49:21.000 They came to Easter Island and they removed almost the entire population.

02:49:26.000 Only 111 Easter Islanders survived those slave raids in the 19th century.

02:49:30.000 And they didn't include any of the old knowledge keepers.

02:49:33.000 So none of the survivors' descendants now can read the script of Easter Island.

02:49:38.000 And yet it had a script.

02:49:40.000 And that itself is a mystery on a very small island.

02:49:43.000 There's the Rongo Rongo tablets.

02:49:45.000 Look how beautiful that language looks.

02:49:47.000 It's so interesting looking.

02:49:50.000 And what is it telling us?

02:49:51.000 I hope AI can be unleashed on this and maybe find some solution to the problem.

02:49:57.000 Look how complex and beautiful it is.

02:50:01.000 It's so interesting looking.

02:50:03.000 When you look at cuneiform, it's kind of crude looking.

02:50:07.000 It's like these just weird lines back and forth.

02:50:11.000 But this is gorgeous.

02:50:12.000 This is a beautiful thing.

02:50:13.000 And they don't know what any of this means.

02:50:18.000 Wow.

02:50:23.000 Wow.

02:50:27.000 Wow.

02:50:31.000 It's so cool.

02:50:32.000 I had no idea that this even existed.

02:50:34.000 Yeah.

02:50:34.000 And it's a mystery.

02:50:35.000 It's a mystery on a tiny island, 2,000 miles from Tahiti and 2,000 miles from the South American coast.

02:50:40.000 A tiny island that they have their own fully evolved script.

02:50:44.000 That is hard to explain.

02:50:45.000 And it's one of the things that makes me think Easter Island's origins are much older than we're taught.

02:50:49.000 Look at that drawing of it in the upper...

02:50:51.000 Yeah, right there.

02:50:52.000 Yeah.

02:50:52.000 Yeah, that one.

02:50:53.000 Look how wild that looks.

02:50:55.000 Mm-hmm.

02:50:56.000 Many repeated characters.

02:50:58.000 Has all the characteristics of a script, of a written language.

02:51:01.000 Yeah.

02:51:03.000 Wow.

02:51:04.000 So how would AI, without a Rosetta Stone, without something that connects two together, because that was one of the ways that they deciphered...

02:51:13.000 That's right.

02:51:14.000 If it weren't for the Rosetta Stone, we could not read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

02:51:18.000 It 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.

02:51:29.000 In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the more recent form of ancient Egyptian called hieratic, and in Greek.

02:51:36.000 And that gave them the key.

02:51:38.000 From that, our whole knowledge of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs has arisen.

02:51:43.000 Isn't that amazing?

02:51:44.000 One stone.

02:51:45.000 Gave us access to that wisdom and that ancient world.

02:51:49.000 Maybe not complete access.

02:51:50.000 I think there's a lot that's not understood in the ancient Egyptian texts, particularly their exploration of death and what happens after death.

02:51:58.000 They put their best minds to work for thousands of years on that problem, and they came up with all kinds of interesting ideas.

02:52:04.000 But at least, thanks to the Rosetta Stone, we can read their texts.

02:52:07.000 We can read the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.

02:52:09.000 We can read the book of what is in the Duat.

02:52:11.000 We can read the pyramid texts.

02:52:14.000 Case of Easter Island, no such thing.

02:52:17.000 So 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.

02:52:27.000 And I repeat again the Indus Valley script, which is incredibly important.

02:52:30.000 It's 5,000 years old, completely undeciphered.

02:52:35.000 Cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa had a very advanced civilization 5,000 years ago, and they had a script that we can't read.

02:52:44.000 How many different scripts that we can't read exist?

02:52:47.000 I can't give you a number.

02:52:49.000 Quite a few?

02:52:50.000 That is quite a few, yeah.

02:52:51.000 But the most famous is the Indus Valley script.

02:52:53.000 Isn't it absolutely insane that if it wasn't for the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, how much would still be confusing?

02:53:00.000 Egypt would be dark to us. 0.99

02:53:02.000 It would all be guesswork.

02:53:04.000 One stone.

02:53:05.000 One stone.

02:53:06.000 That gives us the key.

02:53:07.000 Imagine having the gall to say you know everything about the history of the earth when literally the discovery of one stone changed everything.

02:53:16.000 Exactly.

02:53:16.000 Who knows how many stones out there are not discovered?

02:53:19.000 Exactly.

02:53:20.000 And who knows how much is under there?

02:53:22.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:53:23.000 There's a huge untold story in ancient Egypt.

02:53:28.000 It's also like the deeper you dig, the more there's different forms of structures, like the different construction styles.

02:53:38.000 Yeah.

02:53:38.000 It seemed to indicate like an older civilization.

02:53:41.000 They kept on building and rebuilding on older sites.

02:53:44.000 I mentioned the Ed Fu building texts.

02:53:46.000 That's a temple from the Ptolemaic period.

02:53:48.000 It contains basically the story of Atlantis, which Egyptologists say had no Egyptian origin, but it contains that story.

02:53:55.000 They call Atlantis the homeland of the primeval ones.

02:53:58.000 That temple was built on the foundations of an earlier temple, which had fallen to pieces.

02:54:02.000 It preserved the archives from that earlier temple.

02:54:05.000 Turns out that earlier temple was itself built on an even earlier temple, going back to pre-dynastic times.

02:54:10.000 So there's a lineage, there's a heritage of stuff being passed down.

02:54:14.000 And there's a history of that in Europe as well.

02:54:16.000 When I was in Italy, we were in Rovello.

02:54:19.000 And in Rovello, there's a church that's right across the street from this hotel.

02:54:23.000 And this church has a glass floor.

02:54:26.000 So they have this ancient church.

02:54:28.000 It's really old.

02:54:29.000 But below it is something far more ancient.

02:54:32.000 Right.

02:54:33.000 And they don't know how old it is.

02:54:35.000 They don't know who made it.

02:54:36.000 But it's pre-Christian.

02:54:37.000 Well, I don't know what it is.

02:54:39.000 Yeah.

02:54:39.000 But there's a glass floor there where you can look down.

02:54:43.000 I think I had it on my Instagram.

02:54:45.000 I 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.

02:54:54.000 So this is this ancient church.

02:54:57.000 So this is the church.

02:54:59.000 So that's the floor.

02:55:00.000 So I'm looking down now through the floor.

02:55:03.000 You can see me taking the photo, the reflection.

02:55:06.000 So this is this church.

02:55:07.000 What does it say here, Jamie, in the description?

02:55:10.000 So this church in Rovello is 1,000 years old, and it sits on top of the ruins of a far older church.

02:55:15.000 This is a glass floor where you look down to the old one.

02:55:19.000 The people that have worked here say they have no idea how old the original ruins are.

02:55:23.000 Pretty cool to be there and take it all in, as you said.

02:55:26.000 See how it is right there?

02:55:27.000 This is a glass floor.

02:55:29.000 So you're walking around a thousand-year-old church with a glass floor.

02:55:32.000 It seems to be suggesting that it's built on the ruins of an older church.

02:55:35.000 Yes, that's what they're saying.

02:55:36.000 But an interesting point is, if you go to Mexico, for example, you'll find that the Conquistadors built churches.

02:55:44.000 On top of so many ancient Mexican sacred sites, the Great Pyramid of Cholula is an example.

02:55:51.000 It has a huge cathedral now built on the top of it.

02:55:53.000 Of course.

02:55:54.000 It's sort of capturing the culture by imposing their religion. 0.97

02:55:59.000 Flattening your enemy's house and building your own on top of it.

02:56:01.000 And taking it over.

02:56:04.000 The human past is mysterious.

02:56:06.000 There are layers upon layers, depths upon depths.

02:56:08.000 We're just scratching the surface right now.

02:56:10.000 And 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.

02:56:16.000 Well, that's very charitable of you, and you most certainly have played a large role, certainly for me.

02:56:21.000 I remember when I used to read that book.

02:56:22.000 There's Cholula.

02:56:23.000 There it is.

02:56:24.000 That's incredible.

02:56:25.000 Look how crazy that is.

02:56:27.000 This is a fantastic man-made mountain.

02:56:30.000 Yeah.

02:56:30.000 You know, it's a huge thing.

02:56:32.000 And right on top of it, perched there, As though to say, we own you now.

02:56:37.000 So that's what it looks like now?

02:56:38.000 Yeah, that's what it looks like now.

02:56:39.000 So how do they know what exactly the structure looks like underneath it?

02:56:43.000 What science are they using?

02:56:44.000 There's more than eight miles of tunnels have been cut through it by archaeologists.

02:56:48.000 Wow.

02:56:49.000 And they've got into the depth of it.

02:56:52.000 It's a case where pyramids were constantly built on top of earlier pyramids, just as we've been discussing.

02:56:58.000 Wow.

02:56:59.000 So interesting.

02:57:00.000 So that's the recreation of what it's actually like underneath it.

02:57:03.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:57:04.000 Wow.

02:57:05.000 And all we can see is just a mountain of dirt.

02:57:07.000 A mountain of dirt with a big church on top of it.

02:57:10.000 A big church on top.

02:57:10.000 But the church is not nearly as impressive as the pyramid.

02:57:13.000 That's hilarious.

02:57:14.000 It's not. 1.00

02:57:14.000 They put their bullshit structure on top of something that's insane. 1.00

02:57:18.000 And that's what it looks like. 1.00

02:57:19.000 It just looks like a hill.

02:57:20.000 It does.

02:57:21.000 And the ancient name for it was man-made mountain.

02:57:24.000 It was one of the things that was known.

02:57:26.000 Well, there's quite a few of those in Mexico, right?

02:57:28.000 You bet.

02:57:29.000 Mexico is another fascinating culture.

02:57:31.000 We've hardly had the opportunity to talk about it today, but there's just so much.

02:57:35.000 And 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.

02:57:46.000 That whole area of the Yucatan is just absolutely fascinating.

02:57:50.000 And the features of the Olmecs are so unique.

02:57:53.000 That's what's interesting.

02:57:53.000 They look very African.

02:57:55.000 What the Olmec sculptures show is...

02:57:59.000 So cool looking, too. 1.00

02:58:00.000 Look at that serious motherfucker with his hat on. 1.00

02:58:03.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:58:04.000 They show multi-ethnic people.

02:58:07.000 It's fascinating that they show faces that we would definitely regard as African faces today, or perhaps Polynesian faces.

02:58:15.000 Yeah, maybe Polynesian.

02:58:16.000 But other faces are also shown there.

02:58:19.000 Look at that one.

02:58:20.000 Wow.

02:58:21.000 There's a piece, I don't know if you can find it, Jamie, but there's a sculpture that they call The Walker, W-A-L-K-E-R, at La Venta.

02:58:30.000 Which one's The Walker?

02:58:31.000 I'm not seeing him there.

02:58:36.000 No?

02:58:37.000 No.

02:58:38.000 The Walker?

02:58:39.000 There he is.

02:58:40.000 Where is he?

02:58:40.000 Ancient Inquiries, Olmec sculpture in La Venta Museum.

02:58:44.000 It's in the bottom row, second from left.

02:58:46.000 Bottom row?

02:58:47.000 That one, yeah.

02:58:50.000 Now, look at that individual.

02:58:51.000 That's another ethnic group that seems to be represented there.

02:58:55.000 Right.

02:58:55.000 It looks like he's got a beard.

02:58:56.000 He's got a beard, for sure.

02:58:57.000 And he's got some crazy hat on that looks like it has a tail on it.

02:59:00.000 Yeah.

02:59:00.000 And some glyphs around it.

02:59:02.000 And the oldest representation of the feathered serpent as Quetzalcoatl.

02:59:08.000 That's what Quetzalcoatl means.

02:59:10.000 That is also found amongst the Olmec sculptures of La Venta.

02:59:15.000 So, so much to dig into there.

02:59:18.000 And what's the mainstream archaeologists' explanation for the Olmecs?

02:59:23.000 What do they think?

02:59:24.000 They see them correctly as a predecessor culture to the Maya. 1.00

02:59:28.000 The famous Mayan calendar was an Olmec calendar.

02:59:32.000 Really?

02:59:32.000 Yeah.

02:59:33.000 The Maya inherited it, derived it from the Olmecs.

02:59:36.000 Olmec means rubber people. 0.98

02:59:39.000 It's what the Aztecs used to call them because they lived in an area that produced rubber.

02:59:45.000 But we don't know what they call themselves.

02:59:47.000 Rubber trees.

02:59:48.000 Yeah.

02:59:48.000 And what was their use of rubber back then?

02:59:51.000 How did they use it?

02:59:52.000 It'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.

03:00:04.000 Rubber originally comes from the Amazon, rubber trees, but it found its way up into Mexico as well.

03:00:10.000 What was it used for?

03:00:12.000 I don't know.

03:00:13.000 Making rubber balls?

03:00:17.000 Other possibilities arise, but I'm not clear what it was used for.

03:00:23.000 There's been no astounding piece of information.

03:00:24.000 Is that rubber right there?

03:00:25.000 Yeah.

03:00:26.000 And then the other thing with the Olmecs was those enormous fears.

03:00:30.000 Yeah.

03:00:32.000 That's Costa Rica.

03:00:33.000 Oh, is it?

03:00:34.000 Yeah.

03:00:34.000 They actually look like uncompleted Olmec heads.

03:00:38.000 They're in Costa Rica.

03:00:39.000 They're huge megalithic spheres.

03:00:41.000 And basically, these Olmec heads are spherical, but they're carved with human features and ears and faces. 0.82

03:00:48.000 I've often felt that there's a similarity between the stone spheres of Costa Rica and the Olmec heads. 1.00

03:00:55.000 What do they attribute the stone spheres of Costa Rica to?

03:00:57.000 Nobody knows.

03:00:58.000 Nobody knows.

03:00:58.000 Do they have a timeline that they think those were made?

03:01:01.000 As I said, it's impossible to date stone.

03:01:05.000 So any timeline would be based on organic material found around them.

03:01:09.000 So they just – when did they first discover these things?

03:01:11.000 Well, let's see what Wikipedia says.

03:01:16.000 They'll put a recent date on it for sure.

03:01:20.000 What does it say?

03:01:22.000 500 to 1500 CE. Yeah.

03:01:25.000 Well, I would question that because it's not dating the objects themselves.

03:01:31.000 The objects are also movable objects.

03:01:33.000 You can roll a stone sphere.

03:01:35.000 Organic material associated with them may not give you the accurate data.

03:01:39.000 Are there quite a lot of these?

03:01:40.000 I've been in a place where I saw about a dozen in one place.

03:01:44.000 It's only Costa Rica.

03:01:45.000 It's only Costa Rica.

03:01:47.000 Wow.

03:01:48.000 How strange.

03:01:49.000 I mean, are they perfect spheres?

03:01:52.000 God, they look good.

03:01:53.000 Pretty much perfect, yeah.

03:01:54.000 They look amazing.

03:01:55.000 Some of them, bits of flaked off, like that there, you can see.

03:01:59.000 But basically, we're looking at perfect spheres, cut in hard stone.

03:02:06.000 So it's a technological achievement in its own right.

03:02:09.000 So there's some erosion that leads to imperfections.

03:02:12.000 Yeah.

03:02:12.000 But the original structure was perfect.

03:02:13.000 Yeah.

03:02:13.000 And is it painted, too?

03:02:15.000 Is that one painted, Jamie?

03:02:16.000 That one next to your cursor?

03:02:18.000 Yeah.

03:02:18.000 I think that's just a shadow.

03:02:19.000 I think it's shadows, yeah.

03:02:20.000 I've not seen a painting.

03:02:22.000 I don't know.

03:02:22.000 That looks painted.

03:02:23.000 The 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.

03:02:31.000 It could be, it could be just a flash or light or something.

03:02:33.000 That is weird.

03:02:35.000 Have you never seen one that's painted before?

03:02:36.000 I have not, no.

03:02:37.000 I've only seen the plain stone spheres.

03:02:40.000 I think I've seen that one.

03:02:41.000 Yeah.

03:02:43.000 And there's no, wow, they're that big?

03:02:46.000 Yeah.

03:02:46.000 Oh my god.

03:02:47.000 They're enormous.

03:02:48.000 Do we know where they came from?

03:02:50.000 Like what quarry?

03:02:51.000 I don't know the answer to that question, Joe.

03:02:54.000 I'm not sure if anybody does.

03:02:56.000 It's just so interesting when they find these things.

03:02:57.000 Because if we get wiped out, that's what's going to be left.

03:03:00.000 People are going to think, oh, the people that lived in 2023 made pyramids.

03:03:04.000 Like, legitimately.

03:03:06.000 Yes, absolutely.

03:03:07.000 Oh, look, they left behind stone spheres.

03:03:09.000 Like, we really don't know.

03:03:10.000 Absolutely.

03:03:10.000 That's how it could be.

03:03:12.000 That's how kooky it is.

03:03:14.000 That we might be attributing something to a civilization that existed 10,000 plus years after its actual construction.

03:03:21.000 Yeah, perfectly possible to do that.

03:03:24.000 Bro.

03:03:25.000 And as I said earlier on— Look at the size of these things.

03:03:28.000 You know— They weigh up to 15 tons.

03:03:30.000 Wow.

03:03:30.000 We did make one sphere recently, but— Oh yeah, the Las Vegas one.

03:03:33.000 Pretty dope.

03:03:34.000 It might disappear.

03:03:34.000 That might be better.

03:03:35.000 But that would definitely disappear.

03:03:37.000 That's the problem.

03:03:38.000 In a cataclysmic disaster, those spheres would remain.

03:03:40.000 Yeah, they would remain.

03:03:42.000 As would the pyramids.

03:03:43.000 As would the pyramids.

03:03:45.000 And it could easily get mixed up in time.

03:03:47.000 If we went 20,000 years into the future, and some future archaeologist is looking at this, how do they disentangle?

03:03:54.000 Oh, yeah, they would say 2023 they built the pyramids.

03:03:57.000 They probably would.

03:03:58.000 It's perfectly possible.

03:03:59.000 What if they didn't have the Rosetta Stone?

03:04:01.000 I'm really fascinated with AI's ability to interpret ancient languages and whether or not that could be applied to the Easter Island language.

03:04:09.000 I think that's amazing.

03:04:11.000 Is there work being done on that right now?

03:04:13.000 Do we know?

03:04:13.000 Not that I'm aware of.

03:04:15.000 I know that there have been multiple attempts to decode the Easter Island script.

03:04:18.000 They've all failed.

03:04:20.000 But that's with humans.

03:04:21.000 Maybe.

03:04:22.000 Say again?

03:04:23.000 That's with humans.

03:04:24.000 Maybe we just give control to our psychological overlords.

03:04:28.000 If AI is deployed, then maybe there's a hope that it can be done.

03:04:33.000 Yeah.

03:04:35.000 I asked you this before. 1.00

03:04:36.000 I sometimes call it artificial stupidity though. 1.00

03:04:38.000 Why is that? 0.99

03:04:40.000 I'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.

03:04:50.000 Sometimes they're pretty stupid. 1.00

03:04:52.000 Well, I think artificial intelligence is – look. 1.00

03:04:56.000 Fish are intelligent.

03:04:58.000 They're intelligent enough to know what a lure is and some fish learn and they can tell a fake, like a hook.

03:05:05.000 They can see things.

03:05:06.000 Absolutely. 0.94

03:05:08.000 They're not intelligent like a baby or like a monkey.

03:05:11.000 And we know that crows are very intelligent.

03:05:14.000 Very smart crows, yeah.

03:05:15.000 There's a lot of weird intelligence.

03:05:18.000 And I think that artificial intelligence is much like that.

03:05:21.000 Like, we're seeing the emergence of this insanely intelligent life form, and we're seeing very crude versions of it initially.

03:05:27.000 Yeah.

03:05:27.000 And eventually...

03:05:28.000 You're seeing it as a life form?

03:05:29.000 I think it's a life form.

03:05:30.000 How interesting.

03:05:31.000 I think we're making a life form.

03:05:32.000 I think we've been doing it for a long time.

03:05:34.000 I think there's a bunch of factors that seem to be working in favor of this happening.

03:05:40.000 One of them being materialism.

03:05:41.000 Mm-hmm.

03:05:41.000 I think materialism makes people want to buy the newest, latest, greatest stuff, which fuels innovation, especially technological innovation.

03:05:49.000 And 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?

03:05:58.000 Well, they make better things every year.

03:05:59.000 Every year they make better things.

03:06:01.000 It 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.

03:06:13.000 And they're using these better things to have more control over the people.

03:06:17.000 They're using these better things to have better warfare, more effective weapons and weapons.

03:06:22.000 All these things kind of lead to...

03:06:24.000 The big money goes into that kind of thing, yeah.

03:06:26.000 Right, and they lead to the emergence of an artificial being. 0.70

03:06:30.000 I 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?

03:06:41.000 I have two artificial hands.

03:06:42.000 I wouldn't be walking if it went for that.

03:06:44.000 Matt, see that?

03:06:45.000 Like, you're becoming a robot.

03:06:46.000 And slowly but surely, we'll all agree that, you know what?

03:06:51.000 This whole being attached to being a biological life form is fraught with peril.

03:06:56.000 There's all sorts of problems with ego and anger and sadness and lust and greed.

03:07:00.000 And if we could eliminate all of those, wouldn't the world be a better place?

03:07:03.000 Well, what better way to eliminate all of those than assimilation? 1.00

03:07:07.000 Yeah.

03:07:08.000 So if artificial intelligence were really intelligent and it were a being, the next thing it would do would be get rid of us.

03:07:15.000 I don't think it would get rid of us.

03:07:16.000 I think it would acquire us.

03:07:18.000 Acquire us.

03:07:18.000 Yeah.

03:07:19.000 Use us.

03:07:20.000 Yeah.

03:07:20.000 Deploy us.

03:07:21.000 We made it.

03:07:22.000 And so I think our only alternative would be to emerge with it.

03:07:26.000 That's the only way we're going to survive.

03:07:28.000 Because I think the crudeness of the biological model that we exist in, like the crudeness of our physical bodies, is so difficult to escape.

03:07:39.000 It's so ancient.

03:07:40.000 It's like this code is the same code that was Australopithecus.

03:07:45.000 And it was like all these animals were living in savage environments.

03:07:49.000 And we have all these built-in human reward systems that are so problematic.

03:07:54.000 These are the things that are exploited by social media and by so many of the problems that we talked about earlier.

03:07:59.000 Exploited by leaders, exploited by...

03:08:02.000 And I think that if we do create a sentient artificial intelligence, the only hope that we have to survive is to become one with it.

03:08:12.000 Or pull the plug.

03:08:13.000 Yeah.

03:08:13.000 Or a nuclear war kills only half of us.

03:08:15.000 I mean, in a sense, already we are artifacts of our own technology in lots and lots of ways.

03:08:21.000 And cyborgs, in a sense.

03:08:23.000 And cyborgs.

03:08:24.000 I'm certainly a cyborg with two replaced hips and a fused L5 disc, you know.

03:08:29.000 I'm definitely a cyborg.

03:08:30.000 And a cell phone in your pocket.

03:08:32.000 I have resisted cell phones.

03:08:33.000 Have you really?

03:08:34.000 Santha, my wife, has the cell phone.

03:08:36.000 Good for you.

03:08:38.000 The little typing thing, I can't do it.

03:08:41.000 I just can't do it.

03:08:42.000 I do have a cell phone, but I don't use it as a phone.

03:08:46.000 It's a way for accessing social media if I need to post something when I'm traveling.

03:08:50.000 Well, that's wise.

03:08:51.000 I mean, there's definitely a price you pay being connected and a price you pay being disconnected. 0.93

03:08:57.000 But 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. 0.66

03:09:10.000 But it takes too long. 0.97

03:09:12.000 It sucks in so much of your time that you don't really have for other things.

03:09:16.000 Unfortunately, true. 0.82

03:09:18.000 I've reached a stage in life where this sounds very unconstructive, this, but...

03:09:24.000 There's just stuff I don't want to learn.

03:09:26.000 I don't particularly want to learn how to use a cell phone fluently.

03:09:29.000 I have other stuff that I want to learn.

03:09:31.000 I can use it basically.

03:09:33.000 I can type a message to you with one finger.

03:09:37.000 I don't do the thumb thing.

03:09:39.000 But I just feel I don't need to know that.

03:09:42.000 It's going to be in your head eventually.

03:09:44.000 It's going to be in my head eventually.

03:09:46.000 Anyway, if artificial intelligence is going to take over the world, I hope it investigates the mystery of consciousness as well.

03:09:51.000 And I hope...

03:09:53.000 I hope it has a consciousness and a moral code.

03:09:56.000 Well, we'd have to program that in, wouldn't we?

03:10:00.000 I mean, or would it program it into itself?

03:10:03.000 The thing is that once it has the ability to make its own decisions, it's probably going to radically reshape the way resources are used.

03:10:12.000 Try to figure out a way to balance out what the fuck we're doing to the ocean, what we're doing to our skies, and come up with something.

03:10:20.000 First step is, we're being worked on here in Austin, apparently. 0.90

03:10:23.000 I just found this article when I was looking at it.

03:10:25.000 From thoughts to text, AI converts silent speech into written words.

03:10:29.000 Wow.

03:10:30.000 It's not very good yet, but here's just a quick example, just right here.

03:10:34.000 Okay, 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.

03:10:45.000 Pretty close.

03:10:46.000 Listening to the words, I didn't know whether to scream, cry, or run away.

03:10:51.000 Instead, I said, leave me alone, was decoded as, started to scream and cry, and then she just said, I told you to leave me alone.

03:10:59.000 Pretty close.

03:11:00.000 Pretty close. 1.00

03:11:01.000 So fuck, these things are telepathic then. 1.00

03:11:04.000 They can read our mind. 1.00

03:11:05.000 That's just with fMRI.

03:11:06.000 There's nothing extra plugged into their brain or anything.

03:11:08.000 So there's that, and then I think one of the things that would seal the deal is a new universal language.

03:11:16.000 Like a new universal language that's adopted and accepted by everybody.

03:11:21.000 Which is totally possible if you're enhanced with artificial intelligence.

03:11:26.000 It should be pretty easy for us to pick something like that up.

03:11:30.000 It would be great if everybody could speak the same language.

03:11:32.000 It would be amazing.

03:11:33.000 Even if they preserved other languages.

03:11:35.000 I mean, sure, we'll find things to disagree about.

03:11:38.000 Without doubt.

03:11:39.000 But that's part of the problem in the world, is that cultures don't understand one another.

03:11:42.000 And language is really key to understanding another culture.

03:11:47.000 The Tower of Babel. 0.80

03:11:48.000 The Tower of Babel, yeah. 0.70

03:11:50.000 The destruction of the universal language.

03:11:53.000 I wonder what that was really all about.

03:11:56.000 Because if we're talking about this right now, I wonder if this has already happened before.

03:11:59.000 Yeah, maybe it has.

03:12:01.000 Maybe it has.

03:12:01.000 I 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?

03:12:10.000 And who knows what kind of technology they're dealing with?

03:12:13.000 I mean, we love to just apply what we know as the only technology that's available to an advanced civilization.

03:12:20.000 And that seems to me to be silly.

03:12:22.000 Because we've been on a very specific path.

03:12:25.000 Petrochemical produced plastics.

03:12:26.000 Absolutely.

03:12:27.000 It'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.

03:12:35.000 We need to look for something very different from ourselves.

03:12:38.000 A lot of archaeologists say, oh, if there was a lost civilization, they would have left plastics behind.

03:12:43.000 Which rules out the possibility they might have decided not to develop plastics or might have decided – might have developed something much more effective.

03:12:51.000 Well, there's also biodegradable plastics that exist right now.

03:12:53.000 Yeah.

03:12:54.000 We know that.

03:12:55.000 Yeah.

03:12:55.000 Which would degrade.

03:12:57.000 Yeah.

03:12:58.000 And if they're wise, they would probably use those.

03:13:00.000 Yeah.

03:13:01.000 Yeah.

03:13:01.000 You know?

03:13:03.000 It seems so simple.

03:13:05.000 Yeah.

03:13:05.000 Well, Graham, it's always a pleasure to talk to you.

03:13:08.000 Delighted to talk to you, Joe.

03:13:09.000 We'll do it again in April.

03:13:11.000 Hopefully, Flint will be better.

03:13:13.000 I hope he feels better.

03:13:13.000 Fingers crossed.

03:13:14.000 I hope you get well, Flint.

03:13:15.000 I hope we have a fun discussion, but I appreciate you very much, man.

03:13:19.000 Thank you.

03:13:20.000 You're awesome.

03:13:20.000 It's really been good to talk again, Joe.

03:13:22.000 Really enjoyed it.

03:13:22.000 You were probably the first guest guest, like real guest, I think we ever had.

03:13:26.000 It was just you, me, and Duncan.

03:13:27.000 It was you, me, and Duncan.

03:13:28.000 Remember when we ordered pizza?

03:13:30.000 I do.

03:13:30.000 You had just flown in.

03:13:31.000 Absolutely.

03:13:31.000 We were starving, so we got pizza.

03:13:33.000 And you lived in L.A. at that time.

03:13:35.000 And actually, it was in your home.

03:13:37.000 Yeah, that was the early days.

03:13:38.000 That was 2011, I think.

03:13:40.000 Yeah.

03:13:43.000 I must say that your show has opened my work up to an audience that otherwise would never have seen my work.

03:13:51.000 And I'm grateful for that.

03:13:52.000 I'm grateful for that.

03:13:53.000 Well, I'm grateful for you because your work has opened my mind to a completely new view of human beings and the history of human beings.

03:14:03.000 Thank you.

03:14:04.000 And you're awesome.

03:14:04.000 Thank you, Joe.

03:14:05.000 All right.

03:14:06.000 You're awesome, too.

03:14:07.000 All right.

03:14:08.000 Goodbye, everybody.

03:14:09.000 You guys are awesome, too.

03:14:10.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 25, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #2051 - Graham Hancock

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