The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #417 - Graham Hancock

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00:02:14.000 Is there any Graham Hancock books on Audible.com?

00:02:16.000 Yep.

00:02:17.000 Yes.

00:02:18.000 Entangled.

00:02:19.000 My first novel.

00:02:20.000 The first novel, and the second one is War God?

00:02:23.000 War God, yeah.

00:02:24.000 War God.

00:02:24.000 And War God, is that on Audible yet?

00:02:26.000 It's not on Audible yet, but we're working on it.

00:02:28.000 Get on it, Audible.

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00:02:31.000 Get cracking.

00:02:33.000 And Entangled is one of the fictional works of Mr. Hancock, and we're going to talk about that. 0.99

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00:03:47.000 It's a monkey.

00:03:48.000 Is that an ape?

00:03:49.000 How does that work?

00:03:51.000 Is an ape a monkey?

00:03:52.000 I don't know.

00:03:53.000 No.

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00:03:57.000 I would have been quite clear.

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00:05:29.000 Alright, without any further ado, the great Graham Hancock is here.

00:05:32.000 And I'm very excited to talk to you, sir.

00:05:34.000 So cue the music.

00:05:36.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:05:38.000 Join my day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

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00:05:43.000 We're live, ladies and gentlemen.

00:05:45.000 Graham Hancock, a whirlwind tour across nations for many months.

00:05:50.000 And you're finally here in November 2013. Today's date is the 13th.

00:05:55.000 And you've been rocking it hard since September?

00:05:58.000 I have been on the road since the second day of September.

00:06:01.000 Between and betwixt, I've had maybe like five days at home.

00:06:05.000 But the rest of the time I've been traveling, I've been, let's see, I've been in Turkey.

00:06:09.000 I've been all over Turkey.

00:06:10.000 Amazing country.

00:06:11.000 My first ever visit to Turkey.

00:06:13.000 Did you go to Gobekli Tepe?

00:06:14.000 I went to Gobekli Tepe.

00:06:15.000 I spent more than a week at Gobekli Tepe.

00:06:18.000 I met Klaus Schmidt, who's the actually rather decent German archaeologist who's Excavating Göbekli Tepe.

00:06:24.000 I very rarely get on with archaeologists, but I got on with Klaus Schmidt.

00:06:27.000 I don't think he knew who I was, but somehow he was charming, and he gave us a lot of access to the site.

00:06:33.000 He let Santa get right in amongst the pillars and photograph them, and we had a good time.

00:06:38.000 So we were there, and then took the opportunity of being in Turkey to travel over a lot of the rest of the country.

00:06:43.000 There's some cool stuff there.

00:06:44.000 There's like what they call underground cities, which go down eight, ten stories under the earth.

00:06:50.000 The idea was that people built them to hide from their enemies, but in my opinion, the last thing you'd want to do if you were hiding from your enemies is wall yourself up in some underground place where all they have to do is just put a stone across the door and you're done for.

00:07:03.000 I think they had some other function than that.

00:07:05.000 And yeah, we drove all over Turkey, saw a lot of amazing stuff, came back to England briefly, then went straight to Peru and Bolivia.

00:07:13.000 Up in the high Andes, reached a place in a hired car, 15,000 feet above sea level, just over 15,000 feet.

00:07:22.000 That's seriously high, short of breath up there.

00:07:25.000 And that was on the way to a site called Chavin de Huantar, where they venerated psychedelics in ancient times.

00:07:35.000 And...

00:07:37.000 Also visited Tiwanako in the Andes, in Bolivia, where I've been a number of times before.

00:07:42.000 Fantastic place.

00:07:44.000 I came back from there, went to South Africa, spent five days in South Africa, got on a plane immediately after returning from South Africa and came to the United States, and I've been in the U.S. for the last two, two and a half weeks.

00:07:56.000 Wow.

00:07:57.000 We've got to get you some vitamins, sir.

00:07:58.000 I need vitamins.

00:07:59.000 We really need to get you.

00:08:00.000 Do you follow a healthy diet?

00:08:02.000 Well, in a way.

00:08:04.000 I don't eat meat.

00:08:06.000 Maybe that's not healthy.

00:08:07.000 I don't eat red meat.

00:08:08.000 I don't eat chicken.

00:08:08.000 I eat, but I pick on shrimps and scallops and things like that.

00:08:11.000 Otherwise, I'm a vegetarian.

00:08:12.000 So fish and vegetables?

00:08:14.000 I don't eat fish.

00:08:15.000 No.

00:08:16.000 It has a backbone.

00:08:17.000 Interesting.

00:08:18.000 I don't eat things with backbones.

00:08:20.000 Wow.

00:08:21.000 What brought this about?

00:08:22.000 Was it an ayahuasca trip?

00:08:24.000 No, no.

00:08:25.000 Way back in 1986, when I was 36 years old, I realized that I didn't enjoy meat very much.

00:08:31.000 So I thought, why don't I become a vegetarian?

00:08:33.000 I became a vegetarian.

00:08:34.000 Went on for years and years and years.

00:08:36.000 Then I got bored.

00:08:37.000 I got seriously bored with vegetarian diet, and I'd always liked shrimps and scallops and shellfish of all kinds, lobster, stuff like that.

00:08:44.000 So I went back and started, I lapsed, and I started eating shellfish.

00:08:49.000 And that's kind of where I drew the line, that I would eat as far away from myself as possible, but I would definitely have some flesh, and so I pick on these creatures.

00:09:00.000 There's no particular moral reason for it, it's just what I like to do.

00:09:03.000 It seems a bit moral, though, if you're trying to eat things that are as far away from...

00:09:07.000 I suppose so.

00:09:08.000 I suppose so.

00:09:08.000 But wouldn't it be ironic if I were to discover when I pass through the veil to the next world that the one thing that you're not allowed to eat ever is shrimps.

00:09:17.000 Imagine that.

00:09:19.000 I highly doubt there's dietary requirements.

00:09:22.000 I highly doubt it too.

00:09:23.000 I highly doubt it too.

00:09:24.000 Everything is temporary.

00:09:25.000 Part of, I think, what's great about being a vegetarian or being a vegan is that you don't want to take a life.

00:09:32.000 I appreciate that very much.

00:09:34.000 That's kind of what it comes down to for me.

00:09:35.000 I appreciate that very much.

00:09:37.000 However, lives are taken no matter what.

00:09:40.000 All the time.

00:09:41.000 And you take life when you eat vegetables.

00:09:43.000 You just take a different type of life.

00:09:45.000 I'm wearing a leather belt right now.

00:09:46.000 I'm wearing leather shoes.

00:09:48.000 I took life.

00:09:48.000 Life eats life.

00:09:50.000 It's not just animal life, but plant life and fungal life.

00:09:55.000 I see the point.

00:09:57.000 I just think it's a little short-sighted and utopian.

00:09:59.000 The view is just a little delusional.

00:10:02.000 But I appreciate the thought and sentiment behind it.

00:10:05.000 To be honest, if I really enjoyed meat, even chicken or red meat, if I really enjoyed it, I would eat it.

00:10:11.000 But I don't.

00:10:12.000 I never got much out of it.

00:10:13.000 I was always a bit squeamish about the blood, and I never really wanted to eat it.

00:10:17.000 So I kind of felt it's a waste.

00:10:20.000 I get no pleasure from this stuff, so why should I eat it anyway?

00:10:23.000 That's why I say it's not entirely a moral thing.

00:10:26.000 It's partly just a matter of preference as well.

00:10:30.000 But I agree with you.

00:10:31.000 I mean, everything in the web of life on this planet lives off everything else.

00:10:36.000 I think maybe in our society, in Western technological society, you know, we've got so divorced from the act of actually killing an animal that we forget what we're doing.

00:10:46.000 We forget what's involved.

00:10:47.000 It's all very packaged and sanitized, and it's easy to forget what's involved in it.

00:10:52.000 Some creature is dying, and in our culture, a pretty unpleasant, miserable death.

00:10:57.000 I agree, and I think that that separation is very immoral.

00:11:01.000 That separation between us and our food, to try to...

00:11:05.000 I've reconciled that.

00:11:06.000 I've recently taken up hunting.

00:11:07.000 I went hunting last year for the first time and got a deer and killed it and gutted it and quartered it and all that jazz.

00:11:14.000 And eating it was incredibly satisfying.

00:11:17.000 And also knowing that where I went, these animals, they're not going to make it.

00:11:21.000 No animal makes it.

00:11:22.000 The idea is you just breed as quickly as you can.

00:11:25.000 Your children live for a couple years and then they get taken out by mountain lions or coyotes or the winter.

00:11:31.000 They either freeze to death or what have you.

00:11:33.000 It's a constant cycle, and what I did is just dip into that cycle.

00:11:38.000 I think I have no problem with that.

00:11:42.000 It's much better actually to go hunt an animal rather than the horrible, cold, industrial slaughterhouses that we have now and the fear and humiliation that animals are put through in that context.

00:11:53.000 At least in hunting, it's kind of one-to-one, and you're out there.

00:11:59.000 You're actually killing what you eat.

00:12:01.000 And the animal lives an entirely wild, natural life until the moment you pull that trigger.

00:12:06.000 There's no artificial environment that it lives in.

00:12:11.000 There's no hormones that are introduced into its body, no antibiotics.

00:12:15.000 There's nothing unnatural about it at all.

00:12:17.000 Just the bullet hits it, and that's gone, and it's over.

00:12:19.000 And it's over.

00:12:20.000 And it's virtually painless because when a bullet hits an animal like that, I mean, it's so fast and so quick.

00:12:26.000 They don't even know what happened.

00:12:27.000 They try to run and then they're done.

00:12:28.000 And they're done, yeah.

00:12:29.000 And I think what I'm trying to do, and I'm trying to do it this year, by the end of this year, I want to make my diet when I'm home, when I can control it, Completely wild game.

00:12:39.000 That's my goal.

00:12:40.000 Wild game which you will hunt?

00:12:41.000 Yes, which I will hunt.

00:12:43.000 And for me and for my whole family.

00:12:45.000 And I have this mapped out.

00:12:47.000 This year I want to get deer, I want to get a bison, I want to get an elk, I want to get all these various animals and just do it entirely to procure meat and to bring it back home and deep freeze it and to make sure that I always have wild natural meat available if I want to eat it.

00:13:03.000 Before I went hunting I decided that I'm either going to be a vegetarian After this trip, I'm either going to decide that this is really not me, that I don't really like it, or I'm going to become a hunter.

00:13:13.000 So I became a hunter.

00:13:14.000 I enjoy it.

00:13:15.000 I've always liked meat, but I think it's also because I participate so much in really strenuous exercise, jiu-jitsu and martial arts.

00:13:23.000 Yeah, which requires you to have some protein in your body.

00:13:26.000 There's no doubt about that.

00:13:27.000 It makes me crave it.

00:13:28.000 I don't know if I need it.

00:13:29.000 I know there's many people that work out very hard that go on a completely plant-based diet.

00:13:34.000 But for me, I don't know.

00:13:36.000 Whatever.

00:13:36.000 I think I need it.

00:13:37.000 It varies from person to person.

00:13:38.000 But the hunting that you do...

00:13:39.000 Or that you did to get this animal?

00:13:42.000 I mean, are you out there in nature?

00:13:44.000 What's the scene?

00:13:45.000 How does it work?

00:13:46.000 I went to...

00:13:47.000 Well, I'm going next week, actually.

00:13:49.000 But the first time I went, I went to Montana.

00:13:51.000 The Badlands of Montana.

00:13:53.000 Actually, where Lewis and Clark went down the Missouri River.

00:13:56.000 It was fascinating, because...

00:13:58.000 It's incredibly wild.

00:14:00.000 I mean, we saw...

00:14:01.000 America is a wild land.

00:14:03.000 There's a lot of wild lands in America.

00:14:04.000 Especially Montana, because you can't grow out there.

00:14:07.000 So homesteaders tried to make these homes out there and live, and we took these photos of them.

00:14:13.000 I should have brought some photos back, but...

00:14:16.000 We took photos of these old homestead sites from the 1800s, and they're just rotted out.

00:14:22.000 Nobody could grow anything out there.

00:14:24.000 And then the Indians, the natives wound up killing a lot of people. 1.00

00:14:27.000 There was a lot of, like, between the Nez Perce and all these people that lived there.

00:14:31.000 And the time we were there, we were there for about five days, and maybe we saw five or six other people the entire time, and they were just people going down the river in canoes, doing the same thing, hunting.

00:14:43.000 So you're having a wilderness experience.

00:14:44.000 Yeah, there's a photo of it up there.

00:14:46.000 That's what it looked like.

00:14:47.000 It was completely wild.

00:14:49.000 No cell phone service, no internet, no nothing.

00:14:52.000 Sleeping in a tent for five days.

00:14:55.000 Very, very intense.

00:14:56.000 Very refreshing, too.

00:14:58.000 Like, that was one of the things that I found fascinating about it.

00:15:00.000 Going to bed when it got dark, getting up in the morning when it got light.

00:15:04.000 No cell phone service, no internet, no dealing with social media, no other nonsense that we're constantly inundated with on a daily basis.

00:15:12.000 I enjoyed it very much.

00:15:14.000 But you're not hunting an animal that can hunt you back.

00:15:17.000 That's true.

00:15:18.000 But the animals that can hunt you back are not really...

00:15:20.000 They're not really edible.

00:15:21.000 I mean, you can eat some of them.

00:15:23.000 I guess you can eat grizzly bear, like some people in Montana or in Alaska eat grizzly.

00:15:29.000 I think they make grizzly jerky out of it in some parts you can eat.

00:15:34.000 Mountain lion, you can eat the loin of a mountain lion, apparently.

00:15:38.000 Not really delicious.

00:15:39.000 It's not the best.

00:15:40.000 Game animals are essentially animals that are all running from predators.

00:15:43.000 And you just take part in that.

00:15:45.000 You just get into the scramble.

00:15:47.000 You know, in South Africa, in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia, the Bushmen there, they will run animals down.

00:15:54.000 They will run them down.

00:15:56.000 They will run them down.

00:15:57.000 They will run for like 12 hours.

00:15:59.000 Just running, running, running until finally the animal just says, I'm done.

00:16:02.000 Yeah.

00:16:03.000 I've watched that.

00:16:04.000 I've watched that on videos online.

00:16:05.000 It's fascinating.

00:16:06.000 Amazing.

00:16:07.000 Native Americans used to do that as well.

00:16:09.000 Human beings are a rare animal, in that we can't outrun animals, we can't outspeed them, but we can keep going.

00:16:16.000 We can keep going for a long time, and some animals just overheat.

00:16:21.000 They can't sweat.

00:16:22.000 And so they're designed for these quick sprints to get away from trouble.

00:16:26.000 But if we're just persistent and we keep after them, There's a podcast that I've been listening to that was recommended by one of the nurses at the Reginokine, the laboratory where I'm going to get this blood work done, called Radiolab,

00:16:42.000 and it dealt with this one particular tribe in Kenya that has...

00:16:47.000 So many successful runners from this one particular area.

00:16:51.000 And they were trying to figure out, they did all these studies to try to figure out what made them so successful.

00:16:56.000 And there were several factors.

00:16:57.000 One of them was their body shape.

00:16:59.000 One of them was the fact that they ran to and from school on a regular basis.

00:17:03.000 They were constantly running.

00:17:04.000 But the other one was this unbelievably brutal tribal ritual, this coming-of-age ritual that the men and the women went through that involved genital mutilation.

00:17:14.000 With the men, it involved circumcision with a sharp stick. 0.63

00:17:17.000 And they would cover their face with mud while they did this. 0.64

00:17:21.000 And if they cracked the mud, if they squinted or winced in pain, then they would be labeled a coward.

00:17:28.000 And they would not have access to women.

00:17:30.000 They would be cut out of the economic situation in the tribe.

00:17:36.000 It's the most recent radio lab, folks.

00:17:39.000 It was recommended to me.

00:17:41.000 This happens to these young men just entering puberty?

00:17:45.000 At 13. Between 13 and I think 17, they said.

00:17:49.000 They circumcised them with a stick. 0.83

00:17:51.000 Not only that, they keep the foreskin on, and they tie it in a bow, and they push the head of the penis through this bow, and this whole ritual takes several weeks, in which time they're secluded, and when they leave the hut, they're like secluded in this hut, when they leave the hut to do anything, 0.98

00:18:08.000 they're not allowed to walk. 0.94

00:18:09.000 They must run at full pace.

00:18:11.000 It also involves crawling through stinging nettles naked.

00:18:15.000 They have to crawl through these stinging nettle bushes. 0.98

00:18:17.000 The idea is just to completely...

00:18:20.000 Control your ability to withstand pain. 1.00

00:18:23.000 They're going to be tough bastards. 1.00

00:18:25.000 Oh, yeah. 0.99

00:18:26.000 So it's fascinating.

00:18:27.000 It's like this perfect storm of they have an innate natural athletic ability based on their frame, and then it's also the running on a regular basis, and then also the intense ability to withstand pain.

00:18:39.000 Absolutely fascinating, fascinating stuff.

00:18:41.000 Well, again, I mean, this is all stuff in our culture that we've kind of completely got away from, set behind us.

00:18:46.000 We don't even interrelate with that at all anymore. 0.98

00:18:50.000 And it makes you wonder, I mean, if the shit hits the fan and our culture goes down, who can survive, actually? 0.90

00:18:56.000 I think we're just going to go back to, if the shit does hit the fan, and I know that's a huge topic of your work, and what brought me to you in the first place was your work on... 0.99

00:19:07.000 The very clear evidence that at certain points in history this shit clearly did hit the fan and people did have to rebuild. 0.99

00:19:13.000 I watch a lot of shows on subsistence living, mostly in Alaska. 0.99

00:19:19.000 There's a lot of these shows.

00:19:21.000 Life Below Zero is my new favorite one.

00:19:24.000 And it's all based on these people living this...

00:19:27.000 One of them is this man who lives with this Inuit woman and they just fish and hunt and their family lives off of this. 1.00

00:19:34.000 And it's absolutely fascinating.

00:19:36.000 Every day is spent acquiring food.

00:19:39.000 And they're hardly growing anything because it's so cold.

00:19:42.000 So everything is just about catching fish, hunting animals, preserving these animals in whatever way, whether they're drying or, you know.

00:19:49.000 And it's an amazingly brutal life.

00:19:54.000 They seem to be very happy and this is one of the really confusing aspects of this real traditional sort of subsistence living that people seem to feel satisfied by it.

00:20:06.000 It's kind of something we were meant to do maybe in a way.

00:20:10.000 I don't know if it's meant to, but it seems like we evolved to do it.

00:20:13.000 Well, you have to consider that for, you know, anatomically modern humans, as far as we know, have been around for slightly less than 200,000 years.

00:20:21.000 And for almost all of that period, that's what we did.

00:20:24.000 That's what we did.

00:20:25.000 We're really, you know, at least if we go with mainstream history, and certainly it's true for the majority of the human race, whether we go with mainstream history or not.

00:20:33.000 It's really only in the last 10, 12,000 years that we've been doing anything else apart from hunting and gathering.

00:20:40.000 Yeah.

00:20:41.000 It's a long time, and we've tried to upset that over the last 200 years with machines and electricity and all these different things, but we long for that.

00:20:51.000 Created a fundamentally artificial way of life.

00:20:55.000 And so quickly.

00:20:56.000 Yeah, very rapidly.

00:20:57.000 It seems like our genetics just have not been able to catch up with the actual environment.

00:21:02.000 But the irony of it is that all this development, all this amazing technology, all these machines, all this gear, all this equipment, somehow the promise was it would make us happier.

00:21:14.000 And it didn't.

00:21:15.000 It didn't make us happier.

00:21:17.000 It made us much less happy.

00:21:20.000 Yeah, I don't know if that ever was the promise.

00:21:23.000 Well, it was the promise.

00:21:23.000 I mean, you know, I remember with computers back in the 80s, before computers, early 80s, late 70s, the idea was that, you know, if the computer came in, that we would just have all this endless leisure.

00:21:36.000 We would have a life of complete relaxation.

00:21:40.000 The problem would be actually filling our leisure.

00:21:43.000 But that has not turned out to be the case.

00:21:45.000 Everybody's lives are taken up with the computer, The iPhone, the email, you know, all the time.

00:21:53.000 You can never get away from it.

00:21:54.000 It's constantly demanding your time.

00:21:56.000 Emails, hundreds of emails a day sometimes.

00:22:00.000 I have this huge burden of guilt about emails that I don't answer.

00:22:04.000 We sit there in my email list.

00:22:05.000 I cannot answer them all.

00:22:07.000 It's impossible.

00:22:07.000 I gave up a few years ago trying to answer them.

00:22:10.000 I try to respond to a few tweets a day if possible, but while doing things, especially providing as much content as I do with podcasts and creating comedy and all that, There's no time for that.

00:22:20.000 You can't become a full-time letter writer.

00:22:22.000 Yeah, that literally would be what you would do.

00:22:25.000 You would be dust till dawn doing that, and then sleeping and starting all over again, and you still would never catch up.

00:22:31.000 You'd never catch up.

00:22:32.000 Especially if you gave it a real, honest reply, like if it was a complex discussion that somebody wanted to have with you, you're not going to get there.

00:22:39.000 Yeah.

00:22:39.000 I face the same problem probably in a smaller level than you, but, you know, like Facebook and Twitter.

00:22:44.000 Facebook, I find, is a very useful thing.

00:22:47.000 It's a very positive thing.

00:22:48.000 I do like interacting with my Facebook community, but I can't interact that much.

00:22:54.000 I try to put up posts.

00:22:55.000 I try to put up new material.

00:22:56.000 People make interesting comments.

00:22:58.000 Sometimes those comments are really valuable to me.

00:23:00.000 I get a link to something I didn't know about, and I go look at that.

00:23:04.000 But to respond to every comment when you have 300, 500, 1,000, 1,500 comments on a post, it's impossible.

00:23:12.000 It's just impossible to do that.

00:23:14.000 That is a weird thing about our time.

00:23:17.000 I think that's a stage that we're going through.

00:23:20.000 I think whatever comes next will probably be even crazier and even more impossible to deal with.

00:23:26.000 Halfway to telepathy right now.

00:23:28.000 Yes.

00:23:28.000 That's what I think.

00:23:30.000 I think there'll be some sort of a technologically created symbiotic relationship that allows us to communicate.

00:23:38.000 Some symbiotic thing where...

00:23:40.000 I think we're already kind of symbiotic with certain aspects of technology.

00:23:44.000 Glasses.

00:23:45.000 Glasses are essentially a technology that's a part of your life.

00:23:49.000 You wear it on your head all day, right?

00:23:50.000 Yeah, I do.

00:23:51.000 Cell phone, I mean, it might as well be attached to me because I'm scared if I leave it anywhere.

00:23:57.000 If I leave it in my car and I go to the mall, I'm like, oh, it's in the car.

00:23:59.000 It's by itself.

00:24:01.000 My phone is alone.

00:24:03.000 Yeah, these are weird times.

00:24:05.000 Weird times when it comes to this stage that we're in.

00:24:08.000 We're obviously progressing towards an even greater connectivity with our technology.

00:24:13.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:15.000 In some ways, it's a very good thing.

00:24:19.000 What I find again with Facebook, with the internet, is suddenly the whole world is talking.

00:24:27.000 We're talking to each other.

00:24:29.000 It doesn't actually matter what national boundaries you have or where you grew up or what your religion is.

00:24:34.000 You're in communication with people from all over the world.

00:24:39.000 Communities of ideas tend to gravitate together and people share thoughts and ideas.

00:24:43.000 This, as far as we know, is a new development for the human race to do this on a global scale. 0.79

00:24:49.000 Yes, some shit comes out of it, but also I think a lot of good stuff is coming out of it. 0.96

00:24:53.000 And it is challenging the status quo in the world today. 0.99

00:24:57.000 It is very threatening to the powers that be, that people can communicate directly with one another.

00:25:02.000 I remember a time as an author when I depended heavily on the big media to be heard about, to be known at all.

00:25:08.000 If I'd written a new book, How could anybody know I'd written it unless one of the big newspapers or a big TV station or somebody covered it? 0.97

00:25:15.000 I don't give a shit about that now. 0.97

00:25:16.000 I don't need those people anymore. 0.96

00:25:18.000 I can communicate directly with people who are interested in my work.

00:25:21.000 And the big media companies or whoever influenced them could remove a book from the market and then that subject is gone.

00:25:30.000 John Marco Allegro's book was a perfect example.

00:25:34.000 The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

00:25:35.000 Fantastic book.

00:25:36.000 Yeah, and if you've never read it, John Marco Allegro was a biblical scholar and a linguist who also happened to be an ordained minister.

00:25:44.000 He was one of the guys who was assigned to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, did it for 14 years, and wrote this amazing book which basically said that the entire religion of Christianity originally was about consuming psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.

00:26:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:03.000 Exactly.

00:26:04.000 Fascinating stuff.

00:26:05.000 Yeah.

00:26:06.000 And they removed it.

00:26:07.000 I mean, that book was gone.

00:26:08.000 They didn't like the message at all.

00:26:10.000 Yeah, Jan Erwin has worked to republish it, and it's available again now.

00:26:15.000 But for the longest time, that book was gone.

00:26:18.000 You had to find...

00:26:19.000 I own two copies of it that I bought used, and they were very expensive.

00:26:23.000 You had to buy them from some strange book company that found them.

00:26:28.000 So this is something the big media can't do anymore.

00:26:31.000 Can't do it anymore.

00:26:31.000 And the interest they serve.

00:26:32.000 They cannot do it anymore.

00:26:33.000 You could find something, tweet it, take a picture of it.

00:26:36.000 Say if you were in Turkey and you found something unique, you could take a picture of that, tweet it, and link an article to your website.

00:26:44.000 Boom! 0.99

00:26:45.000 Put whatever you found on your website, and then within moments, Thousands of people would be downloading it and trading it and it would just, in a frenzy, spread across the world.

00:26:55.000 I've been doing that.

00:26:55.000 I've been making a point on my travels of putting up a picture and putting up my immediate reaction to something that I've seen.

00:27:04.000 And it produces a lot of A lot of reaction.

00:27:08.000 And again, it goes two ways, because when people communicate with me, I learn from them.

00:27:13.000 It's not just that I'm giving people stuff.

00:27:15.000 I'm getting stuff back all the time, and I appreciate that.

00:27:18.000 I have these conversations with people that I meet at shows all the time, where they'll say, oh, the podcast changed my life, and thank you so much.

00:27:25.000 It changed my life, too.

00:27:27.000 And my interaction with these people has changed my life as much as it's changed their life.

00:27:32.000 The information that I get on a daily basis from people on Twitter informs me in a way that I've never been informed before.

00:27:39.000 Constant, all day long.

00:27:41.000 I mean, every day I'm getting all these new stories that are tweeted to me, and I retweet the fascinating ones as much as I can, but it's a never-ending stream.

00:27:50.000 Absolutely.

00:27:50.000 And it's amazing.

00:27:51.000 I love it.

00:27:52.000 I'm so...

00:27:52.000 I'm so indebted.

00:27:54.000 I'm so happy.

00:27:55.000 I feel so obligated.

00:27:56.000 The whole connection is a very rewarding connection for me as well.

00:28:00.000 Well, as a matter of fact, you are doing something quite special.

00:28:02.000 I mean, I've been on the road, and it's amazing the people that I meet, whether it's in South Africa, whether it's in some Midland city in Britain, whether it's in upstate New York, you know, who listened to Joe Rogan.

00:28:13.000 You're reaching a lot of people that way, and this is special.

00:28:17.000 And it's eye-opening, actually.

00:28:19.000 Well, it's an amazing connection that we have.

00:28:21.000 It's amazing to be able to do what we're doing.

00:28:24.000 And it's a new thing.

00:28:25.000 I mean, it never happened before.

00:28:27.000 It wasn't around.

00:28:29.000 It's possible to change the world.

00:28:31.000 Everybody says, no, the world is too big, the power structure is too great, nothing can be changed, nothing can be altered.

00:28:38.000 But I don't think so.

00:28:39.000 I'm really optimistic.

00:28:39.000 I think good things are coming.

00:28:42.000 There's an awakening going on.

00:28:43.000 I am as well.

00:28:44.000 I'm very optimistic just based on the people that I've met that have told me they've changed their life.

00:28:48.000 I've met no bullshit, at least...

00:28:51.000 30 or 40 people that told me they lost 100 pounds after they listened to this podcast. 0.94

00:28:55.000 That's incredible.

00:28:56.000 Just people that just changed their diet, started exercising, and started getting their blood pumping and feeling better, and started thinking positively, surrounding themselves with positive people.

00:29:06.000 And if that could be done on that scale, that can spread virally.

00:29:11.000 It totally can, and that's a real measurable change in somebody's life.

00:29:14.000 That's setting aside ill health and discomfort and Moving on to something better and more positive.

00:29:20.000 And I've talked to maybe 50 or so people that have started their own podcast because of this podcast.

00:29:26.000 And I'm hugely encouraging of that because I think there's no difference. 0.98

00:29:30.000 I mean, if you're a curious person, you speak a language that other people understand, and you find information online, you want to discuss it, start a fucking podcast. 0.90

00:29:37.000 Why not? 0.86

00:29:38.000 I mean, if it catches on, it catches on.

00:29:40.000 And if it doesn't catch on, keep going until it does catch on.

00:29:43.000 The way I see it, though, it's really interesting looking at your story.

00:29:48.000 You've got this fighter background, MMA. I don't know a lot about it, but it stands for mixed martial arts, right?

00:29:54.000 Yes.

00:29:54.000 And UFC? Yes.

00:29:56.000 What does that sound like?

00:29:56.000 Ultimate Fighting Championship.

00:29:57.000 Ultimate Fighting Championship.

00:29:58.000 And that goes back into your youth a long way.

00:30:01.000 I saw a little clip of you.

00:30:03.000 Just kicking somebody, I don't know, so fast.

00:30:07.000 It was incredible to see that.

00:30:09.000 So you've got all of that.

00:30:10.000 And I meet a lot of people who are interested in that.

00:30:13.000 My son-in-law, for example, is a mixed martial arts fighter and a really hugely important part of his life.

00:30:18.000 But at the same time, you're combining it with this extraordinary interest in psychedelics and social change and all of these radical ideas.

00:30:25.000 And intuitively, one would not immediately think that somebody who's into mixed martial arts fighting would be also into radical philosophical ideas.

00:30:33.000 But it's precisely the combination.

00:30:35.000 Of those two things that is really attractive, I think.

00:30:38.000 Well, I think that the intuition or intuitively that it wouldn't be is just because people don't understand what martial arts really are.

00:30:45.000 What a martial art really is, is the path that you go through in becoming excellent at a martial art is just developing your human potential.

00:30:56.000 That's all it is.

00:30:57.000 In seeking the truth about yourself and your own character, like as we were talking about those Kenyan men who endure extreme pain and they become stronger because of that.

00:31:07.000 They become something special because of that.

00:31:09.000 That seeking truth through martial arts is along the same lines.

00:31:14.000 It's doing something incredibly difficult, and in doing that, you grow as a person.

00:31:19.000 And then in seeking that truth about your character, seeking that truth about your determination, your willpower, your focus, your discipline, you also start to seek truth in everything else around you, in your government, in your relationships, in your...

00:31:34.000 All various aspects of your life, your diet, you see the relationship between your diet and your health, and all these different things, they do fall into each other.

00:31:42.000 They do.

00:31:43.000 Psychedelics, all of them.

00:31:44.000 Psychedelics, absolutely, because in many ways there is no more challenging adventure or experience that one can have.

00:31:51.000 I mean, yeah, there's all kinds of wilderness experiences one can have, but a deep journey with a powerful psychedelic is going to challenge you.

00:31:56.000 In every possible level as a human being.

00:31:59.000 And it requires incredible will and strength to deal with it.

00:32:02.000 This is what a lot of people who don't work with psychedelics, who are just brainwashed by the whole war on drugs thing, don't understand.

00:32:08.000 This is a deep personal journey which requires strength of character to fulfill.

00:32:13.000 Without a doubt.

00:32:14.000 I've done some terrifying things in my life, but the moment before you light the lighter that fires up the DMT is one of the most terrifying moments of all time.

00:32:24.000 I totally agree.

00:32:25.000 Especially if you've been there and you know what's coming.

00:32:27.000 You're like, whoa, here we go!

00:32:31.000 Fifteen minutes in a rocket to the center of the universe.

00:32:34.000 Exactly.

00:32:35.000 Swarming with colors and geometric patterns and truth and fear.

00:32:40.000 And entities.

00:32:41.000 Yeah.

00:32:42.000 I share that.

00:32:44.000 I mean, the last time I smoked DMT was in the end of September 2011. I haven't smoked it since.

00:32:51.000 And I will, but I had such a...

00:32:55.000 Well, the word terrifying doesn't do it justice to what happened to me.

00:32:59.000 It was just the single hugest ordeal that I have ever confronted in my life.

00:33:04.000 And after you've been through an ordeal like that, you kind of think twice about just leaping back into it again.

00:33:11.000 But I learned a lot from it.

00:33:13.000 It was hugely beneficial.

00:33:15.000 And to survive that and to come back from it...

00:33:17.000 You know, you gather your strength from experiences like that.

00:33:20.000 And that's why I think our society is foolish to try to just sanitize everything and not allow people to undergo these profound and important experiences.

00:33:31.000 Rather, we should be creating structures where it is possible for people to have those experiences and where they don't need to feel afraid of the law about it.

00:33:39.000 Where they can challenge themselves in that way with good advice and with wise and loving care surrounding that situation.

00:33:46.000 Absolutely.

00:33:46.000 And I think that's one of the things that's beautiful about today's internet and these exchanges like we're having right now is it lets people know what these experiences really are about and what the potential these experiences actually do hold.

00:34:00.000 Because we're the victim of massive propaganda that has been going on for decades and decades.

00:34:05.000 Maybe even for thousands of years.

00:34:07.000 It's confused some really intelligent people.

00:34:10.000 I've had some really disappointing conversations with guys like Michio Kaku, you know, talking about mushrooms giving you brain damage. 1.00

00:34:17.000 Such shit. 1.00

00:34:18.000 It's just so silly. 1.00

00:34:19.000 Such complete shit. 1.00

00:34:20.000 And such a brilliant man otherwise. 1.00

00:34:22.000 But the brainwashing goes very deep.

00:34:24.000 Yeah.

00:34:25.000 And it's as though it presses a button in certain people that rational faculties shut down and they cannot react to the subject in an intelligent way anymore.

00:34:37.000 I do find this again and again.

00:34:39.000 It is a huge problem.

00:34:42.000 It's a self-preservation issue as well for people that are professionals, because if you're a professional in anything where you're being judged or you're being looked at as possibly, oh, we're looking at you for possible promotion, but what are you doing?

00:34:56.000 Mushrooms in the desert? 0.99

00:34:57.000 What the fuck, Bob? 1.00

00:34:59.000 You're ruining the whole career, pal. 1.00

00:35:01.000 You're on the fast track.

00:35:02.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:03.000 People are in danger of destroying their careers if that comes out.

00:35:07.000 I mean, that's where I guess you and I have some advantage because we have careers that cannot get ruined by doing that.

00:35:14.000 It can only help.

00:35:16.000 Yeah, if I get caught with a bag of mushrooms at the airport, I get a bump.

00:35:20.000 Everything is great.

00:35:22.000 People get excited.

00:35:23.000 My Twitter explodes.

00:35:25.000 Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm not flying with mushrooms, but my point being that, yeah.

00:35:29.000 And if you're honest about it, look, if you're doing something you shouldn't be doing because it's harming someone, and people find out about it, the repercussions are real, and they should be.

00:35:38.000 But if you're doing something like psychedelics that harm no one, and then you can have a rational discussion about the benefits that you've had from them, that helps people.

00:35:48.000 It really does.

00:35:49.000 It totally helps people.

00:35:50.000 I find this again and again, and that's the crucial distinction, is...

00:35:55.000 Are you doing something which is harmful to others, which impinges upon the sovereignty of others, which makes the life of another person Less rather than more.

00:36:03.000 And the answer is, with taking psychedelics, no, you're not.

00:36:06.000 You're not doing that.

00:36:07.000 That's an inner experience.

00:36:08.000 That's your own experience.

00:36:10.000 And as I've said many times, I mean, we have plenty of laws that deal with doing negative stuff to other people.

00:36:16.000 We do not need laws that seek to govern, control, manage, limit our consciousness.

00:36:23.000 This is the heart of the matter.

00:36:25.000 We're starting to see, in our lifetime, these centers in Mexico.

00:36:30.000 My friend Ed Clay runs one in Mexico, and I know there's some in Canada as well, where they have these Ibogaine centers, where people are going and completely curing themselves from opiates.

00:36:42.000 Opiate addictions, for folks who don't know, are a huge problem in this country.

00:36:47.000 I have lost a couple of friendships.

00:36:50.000 One that went Horribly wrong, because I know the guy was on a bunch of different pills from a bunch of different doctors, and I just couldn't deal with him anymore.

00:36:57.000 I had to get him out of my life.

00:36:58.000 Blaming other people for all of his failures, constantly woe is me, and just on pills all the time.

00:37:04.000 And these are prescribed pills.

00:37:06.000 These are legal pills.

00:37:07.000 He had a back injury and he went to one doctor in one state and then moved to California and started going to another doctor and then having both guys send him prescriptions and taking both two times the amount of pills.

00:37:18.000 If you take a prescribed dose of opiate pills, you're very likely to get addictive.

00:37:24.000 Even with a prescribed dose, it's a really difficult time to get off of them.

00:37:28.000 Especially if you're facing some significant pain.

00:37:31.000 You just had a hip replacement.

00:37:32.000 Did they prescribe you any?

00:37:34.000 Yeah, they did.

00:37:35.000 I was given, but nothing extremely strong, but codeine, which is an opiate.

00:37:41.000 NyQuil.

00:37:41.000 That's what NyQuil used to have in it, right?

00:37:43.000 Does it?

00:37:44.000 It used to.

00:37:44.000 I believe so.

00:37:45.000 I believe NyQuil had codeine.

00:37:46.000 I mean, codeine is actually a highly addictive drug.

00:37:49.000 There's no doubt it is addictive.

00:37:52.000 In Britain, they often mix it with paracetamol, which is a less strong painkiller.

00:37:57.000 And if you take those two pills in combination, you could get addicted to it within a week or ten days.

00:38:04.000 And it's the codeine that you're getting addicted to, but it's the paracetamol that's really going to...

00:38:09.000 Totally screw up your liver, you know, in the long run.

00:38:13.000 And it's stunning, actually, that the big pharmaceutical companies are allowed to do this.

00:38:19.000 They're allowed to deliberately addict people, to hook people on very powerful drugs that really have very little benefit.

00:38:27.000 I mean, to be honest, if I had some terrible cancer, some terrible pain, some terrible suffering, I would be very interested in exploring opium or even heroin, as a matter of fact.

00:38:39.000 I think that nature has been kind to us.

00:38:42.000 It's provided us with certain plants that can help us with pain.

00:38:45.000 And it may reach a stage in life where you're terminal.

00:38:50.000 Why suffer that terrible agony?

00:38:53.000 It would be interesting perhaps to sort of bliss out a bit on that.

00:38:58.000 But to take it regularly daily for small and minor pain, this is a huge mistake.

00:39:02.000 It's not what it's for.

00:39:03.000 There's a new snail toxin that they've discovered that is 100 times more effective than opiates and is non-addictive.

00:39:13.000 Oh, wow.

00:39:13.000 And they're trying to figure out a way.

00:39:17.000 This new drug is from the cone snail venom.

00:39:20.000 And it's 100 times more potent than any existing pain medication and completely non-addictive.

00:39:28.000 And they're coming up with this snail venom in a pill form that would just completely eliminate pain.

00:39:35.000 I can see the big drug companies not wanting to do that.

00:39:39.000 They'll probably run out with a hammer and smash every snail that exists. 0.95

00:39:42.000 Smash every snail! 0.99

00:39:44.000 Get in cahoots with some company to spray some shit all over the areas where these snails live and just whack them out all in one big... 1.00

00:39:53.000 They want to keep us addicted. 0.99

00:39:55.000 Well, the amount of money. 0.95

00:39:56.000 People would say that that's a ridiculous thing.

00:39:58.000 No, that's not what people do.

00:39:59.000 But the amount of money you're talking about is absolutely staggering.

00:40:04.000 Vast and enormous.

00:40:05.000 Billions upon billions every month.

00:40:08.000 And you were talking about opiate addictions, of which the vast majority are addictions to prescribed pills.

00:40:16.000 But then there's also heroin addiction.

00:40:20.000 And again, Ibogaine and, in fact, ayahuasca, astonishingly successful in getting people off these addictions.

00:40:28.000 In a very weird way.

00:40:30.000 In a very weird way.

00:40:31.000 I'm not sure the exact mechanism of Ibogaine, but the people that have taken it have told me that it's both...

00:40:39.000 It physically removes the addiction and, more importantly, psychologically alerts you to all the factors that have contributed to your shitty decision-making in the first place.

00:40:51.000 That's it. 0.68

00:40:51.000 That's it, exactly. 0.68

00:40:52.000 All the errors in your thinking, all the errors in your personality that have led you to this path that you're just trying to numb life with these pills.

00:41:01.000 Yeah, it's like a teaching.

00:41:03.000 Yeah.

00:41:03.000 That you get.

00:41:04.000 And that's the mystery of these plants, actually, the teacher plants, particularly the two plants that go into the ayahuasca brew and then iboga.

00:41:13.000 They're probably the most powerful in this respect, is that there's a sense of an encounter with an intelligence which communicates with you and which gets right to the root of your personal issue and shows it to you and says,

00:41:29.000 well...

00:41:30.000 I mean, I've had some experience with this myself and shows it to you and says, this is actually how you are. 0.99

00:41:35.000 And you think, fuck, I never realized that really. 0.99

00:41:39.000 I hid that from myself for so long. 1.00

00:41:41.000 The ego.

00:41:42.000 The ego.

00:41:43.000 And that revelation is extremely helpful in handling an addiction.

00:41:47.000 And no one's protecting you by making Ibogaine illegal.

00:41:51.000 No one's protecting you from anything other than you getting cured from these illnesses and realizing the issues that you have in your life and in your personality.

00:42:01.000 It's yet another example of the fact that we live in a society that is completely insane.

00:42:07.000 Our society is actually crazy. 0.72

00:42:11.000 It's crazy. 1.00

00:42:11.000 It's run by crazy people. 1.00

00:42:14.000 In pursuit of crazy motives, and it is designed to diminish human potential. 0.83

00:42:19.000 I don't think it's an accident.

00:42:20.000 I think it's actually deliberately designed to minimize human potential.

00:42:23.000 By who?

00:42:24.000 Well, I mean, this is where I have to get into something like Gnosticism, which has been a long-term interest of mine, and the idea that there is a...

00:42:32.000 I don't want to use the word divine in terms of God, because I don't go with God particularly, I do go with mystery, but that there's a divine spark in human beings and that there has been a project for thousands of years to deny us the opportunity to realize that part of ourselves,

00:42:51.000 the spiritual essence of ourselves, and to keep us chained in matter and locked in the material realm.

00:42:57.000 And what we see in modern society is two things going on side by side.

00:43:02.000 One is so-called materialist science, which tells us that there is nothing else to reality except the stuff that you can weigh and measure and count.

00:43:11.000 And any thought that there might be spirit, that consciousness, for example, might not be generated by the brain, might not be local to the brain.

00:43:19.000 Any such thought is supposed to be, according to materialist science, complete nonsense.

00:43:23.000 And then there's the actual materialism Which tries to persuade us through all manner of media and the way our society is run that our sole purpose as creatures is to produce and consume and that we have no other function here on this planet and that we are to define ourselves and measure ourselves in terms of our Is that really what we're being taught or is that just something that people find easy?

00:43:49.000 That producing and consuming is just easy.

00:43:52.000 It's exciting.

00:43:53.000 Get a new car, it's exciting.

00:43:55.000 Get a new TV, that's exciting.

00:43:57.000 Work and you can wear clothes that this guy can't wear.

00:44:01.000 Ooh, exciting.

00:44:02.000 I think there's something to that that is just a natural aspect of being a human being and constantly having this desire for improvement and progress.

00:44:12.000 And we measure that improvement and progress erroneously with objects.

00:44:17.000 I mean, there was a culture of Native American Indians, I forget the name of the tribe, who had this ceremony called the Potlatch, which happened like once a year, and what they had to do was the more things you could burn, that showed that you were a really big guy,

00:44:34.000 you know?

00:44:35.000 You just complete the ultimate conspicuous consumption as you take all these possessions and burn them.

00:44:40.000 Not because you're despising them, but because you're rich enough to just burn all this stuff. 1.00

00:44:44.000 Oh, that's so stupid. 1.00

00:44:45.000 I thought it was to free yourself from those objects. 1.00

00:44:47.000 No, unfortunately not.

00:44:49.000 Unfortunately not.

00:44:50.000 Yeah, the consciousness not being projected from the human mind is a very confusing one to me.

00:44:58.000 Because I see their point and I see your point.

00:45:01.000 I see...

00:45:01.000 What I see is...

00:45:04.000 I don't think that we know enough about consciousness itself to define what's going on.

00:45:11.000 We can't be sure.

00:45:11.000 I think it is possible that the mind could be some form of antenna.

00:45:15.000 I don't know that.

00:45:17.000 I think it's pretty clear that if you injure certain parts of the mind, it affects certain aspects of cognitive function.

00:45:25.000 I think that's pretty clear.

00:45:26.000 It's pretty clear, yeah.

00:45:27.000 And that's true of an antenna, too.

00:45:29.000 If you damage an antenna, the picture on the TV screen is affected.

00:45:33.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:45:34.000 Fuck up a radio, the insides of a radio. 1.00

00:45:36.000 It doesn't mean that the signal's not still out there. 1.00

00:45:38.000 It's just not getting in right.

00:45:40.000 There's that, and there was a fascinating debate recently between Richard Dawkins and Deepak Chopra, which...

00:45:50.000 It was quite hilarious, because Richard Dawkins is a very brilliant guy, but he's also kind of cunty.

00:45:58.000 He gets a little cunty.

00:45:59.000 He does.

00:46:00.000 Rightly so. 0.99

00:46:01.000 I mean, he's had to deal with so much quackery and fuckery his whole life, and he's been a rabid atheist for the longest time. 0.99

00:46:08.000 But he's made a career out of that. 0.99

00:46:09.000 Yes, he has.

00:46:10.000 He's made a big career out of that.

00:46:11.000 But one of the things that Deepak said that was really fascinating, because they were talking about consciousness, and consciousness being in atoms, and consciousness being in And Dawkins was insisting that these things did not have consciousness, which to me is, oh, I go,

00:46:27.000 how can you insist?

00:46:28.000 It seems to me, yeah, it seems to me that whether you, clearly, he's a brilliant man with a massive amount of scientific data at his disposal for things that he can prove, for sure.

00:46:39.000 But to say that you know that atoms don't have consciousness is kind of silly, because we don't.

00:46:47.000 The other thing that Deepak said that I thought was really fascinating was that he believes that what you're seeing in human beings, with human beings being recycled stardust, we literally are made of stardust.

00:47:00.000 A star had to explode to create the very molecules that are inside of our body.

00:47:05.000 And what you're seeing in a human being is the universe actually becoming aware of itself in a way that it can communicate.

00:47:12.000 I think it's a beautiful idea.

00:47:13.000 It's a beautiful idea.

00:47:14.000 Yeah.

00:47:14.000 And I think both guys are so rigid on what their side is, you know, especially in a debate form.

00:47:21.000 And Dawkins, absolutely sure he's correct.

00:47:23.000 Yeah.

00:47:24.000 Confusing the fuck out of everybody with word salad of quantum and this and that.

00:47:29.000 He just throws quantum out there like you throw salt on french fries. 0.99

00:47:32.000 I don't even know if it's the right way to use it, but he just throws it out there and confuses the shit out of you sometimes. 0.95

00:47:38.000 Very poor method of communication he incorporates because It's not clear what he's saying.

00:47:46.000 Even though I know what quantum means, I know what he's talking about, when he's talking about consciousness being non-local, I understand all those things, but he says it in such a word-salad way that it's like, I don't know what you're getting at, man.

00:48:00.000 Seems to me like you're trying to confuse the shit out of people with a real elaborate sentence.

00:48:04.000 Could be. 0.96

00:48:05.000 And then win this debate or make a point that's hard to argue.

00:48:09.000 Well, it's a tough call to win a debate with Richard Dawkins.

00:48:11.000 Richard Dawkins is a very clever guy.

00:48:14.000 I've met him and he's a formidable arguer.

00:48:18.000 It's not easy at all, but he is a religious fanatic in his own way.

00:48:24.000 His non-belief in meaning or purpose in the universe is a religious idea of a kind.

00:48:29.000 It's not based on facts.

00:48:30.000 It's not based on evidence.

00:48:31.000 It's based on his His opinion, as a matter of fact.

00:48:35.000 Nothing more.

00:48:36.000 It's also based on a lack of information.

00:48:38.000 And when I say that lack of information, I mean one thing and one thing only.

00:48:42.000 Psychedelic experiences.

00:48:43.000 He has not had them.

00:48:44.000 He needs to have them.

00:48:45.000 Without a doubt.

00:48:46.000 He's so brilliant.

00:48:47.000 I would like Dawkins to smoke DMT. Yes.

00:48:51.000 That's the one psychedelic with which there is just no negotiation.

00:48:56.000 You just don't get a discussion with DMT. It just does for you.

00:49:01.000 And other ones, even the DMT in Ayahuasca, Dawkins could resist that.

00:49:06.000 But the smoked DMT, once you hit the right dose, once you pass that fourth big draw on the pipe, then there's no negotiation.

00:49:14.000 It is going to take you there, and it's going to deal with you.

00:49:17.000 And I would like to see Dawkins argue with DMT. You can't.

00:49:21.000 He would probably argue with what the effects actually are and that it's some sort of an assault on the visual cortex by various chemicals that distort perception and reality.

00:49:32.000 That's what he'd do, yeah.

00:49:33.000 Yeah, I mean, what it is, though, is data.

00:49:36.000 And what it is, is an experience.

00:49:38.000 And it's both things he's lacking in.

00:49:41.000 He's lacking in that data and that experience.

00:49:44.000 It's data that he needs to have as a scientist.

00:49:46.000 He's one of the people I would really like to see having that data.

00:49:50.000 I agree with you that he would probably find a way to rationalize it and set it aside.

00:49:55.000 But still, it would be incredibly useful for him to have that experience because he's been so influential in persuading so many people that there is nothing beyond this material realm.

00:50:06.000 And DMT is a place beyond this material realm.

00:50:09.000 I am prepared to admit it could be something that we're projecting out of our own minds.

00:50:13.000 There may not be any reality, but it feels like a real place.

00:50:16.000 I appreciate you admitting that, and I say that often as well.

00:50:20.000 I think that it feels like a different dimension that's inhabited with intelligent something, whatever it is.

00:50:27.000 Intelligent something.

00:50:28.000 The way I describe it is geometric patterns that are made out of love and understanding.

00:50:33.000 That's what it feels like to me.

00:50:35.000 I have never had a bad DMT trip in a sense where it turned evil.

00:50:40.000 But I've heard people discuss really horrific evil entities that they've run into.

00:50:47.000 And I often wonder, by virtue of that, whether or not what they're talking about is something that's in their psyche, something that's in their subconscious.

00:50:55.000 Something they're bringing to the party.

00:50:57.000 My last DMT trip, which I mentioned a little while ago, which was extremely powerful and scary, This happened just in the two weeks before I gave up my 24-year cannabis habit. 0.97

00:51:14.000 I think I had some shit to go through.

00:51:18.000 I then followed that with five ayahuasca sessions. 0.99

00:51:20.000 I think the DMT was really helpful.

00:51:22.000 I may have mentioned this to you the last time we talked.

00:51:25.000 But what happened as I went under, I had that fourth deep inhalation of the pipe and lay back.

00:51:32.000 And I don't normally hear voices in DMT, but a voice spoke to me.

00:51:36.000 And the voice said to me, you're ours now.

00:51:41.000 Whoa.

00:51:41.000 You're ours now.

00:51:43.000 And my last conscious thought was, shit yes, but only for 12 minutes, you know? 0.99

00:51:49.000 And then I felt myself being ripped apart. 0.99

00:51:53.000 There were these things, these small things.

00:51:55.000 I was on some kind of table, and they were running around me, and they were tearing me apart.

00:51:58.000 My body was torn to pieces.

00:52:00.000 Bits were cast off.

00:52:01.000 It was like a cocoon was being ripped away.

00:52:04.000 And then the voice comes again.

00:52:07.000 There's like a trumpet call and the voice comes again and now the great transformation shall begin.

00:52:12.000 And it was the weirdest and strangest experience and I was in this flickering huge space and these little beings were running around me and I was completely helpless and at their mercy.

00:52:23.000 And that That was scary.

00:52:25.000 That's amazing.

00:52:26.000 But it was not demonic.

00:52:28.000 It was like, this is stuff you need to go through.

00:52:32.000 You need to do this.

00:52:33.000 It's going to be very, very frightening, but it's something you need to do.

00:52:37.000 And I did need to do it, and it was helpful to me.

00:52:39.000 Was that the first time you had heard voices?

00:52:41.000 Yeah, I did not hear voices speaking to me in DMT ever before.

00:52:45.000 Wow.

00:52:46.000 My experiences have been filled with voices.

00:52:50.000 Oh, really?

00:52:50.000 Yeah.

00:52:50.000 Saying what?

00:52:51.000 Well, one of the big ones is it's a really childish thing that they would say.

00:52:55.000 And this is like when I was about to leave, when I was starting to sober up.

00:52:59.000 They would say, I love you 600 million, 500,000 times.

00:53:03.000 Wow.

00:53:04.000 Like a child would say.

00:53:05.000 Oh, I want to hear that.

00:53:06.000 Yeah.

00:53:06.000 I want to hear that more than I want to hear you're ours now.

00:53:10.000 Well, I think I came into it in a good place.

00:53:12.000 I was in a happy place in my life, and I wasn't scared.

00:53:15.000 I wasn't fighting it.

00:53:16.000 But that I love you thing was really weird.

00:53:19.000 The other thing that it said was the words of McKenna.

00:53:22.000 And I think when I've tried to analyze this, I think that what it was was that I had listened to so much McKenna before I'd gone into it that I had sort of stained my brain with this idea.

00:53:34.000 And either my subconsciousness was saying this, or they were...

00:53:39.000 Whatever they are, whether they're a part of my thought process, we're projecting this thing, this reminder, do not give in to astonishment.

00:53:49.000 Because it was so mind-blowing.

00:53:52.000 I was flying down this bumblebee-covered...

00:54:00.000 This pathway, this spinning, when I say bumblebee, not covered, rather by colored, there was very clear black and yellow stripes of all this thing, like very bright, intense black, and very bright, intense yellow,

00:54:15.000 and it was moving, and I was shooting down this thing, and then it was saying, do not give in to astonishment.

00:54:23.000 And it was, the words of McKenna, but not in...

00:54:27.000 I don't think it was his voice.

00:54:29.000 I think it was like no voice.

00:54:31.000 I think it was just the words.

00:54:33.000 But that thought.

00:54:33.000 Well, that's the weird thing about the telepathic thing that you get from the DMT experience.

00:54:41.000 You understand the words.

00:54:42.000 It's speaking to you in English, but it's not really speaking to you.

00:54:46.000 It's just those things are getting into your brain very clearly, but I'm not really sure you hear them.

00:54:52.000 I mean, here is an experience which, what a pity to go through life and not have that experience ever. 0.97

00:54:58.000 Yeah, I've said to many people, you're screwing yourself, man. 0.99

00:55:04.000 It's scary as shit, but boy do you get a lot out of it. 0.99

00:55:08.000 And I mean, in my case, most of the previous DMT journeys I'd had had not been terrifying. 0.99

00:55:13.000 They had been gentle and healing and nice.

00:55:16.000 I think that I was at a juncture in my life where I needed to make a change.

00:55:19.000 And I think that that particular DMT experience, followed by the five ayahuasca journeys, helped me to make that change.

00:55:27.000 And I'm eternally grateful for that.

00:55:28.000 It was a really positive and beneficial thing for me.

00:55:32.000 Yeah, it was very positive and beneficial for me as well.

00:55:34.000 I was...

00:55:35.000 I think I've always wanted a change.

00:55:38.000 I want a change now.

00:55:40.000 I always want more enlightenment, more peace, more serenity, whatever it is.

00:55:48.000 At that time, I think I was just trying to figure out what are the possibilities and what else is out there.

00:55:55.000 It was just this one big rush of impossible possibilities.

00:56:01.000 That redefined my view of reality itself.

00:56:05.000 It was really scary, though.

00:56:06.000 The last one was really slippery.

00:56:08.000 Because after it was over, it was so intense and powerful that regular reality didn't seem real to me.

00:56:15.000 And I went through a period where I feel like my ego was trying to trick me by being scared of everything.

00:56:23.000 I was scared of car accidents and trees falling in front of my car.

00:56:28.000 Buildings collapsing and earthquakes.

00:56:29.000 There's all these thoughts that came into my mind that I felt.

00:56:32.000 This went on for days after the journey?

00:56:34.000 Yes.

00:56:34.000 It's not intensely strong.

00:56:36.000 It wasn't like paranoia or anxiety.

00:56:40.000 It was like this flittering thing that I'd go, no, stop it, stop it. 0.97

00:56:45.000 But I'd be on the highway and I'd be like, what if this guy just flips the fucking road and comes right towards you and smashes his head onto your car? 1.00

00:56:50.000 You're dead! 1.00

00:56:51.000 It was all this nonsense that was just entering into my mind. 0.99

00:56:54.000 Not just being aware of traffic and being smart, but possibilities.

00:57:00.000 And you hadn't been doing that before?

00:57:02.000 Never.

00:57:03.000 Never.

00:57:04.000 I think what it was was my ego trying to regain some sort of control.

00:57:08.000 Is that my ego, by protecting me or by keeping me paranoid and keeping me very base and primal and animalistic, worried about safety and shelter and disasters and things like that, it was trying to regain some strength.

00:57:24.000 Because I was so humbled by the experience.

00:57:26.000 It is a humbling experience.

00:57:28.000 It really is.

00:57:29.000 It's one of the most, I mean, perhaps the most humbling experience that it's possible to have.

00:57:34.000 And again, that's why it's valuable.

00:57:36.000 And who says we shouldn't have experiences because they're scary, you know?

00:57:41.000 These are amongst the most important experiences it's possible to have.

00:57:45.000 I hear you use flotation tanks.

00:57:48.000 Yeah, I have one in my basement.

00:57:50.000 Do you use it regularly?

00:57:51.000 Oh yeah, I've been using them for...

00:57:53.000 I bought my house in 2003, so for more than 10 years I've had this in my basement.

00:58:00.000 Please describe the thing to me.

00:58:01.000 You get into this...

00:58:02.000 You've never done it?

00:58:03.000 I've never done it.

00:58:03.000 Oh my goodness.

00:58:04.000 I want to do it.

00:58:04.000 Where are you staying while you're out here?

00:58:06.000 I'm staying in Malibu with friends.

00:58:07.000 Oh, perfect!

00:58:08.000 I'll get you in if you want to go tomorrow.

00:58:10.000 There's a place in Venice called the Float Lab.

00:58:12.000 It's the best place in the country.

00:58:14.000 And you just go in there and float?

00:58:16.000 Yes, it's amazing.

00:58:17.000 You don't need anything.

00:58:18.000 I'd like to do two hours, if I have two hours.

00:58:21.000 But if I only have an hour, I'll set a timer.

00:58:22.000 And I'll put a timer outside of the box so I can hear it when it goes off.

00:58:27.000 But that's my old one.

00:58:28.000 You see it up there.

00:58:29.000 That's a Samadhi tank that I had.

00:58:32.000 The one that I have now, though, is built by the Float Lab, which is far more complicated.

00:58:36.000 It's a really immense, huge, seven feet tall, nine feet wide, or nine foot long, six foot wide.

00:58:43.000 It's huge.

00:58:44.000 It looks like a walk-in freezer.

00:58:47.000 And it has oxygen pumped into it.

00:58:49.000 When you're in it, you're in water, right?

00:58:51.000 And it's salt water that keeps you suspended.

00:58:53.000 I can't believe you haven't done this.

00:58:54.000 I haven't done it.

00:58:55.000 We're going to change your life tomorrow.

00:58:57.000 It's amazing.

00:58:59.000 It's like a psychedelic experience, except completely natural, completely safe, and you can end it anytime you want.

00:59:04.000 That's my new tank.

00:59:06.000 When you climb into that thing, the water is set to the same temperature as the surface of your skin.

00:59:13.000 And there's a thousand pounds of salt in that water.

00:59:16.000 It used to be 800 in my smaller tank.

00:59:18.000 This one's a thousand.

00:59:19.000 So you can't sink.

00:59:20.000 Exactly.

00:59:21.000 It's about 11 inches deep, so even if you did sink and you can't drown, you're fine.

00:59:25.000 And you're floating like half of your body is above the water.

00:59:29.000 And as you lie there, you're in total silence, total darkness.

00:59:33.000 Your ears are actually underwater.

00:59:34.000 You close the lid on this thing and you don't hear a thing, you don't see a thing.

00:59:39.000 You have no input.

00:59:40.000 And you don't feel the water because the water is the same temperature as your skin.

00:59:44.000 So you're floating completely weightless.

00:59:46.000 It's really great for your body.

00:59:48.000 It feels great because you alleviate all the pressures of gravity and stress.

00:59:54.000 You feel your muscles relaxing and unwinding.

00:59:57.000 And for me, the way I describe it is the first 20 minutes or so, it seems like a seminar on my life.

01:00:03.000 It gets me to start examining various aspects of my life.

01:00:06.000 You start to go through like a life review?

01:00:07.000 Mm-hmm. 0.64

01:00:08.000 In the absence of sensory input, even while we're having this conversation, it's very quiet in here, but we're having to deal with the fact that there's computers, there's screens, there's a ceiling, your butt is feeling the chair.

01:00:23.000 All those things are gone in that tank.

01:00:25.000 In the tank, it's just your mind.

01:00:28.000 It's the only place ever, the only environment on Earth where your mind is untethered from your body.

01:00:34.000 It's an amazing, amazing experience.

01:00:37.000 Completely safe, completely natural, completely beneficial, completely refreshing.

01:00:41.000 It's amazing.

01:00:42.000 Even if you're not into the psychedelic aspect of it, you just want to relax, it's incredible.

01:00:47.000 I love it.

01:00:48.000 It should be something that everyone has in their home.

01:00:50.000 It would benefit so many people in so many ways.

01:00:53.000 Do you get into visionary space?

01:00:55.000 Yes.

01:00:55.000 You do.

01:00:55.000 Absolutely.

01:00:56.000 Especially when you get a little smoky, smoky.

01:00:59.000 Well, that's what I was going to say.

01:01:00.000 So you can enhance the experience with certain allies.

01:01:02.000 Mushrooms enhance it.

01:01:05.000 Although mushrooms are scary in there.

01:01:08.000 I like cannabis.

01:01:10.000 Eating cannabis is my favorite. 0.97

01:01:12.000 I like to eat enough cannabis that I feel like I fucked up and ate too much and then get in there. 0.59

01:01:18.000 And those are intensely psychedelic and very visionary. 0.96

01:01:22.000 But what I like about it is you can end it pretty much at any moment.

01:01:25.000 When you open the door, The cannabis will still affect you.

01:01:29.000 You'll still have the weirdness of that, but all the nutty hallucinations and visuals will all go away.

01:01:35.000 You just step out.

01:01:36.000 Yeah, you just step out.

01:01:37.000 And you can get to that place without the cannabis as well.

01:01:39.000 I know a lot of people that have really intense psychedelic visions while they're in the isolation tank.

01:01:46.000 How interesting.

01:01:46.000 Well, this is an experience I have to have.

01:01:48.000 You're going to have it.

01:01:48.000 You're going to have it tomorrow.

01:01:49.000 Do you have a day off?

01:01:50.000 Are you free?

01:01:50.000 I don't have a total day off, but I can get two hours.

01:01:53.000 Okay, we'll work it in.

01:01:54.000 We'll make it happen.

01:01:55.000 All right.

01:01:56.000 Crash, who's the guy who runs the Float Lab in Venice, is a great friend and a great guy.

01:02:00.000 Fantastic.

01:02:01.000 He's a genius.

01:02:02.000 He's the wizard behind the curtain that creates the greatest tanks on Earth. 0.98

01:02:05.000 He's just a nutty, nutty dude. 0.78

01:02:08.000 He's just worked incredibly hard to figure out a way to make...

01:02:11.000 There's tanks, there's the Samadhi tank, which is a very good tank, very functional, you can use it.

01:02:17.000 There's a bunch of different companies that have tanks.

01:02:19.000 And then there's his tank.

01:02:21.000 And the difference is like, A modern BMW compared to a Model T Ford.

01:02:26.000 Like, literally.

01:02:26.000 It's that good.

01:02:27.000 Oh, it's amazing.

01:02:28.000 He's just a genius.

01:02:30.000 He figured out a way to pump oxygen into them.

01:02:32.000 He also figured out a way to flush all the water through ozone.

01:02:36.000 It kills all the bacteria.

01:02:38.000 He has incredibly intense filtration systems, four- and five-step processes of filtering the water.

01:02:44.000 All of his equipment that he has attached to all this stuff, nobody's rocking it like that.

01:02:49.000 He takes it to literally...

01:02:51.000 The next level is not even a mile from him.

01:02:55.000 He's gone.

01:02:56.000 He's in a place all by his own with what he's creating.

01:02:59.000 And you're in total silence.

01:03:01.000 Total silence.

01:03:02.000 And total darkness.

01:03:02.000 Total darkness.

01:03:03.000 And you don't feel a thing.

01:03:05.000 You feel like you're flying through space.

01:03:07.000 Wow.

01:03:08.000 Because your body is completely weightless.

01:03:10.000 It's the weirdest feeling ever.

01:03:11.000 But it's amazing.

01:03:12.000 You've convinced me.

01:03:13.000 I can't believe you haven't done it.

01:03:15.000 But you're such a psychedelic adventurer.

01:03:17.000 I would have thought that would have been a part of your daily life.

01:03:19.000 It hasn't been.

01:03:20.000 We've got to set you up with one in England, man.

01:03:22.000 We've got to send one over there.

01:03:24.000 Send a crash over. 0.82

01:03:26.000 Have them set you up in your basement or something.

01:03:29.000 I wouldn't live in a house if I didn't have space for one.

01:03:31.000 Literally.

01:03:32.000 Is that important to you?

01:03:33.000 To me, it's massive.

01:03:35.000 Anytime I've got something I'm thinking about or trying to work on or new material, ideas, I go through jujitsu moves in there.

01:03:43.000 I go through scenarios.

01:03:46.000 I'll visually spar.

01:03:47.000 Okay.

01:03:48.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

01:03:50.000 You don't get an opportunity to have the mind at its full resource capacity, other than in that tank.

01:03:58.000 In this world, constantly bombarded by a sensation of all kinds, we're torn apart.

01:04:06.000 I can't wait to talk to you after you get out.

01:04:09.000 Have you seen this new skull that they found, the 1.8 million year old human skull?

01:04:15.000 Hmm, no.

01:04:17.000 Yeah, this is an amazing discovery that they found.

01:04:21.000 This first completely preserved adult hominid from the early Pleistocene.

01:04:28.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:04:29.000 See if you can pull that up, Jamie.

01:04:30.000 It's a 1.8 million year old skull.

01:04:33.000 But it's a really amazing find.

01:04:37.000 And they found it in Georgia, in Eastern Europe.

01:04:41.000 And it's the fifth such skull from this region.

01:04:44.000 But it's 1.8 million years old.

01:04:47.000 That's really old.

01:04:48.000 That is...

01:04:51.000 Yeah, there it is.

01:04:52.000 Let's see if they have any still images of it.

01:04:57.000 But these, they're completely, it's thrown a gigantic monkey wrench into our timeline of human evolution.

01:05:05.000 They found stone tools and cut marks on animal bones, which indicates that the hominids were actively involved in meat processing. 1.00

01:05:13.000 This is amazing.

01:05:15.000 But is it a recognizable species of early man?

01:05:19.000 It has quite prominent brow ridges.

01:05:21.000 Yes.

01:05:22.000 Well, it's some sort of early man.

01:05:27.000 What they're calling it.

01:05:30.000 It hasn't received a name yet.

01:05:32.000 Have they indicated any idea about the size of the brain?

01:05:36.000 Um, that's a good question.

01:05:38.000 They're calling it Skull 5. It says here, Skull 5 is different, different even than the four other skulls found in, uh, Dumanese is the name, the area.

01:05:47.000 It was found in 2005 and completely, and ultimately matched a jaw found in 2000 to make a complete skull.

01:05:54.000 After eight years of study, scientists on Thursday published a paper in the Journal of Science revealing that Skull 5 is simply not that different from others.

01:06:02.000 The five Demanisi individuals are no more different from each other than any five modern humans or chimpanzees, said neurobiologists, blah, blah, blah.

01:06:14.000 So the brain case itself is very small, around the third of the size of modern humans.

01:06:19.000 And at the same time, the face is quite large.

01:06:23.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I need to read it.

01:06:26.000 I'm not sure how much that changes history.

01:06:29.000 I mean, we know that there were human species around one point.

01:06:34.000 Our ancestors were making tools two and a half million years ago.

01:06:39.000 So this is well within that time frame.

01:06:43.000 I think maybe what it's showing us is that there have been many lines of human down through the ages.

01:06:51.000 And like this one that they call the Hobbit, you know, Florian, this tiny little creature which lived until 18 or 16,000 years ago in Floris in Indonesia.

01:07:02.000 That was completely unpredicted as well.

01:07:04.000 Maybe there have been many human types and we don't know where we actually come from in this whole picture.

01:07:12.000 Yeah, these lost hominids that they keep discovering, like Homo floriensis, and like that Russian one that they found that was basically 40,000 years old, a completely different species of human.

01:07:22.000 Completely different, Denisovans.

01:07:25.000 Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

01:07:26.000 And 40,000 years ago, a blink of an eye.

01:07:29.000 A blink of an eye.

01:07:30.000 Nothing.

01:07:30.000 Just a completely different type of human.

01:07:32.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:07:33.000 So again, what it adds up to is the realization that we know nothing, actually.

01:07:37.000 We know very little.

01:07:39.000 We come out of mystery.

01:07:41.000 We live in mystery and we end in mystery.

01:07:44.000 Have you heard of the Orang Pendek?

01:07:46.000 Yes, this is cryptozoology.

01:07:48.000 That's Malaysia. 0.74

01:07:50.000 That's where my wife comes from, Malaysia. 0.85

01:07:52.000 And it's a kind of Yeti, Malaysian Yeti or Malaysian Bigfoot.

01:07:55.000 Well, it's tiny.

01:07:56.000 But it's a wild creature, a man-like creature that lives in the woods.

01:08:02.000 Well, very similar to Homo floreensis.

01:08:06.000 And so the suggestion is Orang Pendek is Homo floresiensis, or whatever it's called, still alive.

01:08:12.000 Yeah, that's the idea.

01:08:13.000 Hanging out in the world somewhere.

01:08:14.000 It would sound ridiculous, but this Homo, let's call him Hobbit Man. 1.00

01:08:17.000 This Hobbit Man was only 13,000, 14,000 years ago.

01:08:21.000 Yeah, very recently.

01:08:21.000 Within the span almost of human history.

01:08:25.000 I mean, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, where I've just been, is 12,000 plus years old.

01:08:29.000 They're making these massive, great, megalithic pillars there.

01:08:32.000 So this creature on Flores is just that period, just the same age as that.

01:08:38.000 So the world was filled with all kinds of different creatures.

01:08:42.000 By the way, talking about Indonesia, I'm going to Indonesia on the 3rd of December.

01:08:49.000 Because there's been a new site, or rather an old site, which has been radically redated in Indonesia.

01:08:55.000 Really?

01:08:56.000 Which is called Gunung Padang, not that far from Flores, as a matter of fact.

01:09:00.000 It's a megalithic site with gigantic basalt columns.

01:09:05.000 And this place has been known since the early 20th century, thought to be about 3,000 or 4,000 years old.

01:09:12.000 But there's an Australian geologist called Danny Hillman, Who's been working for the Indonesian government on a site survey for the last five years, and he's just in the last month or two come out with this explosive finding that he thinks this site is possibly as much as 20,000 years old, which a megalithic site,

01:09:29.000 20,000 years old, that completely rewrites history.

01:09:32.000 Gobekli Tepe already pretty much rewrites history, but this place in Indonesia totally does it.

01:09:37.000 And when you take the two together, so I'm going to go out and take a look at that site and meet Danny Hillman.

01:09:41.000 What is the name of it again?

01:09:42.000 Can you spell it?

01:09:43.000 Gunung Padang.

01:09:44.000 Whoa.

01:09:44.000 Gunung Padang.

01:09:45.000 I may be able to show you a picture of it.

01:09:47.000 Yeah, Jamie put it up.

01:09:49.000 That is Gunung Padang, yeah.

01:09:50.000 That is totally Gunung Padang.

01:09:52.000 I use that picture.

01:09:53.000 So all these stones, and what made them date this to 20,000 years?

01:09:58.000 What was the change?

01:09:58.000 Okay, so the previous dating has just been based on the surface layers, and Danny Hillman and his team have been down deep into this man-made hill on top of which the surface layers stand, and they've gone all the way down and they're finding big megaliths right down at the bottom.

01:10:12.000 And they're finding associated carbon that allows them to date it to up to 20,000 years old.

01:10:18.000 So this is a real huge game changer that's taking place there.

01:10:22.000 So when they date it, when they carbon date it down to 20,000 years old, is it based on organic material that's near the rock?

01:10:26.000 It has to be, yeah.

01:10:27.000 You can't date stone, but what you do is you get into undisturbed layers.

01:10:32.000 Deep down in that man-made hill that we're looking at on the screen right now, you get down into undisturbed layers where you're finding megaliths at the bottom, covered by Earth, being covered by Earth for 20,000 years, and amongst that Earth is organic material, fragments of bone, fragments of charcoal that you can date with carbon dating.

01:10:48.000 So you can then say that those megaliths are at least that old.

01:10:52.000 At least.

01:10:53.000 At least.

01:10:53.000 Most likely much older than that.

01:10:55.000 They may be much older than that, but they're at least that old.

01:10:57.000 And the weird thing that this place has in common with Gobekli Tepe Is that both of them are man-made hills which appear to have had some kind of deliberate burial of the earlier lairs, like a time capsule.

01:11:09.000 So I get this feeling that, you know, stuff is coming out.

01:11:13.000 Stuff is coming out into the open that's been...

01:11:21.000 Well, Gobekli Tepe was a real game changer because that was the first time that they had found anything that you had to date back to at least 12,000 years.

01:11:32.000 Gobekli Tepe is really important and that's why I was glad to be able to go there.

01:11:38.000 In September and spend a lot of time just gently getting to know this site.

01:11:43.000 The reason it's important is because it was deliberately buried.

01:11:50.000 And what it raises is...

01:11:52.000 I just want to show you this cover from New Scientist magazine.

01:11:55.000 Can we show this?

01:11:56.000 Yeah, sure.

01:11:58.000 There it is.

01:11:59.000 The True Dawn.

01:12:00.000 How do we get that up there?

01:12:01.000 We'll pull it up.

01:12:02.000 We'll have Jamie pull it up.

01:12:03.000 Civilization is older and more mysterious than we thought.

01:12:06.000 Wow, New Scientist magazine.

01:12:07.000 This is New Scientist magazine in the beginning of October 2013. Now, New Scientist was one of the magazines.

01:12:13.000 That attacked me massively back in 1995 when I published Fingerprints of the Gods.

01:12:17.000 And what did I say in Fingerprints of the Gods?

01:12:20.000 Civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought.

01:12:23.000 And now they come out with this cover, you know.

01:12:25.000 So I've got to feel a certain feeling of, I don't know, almost smugness.

01:12:30.000 Oh, yeah.

01:12:31.000 Sure.

01:12:31.000 Listen, you can hear your voice.

01:12:32.000 You just get all giddy.

01:12:33.000 It's fun.

01:12:34.000 I mean, it's fun to see them doing that.

01:12:36.000 And the reason they're saying that is it's got a lot to do with Quebec Zetepi.

01:12:39.000 Yeah.

01:12:39.000 Because Gobekli Tepe is something completely unpredicted that what are supposed to be hunter-gatherers at the end of the Upper Paleolithic who are not supposed to have the kind of organizational skills, the architectural skills to put together gigantic megalithic circles.

01:12:56.000 There's one of the pillars that I went and took a look at, which they never removed it from the quarry because they found a fault in it.

01:13:05.000 It wasn't that they couldn't remove it, they found a fault in it.

01:13:07.000 And that one weighs more than 50 tons.

01:13:10.000 It's just a gigantic piece of stone.

01:13:13.000 And the other intriguing thing about Gobekli Tepe, which I learned from Klaus Schmidt when I was talking to him, is they've done ground-penetrating radars.

01:13:21.000 So right now when you go to the site, you see four We're good to go.

01:13:33.000 We're good to go.

01:13:45.000 Over the site and they found that at least 20 times as many stone circles are still underground and possibly as many as 50 times as many.

01:13:53.000 So it's just a gigantic site and why it's important is that whoever made it 12,000 years ago deliberately buried it 2,000 years later, 10,000 years ago.

01:14:03.000 So that meant that the carbon dating record has not been contaminated by later cultures.

01:14:09.000 It's a perfect pristine time capsule and lo and behold The date that it prints out is 12,000 years old.

01:14:18.000 Now, that then raises questions over lots of other megalithic sites all over the world, which have been contaminated by later cultures.

01:14:25.000 The megalithic sites of Malta, for example, look very like Gobekli Tepe. 0.53

01:14:31.000 They look very like Gobekli Tepe, but they're only supposed to be 5,000 years old.

01:14:35.000 I would now say we need to reconsider that evidence because those sites Were contaminated by later culture.

01:14:41.000 Maybe the carbon on which they were dated was introduced by a later culture.

01:14:44.000 Maybe it doesn't belong to the period of the construction of the megaliths.

01:14:49.000 Well, this alone, this one discovery alone, really is a huge game changer.

01:14:55.000 Because now we know that people were capable of doing something like that 12,000 years ago.

01:14:59.000 And not a task to be underestimated because you're in an area where there isn't a lot of water available.

01:15:05.000 So you're bringing in hundreds of people.

01:15:08.000 You're organizing them into teams to construct these gigantic megalithic circles.

01:15:14.000 You're feeding them.

01:15:15.000 You're watering them.

01:15:16.000 You have site planning and arrangement.

01:15:18.000 All of this is the kind of stuff that you expect much later in human history.

01:15:22.000 You don't expect it 12,000 years ago.

01:15:24.000 And it raises that big question, you know, could there have been a lost civilization?

01:15:28.000 Could we be looking at the work perhaps of the survivors of a lost civilization?

01:15:32.000 How do we know that they covered it intentionally?

01:15:36.000 There's a deliberate infill, the nature of the earth that's been put into it.

01:15:40.000 You can pretty much say here were people with spades pouring this earth in, all in one go, filling it in. 0.99

01:15:46.000 And amongst the earth there are bits, there are fragments of bone, there are fragments of carbon, and that's how they've dated it.

01:15:51.000 It's not a natural sedimentation that built up over a long period of time.

01:15:57.000 It's something that was done all at once in a planned and organized way.

01:16:02.000 So for some reason, and Claire Schmidt, the German archaeologist who's running the site, is not clear what this reason was.

01:16:08.000 For some reason, whoever created this place decommissioned it at a certain point about 10,000 years ago.

01:16:13.000 They closed it down.

01:16:15.000 And then, and this is eerie, for the next 10,000 years it remained untouched and nobody went there and nobody Nobody saw it.

01:16:23.000 Back in the 50s, some American archaeologists were attracted to the site.

01:16:26.000 They saw bits of cut stone lying on the surface, and the cut stone was so good that they concluded it was recent.

01:16:33.000 They thought it must be from the Ottoman period, you know, 15, 1600, something like that.

01:16:39.000 And they ignored it.

01:16:41.000 And it was really a lucky turn of the spade by Klaus Schmidt, this German archaeologist, that revealed that that's not the case at all and that these are 12,000-year-old megalithic pillars.

01:16:51.000 And not only that, so we have this incredible innovation in architecture taking place.

01:16:57.000 Stone circles on the scale of Stonehenge, but 7,000 years earlier than Stonehenge.

01:17:03.000 Being created at Gobekli Tepe, but at the same time, mysteriously, agriculture starts to appear in that area.

01:17:08.000 There hasn't been agriculture there before, or anywhere so far as we know, and suddenly it starts to appear.

01:17:13.000 They're domesticating cattle, they're domesticating wheat, and it's the beginning of the agricultural revolution, so it's like a center of innovation.

01:17:23.000 We're doing something unique as far as we know in human history in terms of architecture.

01:17:28.000 We're doing something unique in terms of economics, producing the first agriculture.

01:17:33.000 And I can't help feeling that This thing happened so suddenly and in such an extraordinary way that maybe this is the missing link, that we're looking at the fingerprints of a lost civilization, the survivors of a lost civilization who settled there with all these skills already in place and introduced them into the local culture because this period 12,000 years ago plus is the period when the Earth went through gigantic cataclysmic events because

01:18:04.000 it was struck by a comet.

01:18:05.000 Yeah, and that's the other piece of the puzzle, the nuclear glass that they've found.

01:18:10.000 How do you say this stuff?

01:18:13.000 Trinitite?

01:18:16.000 Trinitite.

01:18:17.000 And that they have found this stuff all over Europe and all over Asia, all over the world, at that precise moment, 12,000 years ago.

01:18:27.000 The layer of platinum in the Greenland ice cores, all of this says Earth was hit by a comet at that time.

01:18:35.000 Is that the Holocene?

01:18:36.000 Well, that's the beginning of the Holocene.

01:18:39.000 The Holocene is our period.

01:18:41.000 It's the period we still live in now.

01:18:42.000 But in archaeological terms, it's the juncture between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic.

01:18:48.000 That's what we're talking about here.

01:18:52.000 And you have this episode that geologists call the Younger Dryas, which is an episode of sudden deep freeze strikes the Earth.

01:19:02.000 The Earth has been emerging from the Ice Age until 12,980 years ago.

01:19:06.000 And amazingly, you can date it that precisely.

01:19:08.000 Give or take five years, this happened 12,980 years ago.

01:19:12.000 And then suddenly the Earth flips into this thousand-year deep freeze that nobody's ever been able to explain before, that they called the Younger Dryas.

01:19:21.000 And now we can say for sure that the Younger Dryas was caused by huge amounts of dust being projected into the upper atmosphere of the Earth by this comet impact, and that that dust enshrouded the whole Earth and set in motion a kind of what we would call a nuclear winter today.

01:19:37.000 Where the sun's rays could no longer reach the earth, and the earth went back into a deep freeze.

01:19:42.000 And for me, this is the smoking gun that lost us a whole civilization.

01:19:46.000 And I was just, yesterday, I've come here from North Carolina, and I sat down with Randall Carlson, who has been...

01:19:54.000 Yes, I met him.

01:19:54.000 You met Randall.

01:19:55.000 He's a very, very fascinating man.

01:19:57.000 And he's been working away quietly on this subject for years and years and years, long before the evidence Was in for a comet.

01:20:03.000 He was predicting that this is what caused it, that there was a comet impact.

01:20:06.000 And he's got this very, very fascinating theory.

01:20:09.000 And he's going to take me next year on a field trip into the Pacific Northwest and into Canada to look at areas where there were these massive outflows of floods from the ice cap.

01:20:21.000 And what Randall is suggesting is that at least some large fragments of the comet that hit the Earth 12,980 years ago actually hit the ice cap.

01:20:31.000 They landed on the ice cap, which was still then a mile deep, and they pulverized it.

01:20:35.000 They turned it into water immediately, and that's why you have these gigantic outburst floods which carry down huge boulders and strew them all over the landscapes.

01:20:43.000 A very exciting theory, and it's great to see Randall's work being vindicated because he's been ignored for far too long, and I'm looking forward to doing a fascinating field trip with him next year.

01:20:53.000 Yeah, I met him in Georgia many years ago at the Punchline Comedy Club.

01:20:57.000 I had a long and really interesting conversation about him.

01:21:00.000 With him, rather, about the Holocene Comet.

01:21:03.000 Yes.

01:21:03.000 Well, that's exactly what he's talking about.

01:21:05.000 You see, he's one of these guys who is just so far ahead of his time that nobody saw it.

01:21:10.000 Nobody realized what he was onto.

01:21:12.000 Now, everybody understands that the Earth was hit by a comet and there's been a big scientific argument about this over the last Five or six years, but it's really settled now.

01:21:20.000 The evidence that all over the world is clear that this happened.

01:21:24.000 But Randall was on to this years before anybody else.

01:21:27.000 And what he's also doing is just taking it that bit further.

01:21:31.000 Because we have these mysterious floods that occurred in precisely that period, which have traditionally been called outburst floods.

01:21:39.000 The idea was that the ice caps gradually melting down filled up these huge glacial lakes.

01:21:47.000 And that eventually the ice dam enclosing the Glacial Lake would break.

01:21:52.000 But now it looks like we're looking at ice dams a thousand feet high in order to account for the massive flow of water.

01:21:59.000 And what Randall's suggesting is that that theory is actually wrong.

01:22:02.000 It wasn't the outburst floods from Glacial Lakes.

01:22:05.000 It was the comet hitting the ice cap that turned all that ice to water and produced a gigantic, gigantic outflows, carrying down boulders, you know, the size of houses and dumping them over the landscapes.

01:22:17.000 And then you have to consider anything that lay in the way of those floods, anything that lay in the path of floods on that scale is gone.

01:22:24.000 Gone completely.

01:22:25.000 Wiped out from human memory.

01:22:27.000 And you also have to consider the fact that we absolutely know that these events have taken place in a much greater scale over the course of the Earth.

01:22:35.000 There's been mass extinction events, so this is not preposterous.

01:22:39.000 It's not preposterous.

01:22:40.000 It's completely logical, and it's time that historians and archaeologists...

01:22:46.000 We've abandoned the model that everything just proceeds smoothly and gently in the way that we've seen it doing for the last few hundred years, which is called uniformitarianism, and embraced the thought that cataclysmic events are a key part of the history of the Earth.

01:23:00.000 And we should know this already.

01:23:02.000 There's massive amount of evidence for it.

01:23:04.000 It's not something we even need to argue about.

01:23:06.000 But history proceeds on the basis that there is no such thing as a cataclysm.

01:23:10.000 In fact, it's cataclysms that have written the story of human history.

01:23:14.000 Well, not only that, when you stop and look at all the ancient stories, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Flood of the Ark.

01:23:21.000 Exactly.

01:23:22.000 There's so many stories that involve cataclysmic events.

01:23:25.000 They're all about floods and cataclysms. 0.94

01:23:27.000 The idea that those are just fiction is kind of silly. 0.93

01:23:30.000 It's totally, totally crazy.

01:23:32.000 And they all say that there was a golden age, that there was a former civilization, that mankind had attained to a very high level.

01:23:44.000 And then we angered the gods.

01:23:46.000 It's often put that way.

01:23:48.000 We angered the gods.

01:23:49.000 We fell out of harmony with the universe.

01:23:51.000 There was something went wrong.

01:23:53.000 There was some kind of moral decline.

01:24:00.000 Like now!

01:24:01.000 This is what I often say, that if I were to look at our civilization in mythical terms, There's never been a civilization that looked more like the next lost civilization than ours.

01:24:13.000 I don't want to spread gloom and doom.

01:24:15.000 I don't believe in spreading gloom and doom.

01:24:17.000 I think we should think positive.

01:24:18.000 And I've said earlier, and I maintain this, I'm very optimistic about the future of the human race.

01:24:22.000 But let's not pretend that it's all roses in the garden.

01:24:25.000 The terrible things are happening in the world today.

01:24:28.000 We have an unbelievable arrogance, an unbelievable Pride, cruelty, an economic model that makes countless millions incredibly poor and allows tiny, tiny numbers to be incredibly obscenely rich.

01:24:44.000 And the whole system is skewed in the interests of that tiny, tiny fraction of 1% of the wealthy.

01:24:51.000 And unfortunately, it's really as bad as it's possible to get in America.

01:24:56.000 It's bad in many other countries, too, but it's really bad in America, the skewing of wealth and the brainwashing of the population to keep people quiet, to stop people thinking the mind control operates in our society.

01:25:08.000 It's like a pressure cooker.

01:25:10.000 Something's got to give, and ours is a culture which is literally destroying the earth. 0.98

01:25:15.000 The Amazon jungle, this amazing sacred realm, this incredible home of biodiversity, Beautiful, beautiful place.

01:25:27.000 The destruction that's taking place now.

01:25:29.000 Only a society that is truly insane could allow that to happen.

01:25:34.000 And that's unfortunately our society today.

01:25:37.000 So we need to wake up.

01:25:38.000 And you want to talk about the writing on the wall as far as a powerful advanced civilization being completely wiped off the earth.

01:25:45.000 How about our writing is all going to the cloud?

01:25:48.000 We have this crazy trend where everything is going into these databases and hard drives.

01:25:55.000 When those are destroyed, there will be nothing to hold onto.

01:25:58.000 Nothing to read.

01:26:00.000 All of our knowledge will be memory.

01:26:02.000 I mean, it's almost ensuring that there will be nothing remaining.

01:26:06.000 Total wipeout.

01:26:07.000 So this idea that I've talked about many times over the years that we are a species with amnesia, we are going to be a species with amnesia.

01:26:15.000 Again.

01:26:16.000 Again.

01:26:16.000 And our culture has not at all looked at oral traditions.

01:26:22.000 We've destroyed the oral tradition.

01:26:24.000 You know, we put everything into the written form, now beamed it up into the cloud, and one disaster, it's all gone.

01:26:31.000 And at least in a written form, you have books.

01:26:34.000 I mean, we don't even have books anymore.

01:26:36.000 We have auto-updates.

01:26:40.000 It's so crazy to think that all it takes is one asteroidal impact that wipes out the grid, and all that stuff's gone.

01:26:47.000 All that stuff's gone.

01:26:48.000 You can't access it anymore.

01:26:49.000 You have to rebuild the entire power grid.

01:26:52.000 If the future...

01:26:53.000 I mean, if we lose one or two generations, if we had a Holocene-type incident again or a big comet hit and wiped out 50% of the population and we had to sort of re-figure out databases and re-figure out hard drives, we're not going to.

01:27:08.000 We're going to gather food and we're going to figure out agriculture.

01:27:10.000 We're going to figure out some real primitive ways to live life.

01:27:13.000 But most of that stuff, three, four generations later, is gone.

01:27:16.000 It's gone.

01:27:17.000 Gone.

01:27:17.000 Completely, completely gone.

01:27:19.000 And...

01:27:20.000 I mean, we have these gigantic populations now based in cities where actually the food supply is incredibly fragile.

01:27:28.000 It's like two or three days of food is available in any city at any time.

01:27:33.000 Consider the implications of that if that supply chain breaks down.

01:27:36.000 And it's very clear, we're on record now.

01:27:39.000 Look what's just happened in the Philippines.

01:27:40.000 Look at Hurricane Katrina.

01:27:42.000 We cannot deal with natural disasters.

01:27:44.000 Yeah, that was a big one too, man.

01:27:46.000 That was a really, really scary one.

01:27:49.000 The Philippines Superstorm, a storm the size of Germany. 0.51

01:27:53.000 Unbelievable.

01:27:55.000 Thousands, 10,000 more people killed and very slow reactions to do anything about it.

01:28:00.000 We are very bad.

01:28:01.000 The human race, we got all this tech, we got all this wealth.

01:28:05.000 We got all this complacency, but actually, when the universe strikes us, we are unable to do anything about it.

01:28:12.000 And that was true in the most wealthy country in the world, in America, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina.

01:28:16.000 And this is three times bigger than Katrina.

01:28:19.000 Three times bigger than Katrina.

01:28:19.000 They showed a city that was 200,000 people, and there's not a single structure left standing.

01:28:26.000 Unbelievable.

01:28:27.000 And that, by the way, there have been bigger ones.

01:28:30.000 There have been bigger storms throughout history than that.

01:28:32.000 There's been bigger impacts than the Holocene one.

01:28:35.000 And the other thing about the universe is that our orbit, like where we are, is stable.

01:28:41.000 And we have the moon, which helps our orbit be stable.

01:28:44.000 But there's hundreds of thousands of near-Earth objects that are just floating around out there that could easily come down, collide into each other, Slamming the Earth, and that's a wrap.

01:28:55.000 Absolutely.

01:28:56.000 This again is something that needs to be taken very, very seriously.

01:29:01.000 Again, I want to say, let's emphasize the positive, and let's emphasize positive thinking, but let's also be rational and reasonable.

01:29:08.000 And when you look at the orbits of near-Earth asteroids called Apollo objects, it's like looking at a cat's cradle of harm.

01:29:16.000 That is surrounding this precious jewel of a planet.

01:29:20.000 And we don't even know them all.

01:29:22.000 We know a tiny fraction of them.

01:29:24.000 What becomes clear is we only know a little bit of these things, some of them 10 miles wide, which are winging through outer space and can hit us at any time.

01:29:35.000 And then comets, then comets.

01:29:36.000 Some comets can have 12,000-year orbits.

01:29:40.000 The suggestion that we're seeing a lot of increased meteor activity as well right now, a lot of action going on.

01:29:47.000 And the suggestion, and again, Randall Carson's work has been really important in this area, is the torrid asteroid comet.

01:29:56.000 The torrid shower is a remains of a disintegrated comet.

01:30:00.000 And in that shower, there may be huge things the size of cities, which are...

01:30:05.000 Which are flowing through and crossing the orbit of the Earth regularly.

01:30:08.000 It's not just pretty little lights in the sky.

01:30:12.000 One day we're going to run into something the size of New York, which is going to hit us.

01:30:18.000 So this is a matter for care and concern.

01:30:21.000 And again, look what we do.

01:30:23.000 We spend billions, trillions, limitless, endless amounts of money in inventing new ways to destroy each other.

01:30:32.000 And very little on actually looking on how to protect the Earth.

01:30:36.000 How could they protect the Earth, though, from something like that?

01:30:39.000 Well, if we don't look into it, we certainly won't have an answer to that question.

01:30:43.000 Some of them, don't they come from behind the sun and we can't see them because of the gravity?

01:30:48.000 You can't see them come.

01:30:49.000 You can't see them come.

01:30:50.000 But if the kind of focused scientific effort that is presently put into creating weapons of mass destruction so that we can all fight each other, if that kind of effort were put into making sure That we understand the orbit of every single asteroid that's out there.

01:31:08.000 We identify them and find them.

01:31:09.000 Well, we'd be a lot safer than we are today.

01:31:11.000 There's no profit in that, Graham Hancock.

01:31:13.000 I don't know what you want our corporate stockholders to do. 0.96

01:31:16.000 That's ridiculous, sir. 0.93

01:31:18.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:31:19.000 It almost mimics the cyclical nature of life itself.

01:31:23.000 It seems like civilization builds up to this incredible point where it's like...

01:31:29.000 Completely out of control and just reckless and wild and then boom!

01:31:34.000 Gets knocked down and then builds back up again and boom.

01:31:37.000 And it's almost...

01:31:38.000 I'm not suggesting that these things floating around in space are there for a reason.

01:31:42.000 But if they were, I mean, they would be like little reset buttons.

01:31:46.000 Little reset buttons.

01:31:47.000 Yeah, I mean, maybe that's what happened with the dinosaurs.

01:31:49.000 And that's why the ancient mythology...

01:31:53.000 Which consistently says, right or wrong, consistently says that mankind is implicated in these cataclysms.

01:32:01.000 Our behavior, our wickedness is implicated in this in some way.

01:32:07.000 I think it's worth listening to that a little bit.

01:32:09.000 And maybe this time we don't have to go through the reset.

01:32:15.000 Maybe it's possible for mankind to actually wake up now that we are globally connected, now that we do have this possibility of all talking to one another, that before it's too late, we can reset ourselves in a positive direction.

01:32:28.000 I feel like the only way we would is if we knew something was coming.

01:32:31.000 I think that's almost the only way.

01:32:33.000 And we would have to be informed, and then we would have to believe it.

01:32:36.000 And then there would be disputes, and I'm sure the Republicans would start laughing nonsense.

01:32:40.000 We're going to show you right here.

01:32:41.000 The same scientist that brought you climate change.

01:32:43.000 are telling you right now that there's an asteroid heading our way.

01:32:46.000 Sadly, they would say that.

01:32:48.000 Jesus is gonna protect us.

01:32:49.000 What we need to do is cut taxes for corporations and ensure that we can move to Mexico with our factories.

01:32:55.000 Yeah, I wonder.

01:32:57.000 I wonder if we would really pay attention if we knew that we had a year left.

01:33:00.000 If we had a year to go...

01:33:01.000 Think of that.

01:33:02.000 Think of that.

01:33:03.000 What a difference.

01:33:03.000 What a situation that would be.

01:33:05.000 Think of that.

01:33:06.000 We barely pay attention to what we're doing that's really obvious.

01:33:09.000 Like the polluting of the ocean or the destroying of the...

01:33:13.000 Pulling the fish out of the ocean at an alarming rate that doesn't allow them to recover.

01:33:19.000 Insane.

01:33:19.000 All of it about the pursuit of short-term profits.

01:33:22.000 All of it about immediate payoffs.

01:33:25.000 Nobody thinking long-term.

01:33:27.000 Again, I come back to this.

01:33:29.000 We are a deranged society.

01:33:32.000 And little nodes of sanity are beginning to wake up all around the world.

01:33:37.000 But maybe it's not in enough time.

01:33:39.000 And doesn't it also go back to what you were saying about psychedelics and how beneficial psychedelics can be?

01:33:45.000 Because one of the main themes of ayahuasca is save the planet.

01:33:49.000 It's save the planet.

01:33:50.000 It's a universal theme of ayahuasca.

01:33:52.000 Sooner or later, anybody who works with ayahuasca enough is going to start picking up that message.

01:33:57.000 That this beautiful earth that we have, this gift that the universe has given us is precious beyond measure, precious beyond imagination, and that we are part of it and that we must treat it with love and respect and reverence rather than in the horrific way that we do.

01:34:15.000 And that part of treating the planet with love and respect and reverence is treating fellow human beings with love and respect and reverence at every level.

01:34:22.000 This is a very strong It's a message of ayahuasca.

01:34:25.000 It is fundamentally a message of love.

01:34:27.000 Not in a wishy-washy way, but in a really firm and clear way.

01:34:31.000 That is the salvation of the human race.

01:34:33.000 Bill Hicks said it, you know, love is the opposite of fear.

01:34:36.000 Fear is what presses our buttons today.

01:34:39.000 It's what's used deliberately to press our buttons.

01:34:42.000 And what's the opposite of that is love.

01:34:44.000 That's what we need.

01:34:45.000 Yeah, and Bill Hicks did a lot of mushrooms, folks.

01:34:48.000 And Bill Hicks did a lot of mushrooms, and what a brilliant, brilliant man he was.

01:34:51.000 Oh, yeah, he's one of my comedy heroes.

01:34:53.000 Yeah.

01:34:53.000 For sure.

01:34:54.000 There's a 19-year-old inventor who found a way to clean up the world's ocean in under five years' time.

01:35:01.000 Mm-hmm.

01:35:02.000 This great pacific garbage patch, this young kid has figured out this machine that would absorb all the plastic material in the ocean.

01:35:13.000 Really fascinating stuff.

01:35:16.000 There's an article about it.

01:35:20.000 This is vr-zone.com.

01:35:23.000 But I'm sure if you do a Google search on that, you can find several different sites that have covered that.

01:35:30.000 But it's like this machine that would essentially sit in the center of the ocean and start sucking all the plastic up.

01:35:38.000 We have a huge, huge, huge problem with this.

01:35:41.000 This plastic in the ocean is something that no one even considered until roughly a decade or so ago when they started being aware that all the stuff that we're littering on, you know, whether it's throwing it off of boats or just finds its way to the ocean through drainage pipes or what have you, we're dealing with a massive,

01:35:57.000 massive amount of material and material that's not biodegradable, that's being Turned into, like, this sludgy sort of shitty stuff that's floating around.

01:36:07.000 It's a kind of symbol of everything that's wrong with our culture, actually.

01:36:10.000 Yeah, it really is.

01:36:12.000 But is this guy's idea going to be taken up?

01:36:15.000 Well, hopefully.

01:36:16.000 I mean, it's pretty amazing that this 19-year-old kid...

01:36:20.000 The point being that what I find fascinating is that when our back is up against the wall, like when someone realizes, oh my god, we have this country-sized patch of plastic that's floating around in the ocean, when your back is up against the wall,

01:36:35.000 people start thinking.

01:36:36.000 When people start thinking, they start innovating.

01:36:38.000 When they start innovating, solutions come about.

01:36:39.000 And maybe even a solution when they say, hey, you know what?

01:36:42.000 That plastic is actually, you could turn that into stuff.

01:36:45.000 That actually could be used as fuel. 0.59

01:36:47.000 That actually could be used to create things.

01:36:49.000 That actually could be used in a beneficial way.

01:36:52.000 But then the problem is going to be, how do you keep people from continuing the same process and re-polluting it again once you've cleaned it up?

01:36:59.000 Yeah.

01:37:00.000 Psychedelics.

01:37:00.000 Yeah.

01:37:01.000 It might be the only way. 0.99

01:37:02.000 The realization, the huge kick up the ass that comes with a major problem. 0.99

01:37:07.000 Responsibly taken psychedelic journey. 0.98

01:37:09.000 And then there's also the challenge of our current trend in these gigantic cities.

01:37:14.000 These gigantic cities aren't sustainable.

01:37:17.000 They're not agriculturally sustainable.

01:37:18.000 Completely non-sustainable.

01:37:20.000 So, like, how do you figure out a way to stop the trend of these gigantic cities or provide food or figure out a way to be in a sustainable environment and still have modern conveniences and technology and medicine and all those,

01:37:36.000 you know...

01:37:37.000 Very difficult.

01:37:37.000 Yeah.

01:37:38.000 Very, very difficult problem.

01:37:39.000 If possible.

01:37:40.000 Hard to solve.

01:37:41.000 But like all of these gigantic problems, if we begin to solve them at our personal level within our own sphere of influence, within where we live in our relationships with other human beings, that's a good start.

01:37:52.000 That's where we do have power.

01:37:54.000 That's where we do have choice.

01:37:55.000 We cannot change the world, any one of us, but we can change the way we interact with others.

01:37:59.000 Yeah, and it seems like that's probably the best way to fix this whole mess, is to fix it on a macro scale or a micro scale.

01:38:08.000 A micro scale, yeah.

01:38:08.000 Fix it in individuals and spread it like a virus.

01:38:13.000 Exactly.

01:38:13.000 Spread this newfound realization of what we're really doing, what our impact really is, the awareness and this sort of newfound idea of connectivity that we have.

01:38:26.000 And that we're starting to grasp a hold of because of this internet culture, because of this new area, this new area in history, this new level of information.

01:38:35.000 This new level of information.

01:38:36.000 That's where it's happening.

01:38:38.000 And that's where I take hope.

01:38:41.000 Because I meet young people every time I go out and give a lecture, give a talk.

01:38:47.000 I meet young people who've come there and they are thinking in a new way.

01:38:51.000 The old ideas of nationalism and patriotism and all that bullshit have gone.

01:38:56.000 These are people who are thinking in terms of humanity as a whole and are thinking in terms of what a glorious gift the universe has given us with this planet and we have to live right.

01:39:06.000 There is a tremendous spirit in the world today.

01:39:09.000 Well, one of the benefits of travel is that travel sort of erodes the idea of nationalism in a way where you meet these people in these other countries and you realize, well, they're just like me.

01:39:18.000 They're just like me.

01:39:18.000 They might talk in a different accent or speak a different language, but they're just people.

01:39:23.000 And I think one of the reasons why people have nationalism is based on a fear of those other people.

01:39:30.000 Again, fear is the theme.

01:39:32.000 And this is fear that can be manipulated.

01:39:34.000 That the powers that run the world at the moment are deliberately manipulating all the time to divide us from one another and prevent us from realizing.

01:39:42.000 And amongst those powers are of course all of the big states and government apparatus and are of course all of the big religions.

01:39:49.000 Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all in the fear business as well.

01:39:52.000 They're all in generating fear and telling us that this is the only way to do things and we are different and this is the right way to do things and that is the wrong way to do things and that's the old model. 0.99

01:40:02.000 The big corporations, they're part of that too, you know, you have to rely on us, we will be the answer to all your problems, such bullshit.

01:40:09.000 That's the old model, and that's the model that is bit by bit, day by day, one step at a time, one brick at a time, getting replaced. 0.98

01:40:16.000 It truly is, isn't it?

01:40:17.000 And the model of government itself is a giant chunk of fear with a little bit of hope.

01:40:22.000 Exactly.

01:40:23.000 Exactly.

01:40:24.000 And the hope is all lies.

01:40:26.000 Yes.

01:40:27.000 And the hope is all silly. 0.99

01:40:28.000 I mean the hope is basically bullshit provided by corporations so they can keep fracking. 0.99

01:40:32.000 You know, it's like... 0.99

01:40:33.000 Yeah.

01:40:34.000 The ghastly thought.

01:40:36.000 Fracking.

01:40:36.000 You know, yeah.

01:40:37.000 All fear.

01:40:38.000 All fear.

01:40:39.000 Fear generated.

01:40:41.000 And this is what we need to move beyond.

01:40:45.000 I think the way we've known it for the last centuries and what it's come to today, it's done.

01:40:50.000 It's over.

01:40:51.000 Its story is over.

01:40:52.000 It's hanging on. 0.98

01:40:53.000 It's fucking everything up as badly as it can. 0.96

01:40:56.000 But it is done.

01:40:57.000 That is a model that will no longer work.

01:41:00.000 And whether or not it wants to or not, it will slowly be phased out.

01:41:04.000 I think that when you're talking about...

01:41:06.000 It's interesting that I think that the very practices that it's using right now, that our government is using, are going to aid its own demise.

01:41:14.000 Yes.

01:41:14.000 The practices of the NSA, monitoring everybody's email and constantly spying on America.

01:41:19.000 So ridiculous.

01:41:21.000 Socially, where people are just completely up in arms and upset about it. 0.90

01:41:24.000 But also that technological trend is going to lead to ultimate truth. 0.91

01:41:29.000 And that's a real issue with the government because the government relies on deception and bullshit and bribery and special interest groups. 0.97

01:41:36.000 Absolutely. 0.99

01:41:37.000 Absolutely.

01:41:37.000 You can't keep that up if you have ultimate truth.

01:41:39.000 If you have ultimate access to information and the boundaries between people and that information are all gone, how are you going to run a country?

01:41:46.000 So the seeds of their own destruction are already planted in the mechanisms they're putting in place.

01:41:52.000 Yeah, it's like they can't...

01:41:55.000 Have you ever seen, there's a method of hunting wolves that the Eskimos use where they would take a very sharp knife and put it in the ground and put blood on the knife and a wolf would come along and start to lick the knife because of the blood on the knife.

01:42:08.000 Taste his own blood and continue to lick and bite the blade and bleed to death.

01:42:12.000 I didn't know that.

01:42:13.000 That's extraordinary.

01:42:14.000 That actually happens?

01:42:15.000 Oh, yeah.

01:42:15.000 Yeah, it's a method that the Inuit people devised of hunting wolves.

01:42:20.000 How incredible.

01:42:20.000 Yeah, they would plant these knives in the ice.

01:42:23.000 Yeah, and that's what our governments are doing. 0.99

01:42:24.000 Exactly.

01:42:25.000 They're licking their own blood, and they don't even realize it.

01:42:28.000 A perfect example is...

01:42:31.000 I don't know if you know the story in our country of General Petraeus, who was the head of the CIA, was exposed through...

01:42:38.000 The head of the CIA is supposedly the number one spy in the country, right?

01:42:43.000 That's the head.

01:42:44.000 Well, he was fired because it was exposed that he was having an affair, and that affair was exposed through email exchanges where the FBI examined the CIA. So the FBI is ratting on the CIA and getting rid of the number one CIA guy through email,

01:43:04.000 through a transparency in email exchanges.

01:43:06.000 Absolutely, completely fascinating.

01:43:09.000 Because this is the main government entity that's involved in spying, you know, other than the NSA. And it's just, it all, like, you guys are going to get exposed too.

01:43:20.000 Everyone's going to get exposed.

01:43:21.000 Everybody's getting exposed.

01:43:22.000 And the real problem isn't in affairs.

01:43:26.000 I mean, affairs obviously are an issue, but the real problem is going to be in the structure of power itself.

01:43:32.000 And when the influence is so clearly exposed, the influence, whether it's of special interest groups, of corporations, of lobbyists, whatever it is, when it's so clearly exposed that it cannot be tolerated by rational people.

01:43:46.000 You can't bear it anymore.

01:43:47.000 There's this growing anger.

01:44:02.000 I think it's a great thing because I think there's nothing wrong with government.

01:44:08.000 There's nothing wrong with There's nothing wrong with having a mayor.

01:44:10.000 There's nothing wrong with having a president.

01:44:12.000 There's nothing wrong with police.

01:44:13.000 As long as everyone's honest and rational and ethical.

01:44:17.000 Truth is the key.

01:44:18.000 Exactly.

01:44:19.000 And they'll be forced to do that.

01:44:21.000 It's not like we're advocating that the government needs to be destroyed and anarchy.

01:44:25.000 Nonsense.

01:44:26.000 We want honest government.

01:44:28.000 It's possible.

01:44:29.000 And if it's forced, Then it's forced.

01:44:32.000 But if it's forced because of technology and innovation, instead of some crazy, radical, violent revolution, it's just as powerful.

01:44:40.000 Just as powerful.

01:44:41.000 In fact, more.

01:44:42.000 And undeniable.

01:44:44.000 You can't just build up a wall to keep the internet out.

01:44:46.000 No, no.

01:44:48.000 Definitely not.

01:44:49.000 No, the truth is key.

01:44:51.000 This is what matters.

01:44:52.000 And also those who go into government, there shouldn't be this huge status and power associated with it.

01:45:01.000 It's a mistake.

01:45:03.000 It should be done.

01:45:05.000 The person who doesn't want to go into government, that's the person who should be in government.

01:45:10.000 Yeah, it's unfortunate that that is how it's been for a long time.

01:45:15.000 The people that shouldn't be president are the ones that want to be president.

01:45:19.000 It's been that way for a long time.

01:45:20.000 Give them ayahuasca.

01:45:22.000 I would hope.

01:45:23.000 I would hope also that the trend is moving.

01:45:26.000 I mean, if you go back to these people that we're talking about that existed, these...

01:45:30.000 Pre-humans that existed 1.8 million years ago and the way they conducted each other, conducted their lives, and then look at how we conduct our lives in 2013. It's been a massive, incredible amount of progress in understanding each other, that this trend will continue. 0.97

01:45:44.000 And if we don't get hit by some kind of giant meteor, that we will ultimately reach a level of understanding that will sort of Make this happen, whether or not psychedelics are involved or not.

01:45:57.000 We'll just reach this level.

01:45:59.000 As I say, it's happening.

01:46:00.000 It's happening now.

01:46:02.000 It's interesting that psychedelics are a catalyst in it.

01:46:05.000 They come up again and again in the conversation.

01:46:08.000 And what it boils down to is the recognition, and I've been banging on about this for a long time, the recognition of the adult sovereign individual that we have a right to explore our own consciousness.

01:46:19.000 That is a grotesque invasion of our privacy and our sovereignty over our own bodies that a government would even have the temerity to suggest that it's got a right to punish us for doing that.

01:46:32.000 It's not the issue of the psychedelics themselves, it's the issue of the Right to make sovereign decisions about our own bodies and our own consciousness.

01:46:39.000 And this I see a big awakening all over the world taking place.

01:46:42.000 It's a litmus test.

01:46:43.000 I agree.

01:46:44.000 And it's one of those things we're going to look back on through history and the way we look at the Inquisition, the way we look at burning witches. 0.97

01:46:51.000 We're going to look at the prosecution of people for using psychedelics and it's just as ridiculous. 0.86

01:46:56.000 We're going to look back on it with horror. 0.76

01:46:57.000 Yeah.

01:46:58.000 As a horrific episode when human society made terrible mistakes.

01:47:02.000 Your book, Supernatural, is a fascinating book.

01:47:05.000 I really enjoyed that.

01:47:06.000 And that details the concept of human beings learning from psychedelic experiences and actually it giving birth to a new level of creativity and a new level of culture.

01:47:19.000 Yeah, I believe that there's no doubt that psychedelics have played a huge unrecognized role in the human story.

01:47:26.000 And I want to pay tribute to Terence McKenna for being one of the early people to recognize that.

01:47:30.000 Again, in so many ways, Terence McKenna, just an incredible genius.

01:47:35.000 That stoned-ape theory that he came up with is absolutely key to this. 0.99

01:47:40.000 And again, he was far ahead of his time.

01:47:41.000 Academics followed behind him in this.

01:47:44.000 We need to recognize that these demonized plants have played a huge role in the human story.

01:47:51.000 Just in my recent travels in South America, I was in a place called Caral, 200 kilometers north of Lima.

01:47:58.000 In Peru.

01:48:00.000 Now, back in the 90s, people were saying that there could be no relationship between old world pyramids and new world pyramids because all the pyramids in the new world were much younger.

01:48:10.000 That story is now gone as a result of Caral and another site, Banduria in Peru, which are definitively 2500 to 3000 BC, the same date that is put on the Great Pyramids of Giza.

01:48:22.000 And what's fascinating at Caral is a couple of things.

01:48:25.000 Firstly, there was a big city complex there 5000 years ago and absolutely no evidence of warfare whatsoever.

01:48:32.000 Traditionally, it was believed that the evolution of cities was connected with warfare in some way, that people came into cities to protect themselves from war.

01:48:41.000 No warfare.

01:48:42.000 None whatsoever.

01:48:43.000 These people did not make war.

01:48:44.000 Secondly, they were using psychedelics.

01:48:46.000 Quite clear evidence of this.

01:48:48.000 So, you know, this unexamined part of the human story needs to be brought back into prominence, and we need to realize we owe a lot to the visionary plants, and we're making a mistake to create a society that seeks to cut us off From that source of learning and that source of teaching.

01:49:04.000 It's not an accident in the Amazon that they call these plants teachers.

01:49:08.000 They are teachers.

01:49:09.000 And I think it's also very fascinating that the academic world has, in many ways, especially the older academic world that grew up without the internet, has turned their back on the concept of psychedelics being beneficial to the point where it's laughed at and poo-pooed to the point where McKenna's psychedelic stoned ape theory is,

01:49:29.000 if you don't know the theory, his theory involves the evolution of humans, the doubling of the human brain size directly related to the consumption Of psychedelic mushrooms.

01:49:38.000 It's an incredibly controversial theory, but when I had Dennis McKenna on the podcast, Dennis explained it in a very scientific way that would show how the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms would correlate with the creating of language, with the expansion of consciousness.

01:49:54.000 It's an incredibly intricate and detailed idea that's completely ignored by so many mainstream people, but if they have had any psychedelic experience themselves, they would know what an incredible Incredibly different experience that is than the normal state of consciousness.

01:50:13.000 If you were looking for a culprit, a thing that would change conscious beings or intelligent beings like lower hominids, something that would just rock them out of their current state, what better thing than psychedelic drugs? 0.98

01:50:28.000 What other culprit that you could connect to a doubling of the human brain size?

01:50:32.000 I've seen it attributed to a bunch of different things like consumption of fish, the throwing arm, all these different things.

01:50:40.000 Don't bears eat fish? 1.00

01:50:41.000 Aren't they stupid as fuck? 1.00

01:50:44.000 I guess the omega-3s would help a little, but man, humans are a different thing, man. 1.00

01:50:51.000 Yeah, humans are a very different thing.

01:50:53.000 And yeah, I mean, I have no doubt in my mind it was psychedelics that played that role.

01:50:58.000 And that was one thing that I looked at in Supernatural was this whole issue of the cave art.

01:51:03.000 Because that's where, you know, that's where in the long evolutionary story of the human species, you suddenly find us confronting ourselves.

01:51:10.000 We're looking at this amazing symbolic art, this incredible, incredible works, and these very mysterious, eerie spaces that you go into, like the Cave of Lascaux.

01:51:22.000 And from the nature of the art itself, it's clear it was visionary art.

01:51:26.000 These were people who were working with psychedelics and painting their visions, just as shamans do in the Amazon today.

01:51:31.000 Did you see Werner Herzog's documentary?

01:51:33.000 Yeah, I did.

01:51:34.000 The Cave of Forgotten Dreams?

01:51:36.000 About Chauvet, yeah.

01:51:38.000 Wasn't that like 40,000 plus years ago?

01:51:41.000 33,000 years ago, Cave of Chauvet.

01:51:45.000 Amazing.

01:51:46.000 Amazing place, yeah.

01:51:47.000 Yeah, just so strange to think that these people...

01:51:50.000 It's so hard for us to...

01:51:52.000 When you get to a number, even a thousand years, it's like, I can't see it.

01:51:56.000 It's too far away.

01:51:57.000 It's almost like it's over the curve of the earth.

01:52:00.000 It's like a thousand years is...

01:52:01.000 It's hard for me to wrap my head around what it was like during the Genghis Khan era.

01:52:06.000 Never mind 33,000 years.

01:52:08.000 Yeah, that's where it gets incredibly squirrely.

01:52:10.000 And when you talk to guys like John Anthony West, they start talking about the hieroglyphs that depict a civilization, and not just that, but name the pharaohs of 30-plus thousand years ago.

01:52:22.000 Absolutely.

01:52:24.000 This is something that really annoys me about Egyptology.

01:52:26.000 John Anthony West is just such a brilliant man.

01:52:29.000 He's an old An old friend of mine going way back to the 90s, super, super guy, and he's done so much to bring to light the mysteries and the magic of ancient Egypt.

01:52:38.000 And he's absolutely right, because you go to the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, and you will see a mural carved in high relief on a wall in a corridor, which shows The pharaoh Seti I, showing his young son, Ramesses II, a list of all the pharaohs who've ruled before their time.

01:52:55.000 Now, this is called a king list.

01:52:57.000 And the Egyptologists, they take these king lists and they use them as the basis for the chronology that we are given of ancient Egypt.

01:53:05.000 As long as it fits into their reference frame.

01:53:08.000 So the king list is fine.

01:53:10.000 It's accepted back to 3000 BC, the first dynasty when civilization is supposed to have begun.

01:53:15.000 They then completely ignore the fact that the king list continues long before that.

01:53:20.000 For tens of thousands of years, as much as 36,000 years before that, lists of pharaohs and the time when the gods walked the earth.

01:53:26.000 All of this is in the king lists as well.

01:53:29.000 So the Egyptologists grab the bit that fits their prejudice and ignore the rest and say, well, the ancient Egyptians were just Yeah, and then there's, of course, the water erosion on the Sphinx that John Anthony West and Robert Shock exposed, which is really,

01:53:44.000 in my opinion, one of the most undeniable things that I've heard people deny.

01:53:49.000 Yeah, it's one of the most important pieces of history.

01:53:54.000 Evidence for a lost civilization, and this is John Anthony West and Professor Robert Shock at Boston University, the evidence that the Great Sphinx was reigned upon for thousands and thousands of years.

01:54:06.000 Now, what's interesting, and again, Gobekli Tepe comes into this story, is that Egyptologists at the time said, look, there's no way that the Sphinx could be 12,000 years old.

01:54:17.000 The geological evidence must be wrong Because if there was a culture that was capable of creating a monument on the scale of the Sphinx 12,000 years ago, well, why we would find other monuments that are 12,000 years old, other big monuments, and they regarded that as the killer argument Against the geological weathering of the Sphinx,

01:54:34.000 you know, that shock and West must just be wrong.

01:54:37.000 Well, now we have Gobekli Tepe and it is 12,000 years old and it is on the scale of the Sphinx and it's not even that far from the Sphinx, you know, and suddenly that old argument about the Sphinx, which was dismissed by academia back in the 90s, they're going to have to reconsider it very,

01:54:52.000 very, very carefully.

01:54:53.000 That Charlton Heston hosted documentary on the Sphinx, I believe it was on NBC. It was on NBC. I watched it, I found it incredibly fascinating, but infuriating when you hear that Egyptologist just laughing at Robert Shock saying, where's the evidence of this culture?

01:55:10.000 Show me the pot shed.

01:55:11.000 And what's crazy is, What do you think would be there when you're dealing with something that's that old?

01:55:18.000 I said about a thousand years being over the horizon, I can't see it.

01:55:23.000 Twelve thousand years, you might as well just be speaking another language.

01:55:27.000 I don't understand. 1.00

01:55:28.000 My stupid brain can't wrap my head around how long ago that is. 1.00

01:55:32.000 Terribly, terribly long ago. 1.00

01:55:33.000 And what would be left?

01:55:33.000 If you left a car outside for twelve thousand years, you came back twelve thousand years later, you'd find zero.

01:55:40.000 Nothing.

01:55:40.000 Absolutely nothing.

01:55:41.000 The earth would just reabsorb it. 0.94

01:55:43.000 What would be left would be the stones.

01:55:46.000 And that's what we're left with.

01:55:48.000 I was just in Tiwanaku in Bolivia and there are stone structures there, beautifully cut, unbelievable precision cutting of the stone.

01:55:58.000 They look to me like they had metal parts fitted into them at some point.

01:56:02.000 The metal's gone, the stone is left, and we're left to wonder.

01:56:05.000 What was going on there?

01:56:07.000 So yeah, the passage of time rubs out all memory and all traces, and it's very easy to get the wrong idea about the past.

01:56:15.000 But places like Gobekli Tepe, places like Gulung Padang in Indonesia are going to change this.

01:56:20.000 What year did people start using metal?

01:56:24.000 You know, the ancient Egyptians, they didn't make iron, but they knew meteoritic iron.

01:56:31.000 The only form of iron that was available to the ancient Egyptians was iron that came in in meteorites.

01:56:35.000 And there is the odd knife that's been crafted from meteoritic iron.

01:56:39.000 But the metal that they used, if you go back to 3000 or 2800 BC, was copper.

01:56:45.000 But they had a way of hardening the copper.

01:56:49.000 Some lost technique of making the copper harder that was definitely present.

01:56:54.000 How do we know that?

01:56:55.000 This is the orthodox view because the copper was used to cut stone.

01:56:59.000 You can't cut stone with copper.

01:57:00.000 It's way too soft.

01:57:01.000 So there must have been some method of making the copper harder.

01:57:05.000 This is the argument.

01:57:06.000 But this is the orthodox view.

01:57:08.000 We don't really know what they had.

01:57:11.000 Maybe metal wasn't the only way to cut stone.

01:57:13.000 This is where I maybe Get a little bit mystical, but maybe, you know, because our society has done things a certain way, that we use mechanical advantage, that we use machine tools, that we want to look for that in the past, but maybe there are all sorts of untapped faculties of the human mind that the ancients were working with in one way or another.

01:57:31.000 Certainly when you go to a place like Sacsayhuaman in Peru, outside of Cuzco, and you see these gigantic blocks of stone, 100, 150 tons each, fitted together like jigsaw puzzle, the edges kind of melting into one another, The notion that some sort of heat might have been used to shape these stones begins to make a weird kind of sense.

01:57:50.000 Some sort of heat?

01:57:51.000 Heat, yeah.

01:57:51.000 That's fascinating.

01:57:53.000 There's vitrified stone up there.

01:57:54.000 In my journey in Peru, I spent several days with a local guy called Jesus Gamara, who is now 77 years old, and his father...

01:58:03.000 Alfredo Gamara was working on that site back at the beginning of the 1900s.

01:58:09.000 And they, as a family, have been studying the megaliths of the Andes for a hundred plus years now.

01:58:17.000 And they are actually descended from the Incas.

01:58:20.000 So you would think if anybody had an investment in saying that the Incas made all this, it would be them. 0.98

01:58:25.000 But they say no.

01:58:26.000 Jesus Gamara is adamant.

01:58:27.000 The Incas have been wrongly handed The majority of the architecture in the Andes by archaeology, the Incas only did a fraction of it and most of what they did was pretty poor quality.

01:58:37.000 The great stuff was done by earlier civilizations and he took me and he showed me vitrified stone which has been subjected to fantastic heat and melted and shines in a way that's really stunning and striking and convincing when you see it.

01:58:51.000 That some kind of technology that is not the technology that we use today was being employed to put these stones into place.

01:58:58.000 And archaeologists have dismissed such ideas for a very long time, but I'm not sure how much longer they're going to be able to dismiss them.

01:59:03.000 I don't know how they can dismiss those enormous stones that have strange shapes that are fitting perfectly into each other.

01:59:09.000 Like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

01:59:11.000 It was like giants a hundred feet tall.

01:59:14.000 Decided to make a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

01:59:16.000 Yeah, tell Jamie what those images would be to pull those up.

01:59:18.000 What would they be?

01:59:20.000 I may be able to show you an image.

01:59:21.000 But have him pull it up.

01:59:22.000 Okay, well, Sacsayhuaman.

01:59:24.000 S-A-C-S-A-Y-H-U-A-M-A-N. Sacsayhuaman. 1.00

01:59:30.000 And it's also, there's one stone that Giorgio Succolo showed me where it was carved out of this piece of stone.

01:59:38.000 There's this slab carved through the back of it and removed.

01:59:44.000 And they have no idea how they got through this stone.

01:59:49.000 Yeah, look at that image.

01:59:50.000 Oh my god.

01:59:52.000 That's me.

01:59:53.000 Yeah, pull it towards you this way.

01:59:56.000 This way?

01:59:56.000 No, no, no, no, no, no.

01:59:58.000 Just flatten, yeah.

01:59:59.000 There you go.

01:59:59.000 That's insane.

02:00:00.000 That's you standing next to that stone.

02:00:02.000 That's me standing next to that stone.

02:00:04.000 And look at the way those stones are fitted together, you know?

02:00:07.000 I mean, that is a really monstrous thing to do.

02:00:09.000 It's just a gigantic work of art that they've created.

02:00:13.000 And it goes on for hundreds of feet.

02:00:15.000 There's not just that section.

02:00:17.000 It goes on forever in these huge walls.

02:00:20.000 And it does feel like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

02:00:23.000 And so beautiful, too.

02:00:25.000 I mean, the way they did it, they didn't make everything square and level.

02:00:30.000 They just decided to use this sort of method of turning these stones into these puzzle pieces.

02:00:37.000 When you go look at it up close and you realize that you can't get a sheet of paper in the gaps between the joints, you realize that you are looking at some sort of technology that we don't get.

02:00:47.000 There was some way that these people were able to do this and make it incredibly difficult for themselves if it was done in any modern way.

02:00:55.000 What's the mainstream explanation for that?

02:00:58.000 Oh, hours and hours of patient labor by tens of thousands of people grinding away at the stones and making them all fit.

02:01:05.000 Consider the planning, you know, to make that happen.

02:01:07.000 Let me show the whole wall.

02:01:09.000 I've got a picture of the whole wall.

02:01:10.000 We could pull it up if you just tell us what patient it is on your website.

02:01:13.000 Oh, my God.

02:01:15.000 When I say the whole wall, I mean that's just a section of the whole wall.

02:01:19.000 That wall runs for hundreds of feet in all directions.

02:01:23.000 The planning that's involved in making no single block of stone is the same size as another.

02:01:27.000 They're all different sizes.

02:01:29.000 They're all tongue and groove into each other in this incredible way.

02:01:32.000 And it really feels like they were melted.

02:01:34.000 They were kind of softened.

02:01:36.000 That's what Jesus Camara says.

02:01:37.000 He says these stones were softened by some technique that we don't understand.

02:01:41.000 He thinks heat was involved.

02:01:43.000 They were softened and in a soft state they were fitted together and then they solidified.

02:01:46.000 Is that possible that they figured out some way to make a blow torch or something?

02:01:51.000 I think it's possible, yeah.

02:01:52.000 But even then, how do you push them into place?

02:01:54.000 Not a blow torch necessarily, but something goes on that defies explanation there.

02:01:59.000 And I don't think we need aliens to explain it.

02:02:02.000 I think it's human work.

02:02:03.000 I think it's human workmanship, but it's at a level and at a standard that we do not fully understand.

02:02:08.000 Yeah, that alien thing gets real weird, you know?

02:02:13.000 Well, you know, I've had the privilege of traveling around this planet for the last 25 years looking at ancient sites.

02:02:22.000 Look at that.

02:02:23.000 Oh, my God.

02:02:24.000 There you go.

02:02:24.000 It's amazing.

02:02:25.000 That's Sacsayhuaman.

02:02:27.000 How big are the largest stones?

02:02:29.000 About 20 feet high, 150 to 200 tons in weight, 6 to 8 feet thick, just monstrous.

02:02:38.000 So 200 tons is 400,000 pounds?

02:02:41.000 Is that what it is?

02:02:42.000 200 tons is...

02:02:43.000 So I think of it in kilos.

02:02:45.000 A ton is 1,000 kilograms.

02:02:48.000 Oh, you're a kilo man.

02:02:49.000 Yeah, I'm a kilo man.

02:02:50.000 I don't do it in pounds anymore.

02:02:52.000 At least you don't do it in stone.

02:02:55.000 When we go to England and we do UFC weigh-ins, we have to say like 10 stone.

02:03:00.000 We have to do it in stone.

02:03:01.000 Let me think there were 14 pounds in a stone.

02:03:04.000 Okay, so 10 stone means you're a 140 pound guy.

02:03:08.000 It's weird.

02:03:09.000 It's really complicated.

02:03:10.000 Yeah, they're sexy.

02:03:12.000 Now the point, looking up at the top left of the screen there, there's some inferior work on top of the better work.

02:03:17.000 And what Jesus Guimara is saying in the inferior work was the work of the Incas, but the other stuff is much older.

02:03:21.000 So the smaller rocks that were easily manipulated.

02:03:25.000 They were copying the older style and respecting it and overbuilding and building around it.

02:03:30.000 But they were honoring an earlier work of construction.

02:03:33.000 And the conventional dating of this is...

02:03:36.000 Very recent.

02:03:37.000 The Incas were wiped out by the Spanish 1530, 1540. They were destroyed as an empire.

02:03:45.000 They'd only existed according to history for 150 years before that, 200 years before that at the outside.

02:03:51.000 And all of this work, this incredible megalithic work that's all over the Andes Mountains, you just can't move for bumping into it, all of it is supposed to have been built in that 200-year period by the Incas because archaeology just can't bear the idea that there might have been some earlier culture.

02:04:05.000 Why date it then?

02:04:06.000 It seems like if it's so confusing, there's so many open-ended questions where when you see these enormous pieces, when you see them fitted together, when you don't have an explanation of how they did it, you're not exactly sure who did it because the history gets really murky when you get that far back.

02:04:22.000 Why date it?

02:04:23.000 I agree.

02:04:23.000 Why date it?

02:04:24.000 I don't understand why they have to do that.

02:04:26.000 It seems to me that archaeology comes to history with a pre-existing reference frame and makes everything fit into it.

02:04:33.000 Makes everything fit into it.

02:04:34.000 And that's been the mistake of science down the ages.

02:04:37.000 There was a long period.

02:04:38.000 A very good example of this is the notion that the sun revolved around the earth.

02:04:44.000 That was based on a pre-existing reference.

02:04:46.000 It seemed to make sense.

02:04:47.000 Get up in the morning, look at the sun, it rises, goes through the sky.

02:04:50.000 But it was complete nonsense.

02:04:52.000 It's the earth that's going around the sun.

02:04:53.000 You have to change the reference frame.

02:04:55.000 In order to see what's really going on.

02:04:58.000 And I think that's the problem with history and archaeology.

02:05:00.000 What impact, if any, has this Gobekli Tepe discovery changed archaeologists' view of backdating things?

02:05:10.000 As I mentioned, I liked Klaus Schmidt when I met him, the archaeologist who's working on Gobekli Tepe.

02:05:16.000 I thought he was charming and enthusiastic, and I enjoyed his energy.

02:05:20.000 When I asked him about, when I said, so what does it feel like to be the man who discovered the site that's rewriting history?

02:05:28.000 And he said, no, it's not rewriting history.

02:05:31.000 It's adding a new chapter to existing history.

02:05:34.000 He still wants to fit it into that reference frame somehow that we have to, okay, we have to completely rethink our ideas about the upper Paleolithic, but somehow desperately...

02:05:42.000 We must look at this site in a way that's not going to rock the boat too much.

02:05:45.000 And I was sad to hear that.

02:05:46.000 I think especially when he himself admits that at least 20 times as much, if not 50 times as much, is still under the ground awaiting to be excavated.

02:05:55.000 I think a little bit of provisional thinking is needed before we decide.

02:05:59.000 Do you just attribute that to him being a professional academic?

02:06:02.000 Yes.

02:06:02.000 I think that professional academia, particularly in the realm of archaeology, It encourages those who are working in the field to think in terms of the existing paradigm, not to think in terms of challenging the paradigm, because it's dangerous.

02:06:17.000 If you challenge the paradigm, you're going to be ridiculed by your colleagues and regarded as completely lunatic and attacked and insulted.

02:06:26.000 So it's better not to challenge the paradigm.

02:06:28.000 But what a fascinating area of research to not challenge the paradigm, an area where you have so little information about what could have possibly happened.

02:06:37.000 When you get back to 5,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 7,000 years ago, and you're trying to piece these puzzles together, to pretend that you have the entire timeline It seems a little silly.

02:06:48.000 It's pretty crazy.

02:06:49.000 It seems so...

02:06:50.000 I mean, it's one thing if you're trying to pretend that you have a timeline when you're dealing with something...

02:06:55.000 Or, excuse me, pretend you have all the information when you're dealing with something like mathematics.

02:06:58.000 Yeah.

02:06:59.000 Or when you're dealing with something like very clear manuscripts.

02:07:04.000 You know, like, oh, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls.

02:07:07.000 Very clearly X amount of years old.

02:07:10.000 This is the thing.

02:07:10.000 With history, where you have written documents that you can draw upon, where you have those written documents, you can be reasonably certain about what's going on.

02:07:18.000 The further back we go, we don't have the written documents.

02:07:21.000 Beyond 5,000 years, we have no written documents.

02:07:24.000 And to draw fixed and firm conclusions about what happened before 5,000 years ago on the basis of a few things dug out of the ground, it's not good enough.

02:07:32.000 It's a mistake that's being made.

02:07:34.000 And that, I believe, is going to change.

02:07:36.000 It's going to be painful.

02:07:37.000 It's going to be slow.

02:07:37.000 It was painful to change the Ptolemaic system to the Copernican system, but it will happen.

02:07:42.000 The system will change.

02:07:44.000 And the backdating of the Sphinx, has there been any progress on that now because of Gobekli Tepe? 0.99

02:07:51.000 Because what Robert Schoch did in exposing the erosion, the water erosion, and we briefly touched on this before, but I've seen people dispute it, and boy, it seems so forced and labored.

02:08:05.000 They're disputing of it.

02:08:07.000 Exactly.

02:08:07.000 I have no doubt that Robert Shock is right.

02:08:09.000 Robert Shock and John Anthony West, they're right about the Sphinx.

02:08:13.000 And they have been attacked in all kinds of ways and all kinds of elaborate contorted explanations have been given to explain away that kind of weathering.

02:08:21.000 But the fact is they remain to be right.

02:08:23.000 And now we have Gobekli Tepe.

02:08:25.000 Now on the other side of the world we have Gunung Padang.

02:08:28.000 We have sites that are 12,000 plus years old, indisputably so.

02:08:33.000 I think it sooner or later will cause a reconsideration of the Sphinx.

02:08:36.000 I hope so.

02:08:37.000 And that's something that I also intend to focus on.

02:08:40.000 Well, I think it has to.

02:08:41.000 As soon as Jamie gets back from the bathroom, we'll show some of the images of the Sphinx enclosure that led Robert Schock, who is a geologist, to very clearly proclaim that what you're dealing with is thousands of years of water erosion.

02:08:57.000 Thousands of years of water erosion.

02:08:58.000 The smoothness of it, the curves, the fact that there's all these fissures that indicate water running down.

02:09:06.000 I honestly think Robert Shock and John West are going to be seen in future generations as the Copernicus of their time.

02:09:12.000 That they saw what nobody else saw.

02:09:14.000 And they had the courage to put the information out there.

02:09:18.000 And they were attacked for it.

02:09:20.000 People don't get burnt at the stake these days for proposing alternative ideas, but in a kind of way, you know, we do.

02:09:27.000 There's the vicious nature of the attacks on people who propose an alternative view of history, but I think in our lifetimes we will see this change.

02:09:35.000 And if folks haven't seen or haven't heard me talk about John Anthony West's amazing documentary series on Egypt, it's called Magical Egypt, and I can't recommend it enough.

02:09:46.000 It is absolutely fascinating.

02:09:48.000 So in-depth.

02:09:50.000 I believe, is it six or seven DVDs?

02:09:52.000 Something like that.

02:09:53.000 Big collection of DVDs.

02:09:55.000 It's a massive, massive amount of work.

02:09:57.000 And John is a man who's devoted his whole life to...

02:10:00.000 Understanding, an alternative understanding of Egypt done with great wisdom and great care.

02:10:06.000 Yeah, it's a really, really incredible series that I've watched many, many times over and over again and tried to absorb as much of it as I can, but it's so staggering.

02:10:18.000 And he also showed very clear that there's some different styles of techniques of building and that these older techniques that you find or different techniques are We're all on a lower level of the soil.

02:10:32.000 It's exactly like it is in the Peruvian Andes and Bolivia.

02:10:38.000 What has happened, I think, is that archaeology has taken the work of the latest culture to work on the site and handed the whole site over to it. 0.73

02:10:47.000 Actually, Giza is a very complicated site.

02:10:49.000 You have the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid.

02:10:52.000 Why do we have to believe that that is from the same date as the pyramid itself?

02:10:56.000 You have the so-called mortuary temples and valley temples, these gigantic megalithic structures.

02:11:01.000 The valley temple beside the Sphinx is actually made of blocks of limestone that were cut out from around the Sphinx to create the body of the Sphinx.

02:11:10.000 So if the Sphinx is 12,000 years old, and I honestly think it is, then the valley temples are 12,000 years old as well.

02:11:16.000 What we have are very complex, multi-layered sites where there's a very ancient, megalithic layer of architecture, and the later culture comes along, perhaps venerates that, perhaps overbuilds around it, and attempts to copy it in some ways.

02:11:30.000 And the mistake has been, both in the Andes and in Egypt, that the later culture has been attributed with all the work.

02:11:36.000 We need a more sophisticated, more in-depth exploration of this.

02:11:40.000 And I think Gobekli Tepe is going to force us to do that.

02:11:42.000 Jamie, if you could pull up some of the images that Robert Schock created of the water erosion as opposed to...

02:11:50.000 I mean, you showed a little animated or illustrated image of it before.

02:11:55.000 But it's pretty fascinating stuff.

02:11:56.000 And that seems to me to be the one smoking gun in Egypt that sort of points to...

02:12:01.000 It's a smoking gun, for sure.

02:12:03.000 It's a smoking gun which the mainstream academia has tried to...

02:12:07.000 Ignore the smoke, but the smoke is there.

02:12:10.000 And Gobekli Tepe, Gunung Padang, other sites are going to force them to reconsider that.

02:12:15.000 What are they going to do if they dig up something that's 30,000 years old?

02:12:19.000 I mean...

02:12:19.000 Well, I hope that they're not going to hide it and pretend...

02:12:23.000 Do you think they would?

02:12:23.000 Well, I know of cases where it's happened.

02:12:25.000 I know it happened in Malta.

02:12:26.000 What happened in Malta?

02:12:27.000 In the Hypogeum, which is an underground structure in Malta.

02:12:31.000 Amazing underground.

02:12:33.000 This should be on everybody's bucket list, by the way, the Hypogeum in Malta.

02:12:36.000 It is an incredible place.

02:12:38.000 It's like a huge temple complex cut out underground.

02:12:43.000 And there are traces of red ochre paint on the walls.

02:12:47.000 They look much more like the caves, the painted caves, than they look like stuff from the Neolithic.

02:12:52.000 And there was at one time a figure of a hybrid creature, a half bison, half bull.

02:12:59.000 Such a figure would be normal in the painted caves from 30,000 years ago, but doesn't fit in with the idea that the Hypogeum belongs to 5,000 years ago.

02:13:10.000 And this was solved by a certain gentleman, who shall remain nameless, who had the bison bull scrubbed off the walls of the Hypogeum in Malta.

02:13:20.000 It was literally scrubbed off.

02:13:22.000 I reported this at some length in my book, Underworld.

02:13:26.000 Who do they think scrubbed it? 0.80

02:13:28.000 Well, we know who scrubbed it.

02:13:30.000 It was the former director of museums in Malta, back in the 60s.

02:13:35.000 He scrubbed it off the walls.

02:13:37.000 Wow.

02:13:38.000 I took the National Museums of Malta to task over this when I was back there making a documentary with Channel 4. We put in a formal document to them asking them to answer this charge, and they refused to answer it.

02:13:49.000 They would not comment upon it at all.

02:13:52.000 Wow.

02:13:53.000 So yeah, I mean, archaeologists do actually sometimes do incredibly dishonest things to maintain the view of history.

02:13:58.000 That's so sad.

02:14:00.000 I mean, just think about the whole cycle of thinking that goes from being a young person, wanting to explore history, wanting to become an archaeologist, getting involved in archaeology, getting involved in academia, and then...

02:14:13.000 Destroying evidence that's contrary to what you've been taught or are teaching.

02:14:17.000 Yeah, it's the opposite of science.

02:14:20.000 It's so scary that human nature, even in a scientific work sometimes, finds its way to rear its ugly head.

02:14:29.000 The nasty aspects of human nature can even find their way into archaeology.

02:14:34.000 Most unfortunate, yeah.

02:14:35.000 That they can't in certain sciences because it's so cut and dry.

02:14:39.000 Mathematics and physics and you know...

02:14:41.000 But in archaeology so much is based on interpretation.

02:14:43.000 An interpretation of very limited facts actually.

02:14:47.000 So what's next for you?

02:14:49.000 What do you do from here?

02:14:50.000 Well, I am writing, at the moment I'm researching and writing a sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods.

02:14:57.000 Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995. The reason I'm doing a sequel is because of the new evidence.

02:15:03.000 We've talked about Gunung Padang in Indonesia.

02:15:05.000 We've talked about Gobekli Tepe.

02:15:07.000 We've talked about the comet.

02:15:08.000 The comet for me is the cataclysmic smoking gun that explains how we lost a whole civilization.

02:15:14.000 And a whole lot of material like this.

02:15:16.000 I'm not going to write an update of Fingerprints of the Gods.

02:15:18.000 I'm going to write a completely new book.

02:15:20.000 And that book, I'm in the process of researching.

02:15:22.000 That's why I'm on these travels at the moment.

02:15:24.000 That's why I'm going to Indonesia at the beginning of December.

02:15:26.000 That book will be published at the end, in the fall of 2015. I'm due to deliver it to the publishers in December 2014, and it'll be published in the fall of 2015. And I see this as...

02:15:42.000 In a way, a kind of summation of my life's work on this whole issue of a lost civilization.

02:15:48.000 And I feel very committed to doing it.

02:15:50.000 But honestly, my heart these days is in writing novels.

02:15:53.000 Really?

02:15:53.000 I love writing novels, yeah.

02:15:55.000 So it took a long time for you to break away from...

02:15:58.000 You were originally a journalist, then went from journalism to writing about ancient history and alternative view of ancient history.

02:16:05.000 But it was a psychedelic experience that led you to want to write...

02:16:08.000 It was a psychedelic experience with ayahuasca.

02:16:10.000 Back in 2007, that set me on the track to write my first novel, which is Entangled, which is a story of two young women, one living 24,000 years ago in the Stone Age, one living in modern Los Angeles, whose destinies are entangled.

02:16:25.000 That time is not what it seems, that it's a kind of spiral or a cat's cradle of intercrossing lines rather than an arrow.

02:16:32.000 And they're brought together by a benign supernatural force, who I call the Blue Angel, to do battle with a demon who...

02:16:40.000 Travels through time and then since then I've written War God which is a novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

02:16:48.000 Did get a British publisher for that book.

02:16:50.000 That book's been published in Britain and it did okay.

02:16:53.000 It did well enough at any rate for the publishers in Britain to commission volumes two and three because it's a series.

02:16:59.000 I couldn't get any American publisher to take that book on but because publishing sees people in terms of brands and I am branded as a non-fiction author And how dare I write fiction as well?

02:17:11.000 How dare you?

02:17:11.000 How dare I do that?

02:17:13.000 You know, life is short.

02:17:15.000 I want to try many, many things.

02:17:17.000 And so what I've done is published it, pretty much effectively self-published it in America through Amazon.

02:17:24.000 And the book is available on Amazon.com.

02:17:28.000 That's what it looks like, by the way.

02:17:29.000 The US edition.

02:17:31.000 People can also order it from bookshops, but it's easier to get it from Amazon.com.

02:17:39.000 What is that on the cover?

02:17:41.000 Well, that's actually derived from an Aztec image of a skull found on a ball court because they played this terrible game of And War God is the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

02:17:58.000 And if I could say to anybody who's listening, special offer for the next 10 days only, go to my website, which is grahamhancock.com, and click on the War God section, and you will find links to get it on amazon.com, either as an e-book or as a printed book.

02:18:16.000 And what I will do is write to me at the address that's on my website there, which is wargoddedications at gmail.com.

02:18:24.000 Write to me.

02:18:24.000 I will write back to you and I will send you a signed, dedicated book plate.

02:18:29.000 That's essentially a label.

02:18:30.000 You buy the book from Amazon in the normal way.

02:18:32.000 But you will receive through the post from me, if you write to me and give me your postal address, you will receive through the post from me a signed dedicated book plate to place inside it.

02:18:42.000 Wow, that's awesome.

02:18:43.000 But that's ten days that that offer is available.

02:18:47.000 That's a beautiful image.

02:18:48.000 That's it.

02:18:48.000 That's War God dedications there.

02:18:51.000 Wargoddedications at gmail.com.

02:18:52.000 That's a beautiful image, that image of the Aztec skull.

02:18:56.000 I had read something somewhere where scholars were contemplating whether or not they were incorrect about the sacrifice, and they were saying that there may be a possibility that they played a game where they sacrificed the winning team.

02:19:11.000 Human sacrifice was conducted on an industrial scale in the Aztec Empire.

02:19:16.000 I've investigated this very, very thoroughly.

02:19:18.000 This novel is a novel.

02:19:19.000 It's a work of fiction, but I've thoroughly grounded it in the historical facts.

02:19:24.000 And this was a tough history to investigate.

02:19:27.000 I mean, the Aztecs were truly a terrifying culture.

02:19:31.000 The Spanish, who turned up with 490 men in 11 ships on the Gulf of Mexico in 1519, were, if anything, an even more terrifying culture. 1.00

02:19:40.000 These are two martial cultures who are brought together in this horrendous conflict.

02:19:46.000 But, you know, it was a different time.

02:19:49.000 It was a different world then in 1519. And I've tried to tell the story through the eyes of ordinary human beings.

02:19:56.000 My main heroine is a true historical figure, a woman called Malinal, who became the mistress and the interpreter of Cortez.

02:20:04.000 And when she enters history, she's given to Cortez as a surrender gift by the Maya. 0.95

02:20:10.000 When she enters history, it's already clear that she has a grudge against Moctezuma. 0.90

02:20:15.000 The Aztec Emperor, and that she is going to use Cortes as her instrument to bring him down. 0.94

02:20:20.000 And I was just interested in her quest for revenge against the Aztec Emperor, and also to have a woman who's a hero in a story rather than just a man.

02:20:29.000 What is the origin of this horrific level of human sacrifice?

02:20:36.000 What started it all with the Aztecs?

02:20:39.000 Well, again, that's a reason why I've written War God as a novel, because for the Aztecs, they believed that they were in touch with a supernatural entity that they called Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird.

02:20:51.000 I use his name in the English translation in the book, Hummingbird.

02:20:54.000 Who is their god of war.

02:20:56.000 He's their war god.

02:20:57.000 And this is an area where we have to recognize that there is a dark side to psychedelics.

02:21:03.000 I am a big fan of psychedelics, and I do think that psychedelics have a hugely important role to play.

02:21:08.000 But the Aztecs were using psilocybin mushrooms in their human sacrifice rituals.

02:21:12.000 And Moctezuma was encountering this demonic entity, hummingbird, In psilocybin trances and was constantly being given incredibly bad, even wicked advice by him.

02:21:25.000 So I'm playing with the idea of dark spiritual forces at work behind human history, manipulating Moctezuma, manipulating Cortez and plunging mankind into this sea of cruelty and misery.

02:21:41.000 And, you know, what redeems the story for me and does it at all times is that the human spirit still shines through, even in the darkest times.

02:21:49.000 There is courage, there is decency, there is love.

02:21:52.000 People struggle to show the best in themselves and to deliver the best in themselves.

02:21:58.000 So I've tried to show both sides.

02:22:00.000 This book is about the battle of good against evil. 0.96

02:22:02.000 And it's not that the Spanish are good and the Aztecs are evil, because the Spanish were wicked, wicked, wicked as well. 0.99

02:22:08.000 And they did terrible things. 0.99

02:22:09.000 They fed people to dogs.

02:22:11.000 They burnt people at the stake.

02:22:13.000 What is actually burning somebody at the stake if not a form of human sacrifice?

02:22:17.000 That's what the Spanish would do to their god. 1.00

02:22:19.000 They were sacrificing people to their god.

02:22:21.000 So no different from the Aztecs in that respect.

02:22:23.000 The level of sacrifice was so insane. 0.97

02:22:26.000 I tried to explain it to a friend of mine and he literally told me I was bullshitting.

02:22:30.000 I told him that 80,000 people were sacrificed.

02:22:33.000 80,000 were sacrificed.

02:22:35.000 Over a period of like four days?

02:22:37.000 Four days with teams of killers, 50 teams of killers working at the top of the Great Pyramid to process people within a minute or two.

02:22:46.000 Process them.

02:22:46.000 Think of it.

02:22:47.000 That's how it's done.

02:22:48.000 It was done on an industrial scale.

02:22:50.000 Cues of victims stretching a mile in every direction, marching up the pyramid and having their hearts cut out.

02:22:57.000 And all of this in honor of a demonic A demonic entity, which the Aztecs passionately believed in.

02:23:04.000 They believed that he needed to be fed human hearts and blood.

02:23:08.000 What did they call him?

02:23:09.000 They called him Huitzilopochtli, which means hummingbird at the left hand of the sun.

02:23:13.000 He's the war god after whom this novel is named.

02:23:18.000 And the way I look at it, the same demonic entity is manipulating both Moctezuma and Cortez.

02:23:26.000 He appears to Cortez in dreams and takes on the disguise of St. Peter.

02:23:29.000 He appears to Moctezuma as the war god, but it's the same demon that's playing with men. 0.89

02:23:34.000 And that's one reason why I wrote this as a novel, because you can't get into this stuff in a nonfiction book.

02:23:38.000 But it's very real.

02:23:39.000 It's a very real part of human history.

02:23:41.000 And the whole shape of the world we live in today, the terrible genocide that happened in North America, the destruction of the North American Indians, the conquest of Peru, the whole relationship of the European powers to Africa, for example, all of this was based on what happened in those years between 1519 and 1521 when the Spanish conquest of Mexico unfolded.

02:24:04.000 And I think we were led onto a dark track.

02:24:08.000 Imagine how it could have been if those two cultures, if the Spanish and the Aztecs, had met one another in a spirit of mutual learning.

02:24:15.000 How much there was to exchange, how much each side of the Atlantic could have learned from the other.

02:24:20.000 Instead, it becomes this kind of conflagration of blood.

02:24:25.000 But it's difficult to place ourselves in the mindset of the people of that time.

02:24:31.000 It is difficult for us to do that today.

02:24:33.000 And I have to say, when you look at the Spaniards, I mean 490 men turn up on the coast of Mexico in 11 ships and they are going to take on this empire that can put 200,000 men into the field that will, if they catch you, will march you up the pyramid and cut your heart out. 0.78

02:24:49.000 And many Spaniards were sacrificed in sight of their colleagues.

02:24:54.000 It was an extraordinary time.

02:24:56.000 It was an extraordinary event.

02:24:57.000 And men of those times were different from men of today, I believe.

02:25:01.000 What is the mainstream explanation for human sacrifice?

02:25:06.000 What do they believe started off?

02:25:09.000 Well, that it's a feeding of psychic energy to supernatural beings.

02:25:14.000 That's what human sacrifice is about.

02:25:16.000 That you take the psychic energy Of the individual you're going to kill. 1.00

02:25:21.000 You kill them. 1.00

02:25:22.000 Take their psychic energy and feed it to these vampire-like creatures that are lying in the beyond, that thrive on human misery and pain. 1.00

02:25:31.000 And, you know, who are we to say that such things do not exist?

02:25:35.000 We don't understand the nature of reality.

02:25:37.000 And if you look at human culture today, I mean, look at wars.

02:25:40.000 Look at wars that are happening in the world today.

02:25:42.000 Look at the tens of thousands of people that are being slaughtered in warfare today.

02:25:45.000 That's also a kind of human sacrifice.

02:25:47.000 I think we have to consider the possibility that some kind of demonic force is thriving on this and being nourished by it.

02:25:56.000 And that's one of the things that we need to do as human beings is to separate ourselves from that and say, no, we will not do that.

02:26:02.000 We will not feed that energy.

02:26:04.000 We will not...

02:26:06.000 Offer lives to the beyond.

02:26:08.000 I don't go with you on that, but I do in a way.

02:26:11.000 I don't believe in demons, but I think it's undeniable that there have been massive groups of people that have participated in horrific things.

02:26:22.000 So what is that, if not demonic?

02:26:25.000 I believe it's demonic.

02:26:27.000 I can't prove it.

02:26:28.000 I can't prove that that's the case.

02:26:30.000 I just think we should stay open to that possibility.

02:26:32.000 That the nature of reality is so complex and so multi-layered that there may be much more going on than we think.

02:26:39.000 And that if we just confine our explanations of things to purely economic and material terms, we may be missing part of the picture.

02:26:46.000 And that when the ancients spoke of angels and demons, to use words, I'm not saying that I believe in angels or demons as such, but when they spoke of light and dark forces, negative and positive forces playing on the human race, maybe they had something going.

02:27:01.000 Maybe there was something to that.

02:27:02.000 Well, I always consider the fact that human beings have this incredibly broad spectrum of possibility, incredibly broad spectrum of behavior, of personality, of circumstance, of genetics, and that there's this yin and yang of life.

02:27:15.000 There's this pull and push of life and that the extreme ends of it are good and evil.

02:27:20.000 Good and evil, yeah. 0.99

02:27:21.000 And it may not be a demon, but it might as well be a demon if you're marching 80,000 people up the side of a pyramid and cutting their heart out with a fucking stone tool. 1.00

02:27:30.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:27:30.000 That's demonic. 1.00

02:27:31.000 It might as well be.

02:27:32.000 Might as well be a demon.

02:27:33.000 Yeah.

02:27:49.000 That we have lessons to learn from duality.

02:27:52.000 Maybe duality is not the whole thing.

02:27:53.000 Maybe there is an overarching unity and oneness in all things.

02:27:57.000 But right now, here in this incarnation on planet Earth, we have to learn from duality.

02:28:02.000 And the thing about duality is human beings can choose.

02:28:05.000 We can always choose, even in the most straightened and difficult circumstances.

02:28:08.000 We can always choose for the light rather than the darkness.

02:28:12.000 We can always choose for good rather than evil.

02:28:13.000 We don't have to take that act.

02:28:15.000 That causes pain and suffering to another human being.

02:28:18.000 We never have to do that.

02:28:19.000 We can always choose not to.

02:28:21.000 The alarming thing is that people often will choose the act that causes pain and suffering to others.

02:28:27.000 And we are defined by our choices, and this is where we need to grow up as a species and start to choose the light.

02:28:33.000 Do you think that this broad spectrum of possibilities, whether it's possibilities of thinking or behavior, it's almost there to educate us as to the destructive possibilities, that this huge spectrum that we have, Is so open-ended and so massive as to indicate that there are these extreme variables and these extreme variables can push us by understanding of the consequences into a more positive way.

02:29:00.000 Yeah, I believe so.

02:29:01.000 And if they didn't exist, if these horrific ideas of war and of human sacrifice didn't exist, maybe we wouldn't appreciate love as much.

02:29:08.000 We would not appreciate love as much and we would have nothing to learn.

02:29:11.000 From this strange and troublesome and mysterious and beautiful thing called being a human being.

02:29:17.000 We have to learn here.

02:29:18.000 We learn here because there are those two different poles at the extreme end of which are good and evil with all kinds of gradations in between.

02:29:26.000 That is what teaches us.

02:29:28.000 And it's the choices we make day by day as we go through life that define us, ultimately.

02:29:33.000 Now, whether there is any transcendental consequence to that, something beyond this life, some reckoning to take place, as the ancient Egyptians certainly believed there was, I don't know for sure.

02:29:45.000 But I do know that a lifetime of making Decisions that cause pain and suffering to others and that detract from their sovereignty is a life that ultimately the person who's lived that life is diminished by it.

02:30:01.000 I want to know how they got 80,000 people to get in a line to get their hearts cut out.

02:30:05.000 Terror.

02:30:07.000 Total terror.

02:30:08.000 They were the dominant military force in the Valley of Mexico.

02:30:12.000 They were very dominant.

02:30:13.000 The Aztecs had a huge secret police force.

02:30:15.000 They spied on one another.

02:30:16.000 They spied on their neighbors.

02:30:18.000 They would carry out human sacrifices as object lessons to their neighbors.

02:30:22.000 You will pay us tribute or this is what we will do to you.

02:30:24.000 They skinned people alive. 1.00

02:30:26.000 They were truly, truly awful.

02:30:29.000 And it was their awfulness. 0.80

02:30:30.000 It was the horrific nature of Aztec behavior. 0.98

02:30:33.000 That led them to lose that battle against Cortez because their numbers are crazy.

02:30:40.000 Cortez 490 men, Aztecs 200,000.

02:30:44.000 You think it's pretty obvious who's going to win.

02:30:46.000 How does Cortez win?

02:30:47.000 He wins because the Aztecs neighbors hate the Aztecs.

02:30:50.000 They have lived in terror of them for 200 years.

02:30:53.000 And they see him as a liberator.

02:30:55.000 They see him as somebody who's going to lift this yoke off their shoulders and allow them to be free.

02:31:01.000 Of course, they didn't know that he was just going to make things worse.

02:31:05.000 But in the time, in the nature of things at the time, that was how it was felt.

02:31:09.000 I mean, it's a fact that there were 30 million people in Mexico in 1519. And 50 years later, there were just 1 million.

02:31:16.000 The Spanish were responsible for a genocide of 29 million people. 0.99

02:31:20.000 So they didn't make things better, but it looked like they'd make things better.

02:31:23.000 And they came as a kind of karma.

02:31:25.000 And here's the weird thing.

02:31:26.000 Again, I'll show this cover because beside it is the feathered serpent in this photograph.

02:31:34.000 And that's Quetzalcoatl.

02:31:36.000 The feathered serpent who is there.

02:31:38.000 And this is another reason why Cortes won.

02:31:41.000 Because he was able to play on the prophecy that a god of peace would return.

02:31:46.000 And that that god would overthrow a wicked king.

02:31:49.000 And he was the feathered serpent.

02:31:51.000 He was Quetzalcoatl. 1.00

02:31:52.000 And it was predicted that he would return in the Aztec year one reed.

02:31:57.000 And it so happened that Cortez landed on the coast of Mexico with his tiny army in the Aztec year one reed.

02:32:03.000 1519 was the year one reed.

02:32:05.000 So the return of Quetzalcoatl was a key part of Cortez's victory.

02:32:09.000 And my heroine, Malinal, is the person who tells Cortez about this.

02:32:13.000 She's the one who...

02:32:15.000 It shows him how to exploit this and how to play Moctezuma's superstition and fear to represent himself as this god. 0.96

02:32:22.000 But of course, Cortes is not a god of peace.

02:32:24.000 He's a god of war.

02:32:26.000 It's quite a coincidence.

02:32:28.000 It was an amazing, amazing coincidence.

02:32:30.000 Is that what it is or is it a prophecy?

02:32:46.000 What were the Spanish ships with their sails, but ships that moved by themselves without paddles.

02:32:50.000 They would be dressed in shining metal armor and they would deploy weapons called Xihucoatl, which means fire serpents, which would dismember men at a distance, i.e.

02:33:02.000 guns.

02:33:03.000 All of this cannon.

02:33:04.000 All of this was right there in the prophecy and Cortes was able to step right into that role and to turn around what should have been an obvious defeat for his tiny force into into a stunning, stunning victory.

02:33:17.000 That is absolutely fascinating.

02:33:19.000 So many correlating ideas.

02:33:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:33:22.000 So many correlating ideas come together and that's why I felt I want to write a book about this.

02:33:27.000 That's why I thought I want to get inside the heads of the characters and deal with that battle of good against evil at a level that one can't do in a non-fiction book.

02:33:35.000 How old was this prophecy?

02:33:37.000 Well, that image that I showed of the of the feathered serpent Again, I show it.

02:33:42.000 That image of the feathered serpent, which side of my screen am I on?

02:33:45.000 Here.

02:33:46.000 That image of the feathered serpent is from La Venta in the Gulf of Mexico.

02:33:52.000 And that is in the oldest archaeological strata of Mexico.

02:33:55.000 That image dates to an archaeological strata that is about 1,500 BC, 3,500 years ago.

02:34:04.000 The stone itself may be much older than that, but the strata it's dug up from was already 3,500 years old.

02:34:10.000 So this notion, and there are many images of people with kind of Caucasian features found in the same stratum, this notion of mysterious strangers who were in Mexico at some time and who would return is very ancient in the Mexican system.

02:34:24.000 Wow.

02:34:25.000 And how did they, I mean, there's a very different language that they used than ours, and it was very difficult for them to decipher a lot of the, especially the Mayan, the Aztec, the way they're, what exactly they were saying.

02:34:40.000 How did they figure out that they're saying ships without oars and things, fire, guns, the whole deal?

02:34:48.000 It's an interesting point that you raise.

02:34:50.000 So when Cortez first lands in Mexico, He lands in the Yucatan and the people who live in the Yucatan are the Maya. 0.99

02:34:58.000 They're not the Aztecs.

02:34:59.000 They're the first people he encounters.

02:35:01.000 And there he has an incredible stroke of luck.

02:35:03.000 He can't speak a word of Maya and nor can anybody else in his group of Spaniards. 0.59

02:35:08.000 But they discover that somebody who looks like them is living on the mainland as a prisoner of the Maya. 0.99

02:35:14.000 The Spanish first landed in Cozumel Holiday Resort today.

02:35:18.000 And the Mayan tribe on Cozumel were relatively peaceful, but the people on the mainland were not.

02:35:24.000 The Maya of Cozumel came to Cortez with sign language.

02:35:28.000 They pointed at him and they said, Castilian.

02:35:31.000 They actually told him he was a Castilian.

02:35:33.000 And Cortez thought, how can they know I'm a Castilian?

02:35:35.000 That's what the Spanish called themselves.

02:35:36.000 And gradually through sign language, he figured out what it was, that there was a Spaniard who'd been shipwrecked on the coast of Mexico.

02:35:44.000 At some point, it turned out it was 11 years before.

02:35:46.000 In fact, 26 Spaniards had been shipwrecked 11 years before.

02:35:50.000 25 of them had been eaten by the Maya.

02:35:53.000 But one, Jeronimo Aguilar had survived.

02:35:57.000 So Cortes grabbed him, and I tell this story in my book, and Aguilar became Cortes' first interpreter because he spoke fluent Maya by then.

02:36:05.000 He'd been living amongst the Maya for 11 years, and he spoke Spanish as well.

02:36:10.000 So suddenly they could understand the Maya, they could communicate with the Maya.

02:36:14.000 But then when they went on and they encountered the Aztecs for the first time, the Aztecs spoke another language, and that language was Nahuatl.

02:36:22.000 The language of the Aztecs.

02:36:24.000 And Aguilar suddenly became useless.

02:36:25.000 He couldn't speak Nahuatl.

02:36:27.000 And that's where my heroine, who is a true historical figure, Malinal, thrusts herself forward.

02:36:32.000 She's already been handed over to Cortes as a prisoner. 0.52

02:36:35.000 She speaks fluent Nahuatl and fluent Maya.

02:36:38.000 And she communicates to Cortes, look, I can work with your man, Aguilar.

02:36:42.000 I will give...

02:36:44.000 You will put the words from Spanish.

02:36:46.000 You'll speak Spanish.

02:36:48.000 Aguilar will give me those words in Maya, and I will translate them into Nahuatl.

02:36:52.000 And the reverse with the Aztec ambassadors.

02:36:55.000 And within weeks, she has replaced Aguilar.

02:36:57.000 She's a genius.

02:36:58.000 She masters Spanish.

02:37:00.000 She becomes Cortez's sole interpreter.

02:37:03.000 And she is communicating for him with the Aztecs.

02:37:06.000 And there's an amazing scene where she encounters Moctezuma directly.

02:37:10.000 She and Cortez face to face with Moctezuma.

02:37:13.000 And in those days, if you looked Moctezuma in the eye, you were killed. 1.00

02:37:17.000 This is what the Aztecs, nobody could look him in the eye.

02:37:19.000 They had to fall on their faces.

02:37:21.000 And the local accounts from the time tell us how Malinal, standing there on the causeway outside Tenochtitlan, looked Moctezuma straight in the eye.

02:37:28.000 She never lowered her eyes for a second as she gave him the words of Cortez.

02:37:32.000 And I'm just fascinated by the courage of this woman and what drove her to use Cortez as her instrument to bring Moctezuma down. 0.54

02:37:40.000 And she's a real historical figure.

02:37:42.000 She's a real historical figure.

02:37:43.000 There's still a statue of her in Mexico City today.

02:37:45.000 She became not only Cortez's interpreter, but also his...

02:37:52.000 Of course.

02:37:53.000 And the mother of his child.

02:37:53.000 And by all accounts, she was a very beautiful woman.

02:37:56.000 I would be disappointed if you didn't bang her. 1.00

02:38:02.000 You can't find a single Aztec painting of Cortez that doesn't have Malina in it. 0.82

02:38:07.000 Wow.

02:38:08.000 And she was in the heart of every battle.

02:38:09.000 I think?

02:38:38.000 And that's it.

02:38:39.000 One woman changed the history of the world.

02:38:42.000 La Malinche.

02:38:43.000 That's how the Spanish knew her.

02:38:44.000 They knew her as La Malinche.

02:38:45.000 Wow, that's amazing.

02:38:47.000 So she's the central character in my novel, and we meet her in the fattening pen at the foot of the Great Pyramid, along with another woman who plays a big part in my story, a young witch called Tozi. 0.95

02:38:56.000 And this is the motive.

02:38:58.000 This is why Malinal escapes, but this is why she wants to bring Moctezuma down, because she sees him as the head of an empire of terror, and she sees Cortez as the only way to bring Moctezuma to his knees.

02:39:10.000 Well, it's fascinating they would regard her as a traitor when you think about what Montezuma had done to his own people.

02:39:16.000 That's amazing.

02:39:18.000 Well, again, to give balance, we have to say that the Spanish did horrible things. 1.00

02:39:22.000 Horrible, horrible things.

02:39:24.000 Feeding people to dogs, using people as target practice for their weapons.

02:39:27.000 Let's see if this Spanish Toledo steel will cut off this man's arm, you know, things like that.

02:39:33.000 Right.

02:39:33.000 They were horrors, true horrors.

02:39:37.000 And Cortes was a man of war in every possible way and a Machiavellian player, very cunning, very clever.

02:39:43.000 You can't help admiring him in certain ways, but he was unbelievably cruel.

02:39:48.000 What brought down Cortes?

02:39:51.000 Cortes was brought down by old age.

02:39:52.000 He wanted to become the king of Mexico.

02:39:55.000 After he eventually, there was an apocalyptic final battle.

02:40:00.000 When the Spanish took Tenochtitlan, which is the old name for Mexico City, and Cortes, really it's clear that his plan was to become the new king of Mexico, but the king of Spain had different ideas, and they pulled Cortes down.

02:40:13.000 They gave him a title, he became a Marquis, but he was never allowed to fulfill his dreams, and I see karma at work in that as well.

02:40:23.000 If he'd been a better man, perhaps he would have been allowed to fulfill some dreams.

02:40:27.000 Whatever.

02:40:28.000 The guy lived to be old.

02:40:29.000 That's amazing.

02:40:30.000 Old for those times.

02:40:32.000 Those times you lived to be 60, you were old.

02:40:34.000 How old did he live?

02:40:35.000 He lived to be about 58. That's amazing.

02:40:38.000 No antibiotics?

02:40:39.000 No aspirin?

02:40:40.000 No band-aids?

02:40:42.000 Massive war wounds.

02:40:43.000 He was clubbed on the head.

02:40:45.000 His skull was broken.

02:40:46.000 They've examined the skull of Cortez and there's three separate times that his skull was fractured.

02:40:50.000 Wow.

02:40:51.000 In battles.

02:40:52.000 And each time he recovered and bounced back.

02:40:55.000 They were men of steel, these Spaniards.

02:40:57.000 They were the ultimate warriors.

02:40:59.000 Weren't they tiny, though?

02:41:00.000 They were small, but they were mean.

02:41:02.000 How big were they?

02:41:04.000 Like five feet tall.

02:41:05.000 They were small guys.

02:41:07.000 Was that because of a lack of food, a lack of nutrition?

02:41:09.000 I guess so.

02:41:10.000 It's a nutritional issue.

02:41:12.000 People are taller today.

02:41:14.000 In those times, they were small.

02:41:15.000 That is absolutely fascinating, isn't it?

02:41:17.000 How much the shape of human beings has changed?

02:41:20.000 Take Japan. 0.86

02:41:21.000 The shape of human beings has changed radically in Japan in the last 50 years.

02:41:25.000 There's some enormous Japanese people now.

02:41:26.000 Huge, tall Japanese now. 1.00

02:41:27.000 Yeah, big, giant wrestlers.

02:41:29.000 Exactly.

02:41:30.000 There's been quite a few that have entered into mixed martial arts, which is enormous, enormous men.

02:41:34.000 And it's to do with nutrition, definitely.

02:41:38.000 Fascinating.

02:41:39.000 So can I say that again?

02:41:40.000 If anybody is interested in...

02:41:42.000 Actually supporting my work and spending a few dollars on getting hold of a copy of War God, go to my website, buy it through the Amazon link, check out the email address that's there, which is wargoddedications at gmail.com, write to me and I will at my own expense, by airmail, send you a signed,

02:41:57.000 dedicated book plate.

02:41:58.000 To go inside your copy of War God, but that offer is only good for about the next 10 days.

02:42:03.000 Well, I guarantee you just sold a gang of books, because that was really fascinating.

02:42:06.000 I'm going to buy it tonight.

02:42:07.000 I'm really blown away by that whole idea, the whole story, the woman who was the translator.

02:42:12.000 It's a whole thing.

02:42:13.000 It's so fascinating.

02:42:15.000 When you live in this sweet, cushy society that we live in today, especially here in Los Angeles where it doesn't even rain, you know, go to a supermarket and get some meat, everything's so soft and easy.

02:42:26.000 It's so hard for us to wrap our heads around that just 500 plus years ago this was going down in Mexico.

02:42:33.000 Amazing.

02:42:34.000 Graham Hancock, every time you come on, it's better than the time before.

02:42:38.000 You blew me away again, man.

02:42:39.000 You broke whatever record you set in the last one.

02:42:43.000 It's even better today.

02:42:45.000 Man, I hope a million people go out and buy your book after that.

02:42:47.000 That's absolutely fascinating.

02:42:49.000 So again, it's War God.

02:42:50.000 You can get it on Amazon.

02:42:51.000 And the book that really got me into Graham Hancock in the first place, which is Fingerprints of the Gods, Also available everywhere on Amazon.

02:43:00.000 And the links for WarGuard are on my website, grahamhancock.com.

02:43:04.000 Very clearly marked.

02:43:05.000 Beautiful.

02:43:05.000 Thank you very much, man.

02:43:06.000 That was amazing.

02:43:08.000 Thank you, Jim.

02:43:08.000 Really, really fascinating stuff.

02:43:10.000 And our sponsors, thanks to our sponsors.

02:43:13.000 Thanks to audible.com.

02:43:15.000 Go to audible.com forward slash Joe and get yourself a free audio book.

02:43:22.000 Thanks also to...

02:43:23.000 I'm trying to find the link.

02:43:25.000 There it is.

02:43:25.000 Thanks also to Carbonite.

02:43:27.000 Go to Carbonite.com.

02:43:29.000 Use the offer code JRE and get a free trial.

02:43:34.000 No credit card required.

02:43:35.000 Plus, two free bonus months with your subscription.

02:43:39.000 That's Carbonite.com.

02:43:41.000 Offer code JRE and, of course, always onnit.com.

02:43:44.000 That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGAN and save yourself 10% off any and all supplements.

02:43:50.000 We'll see you guys next week.

02:43:52.000 Lots of great stuff ahead.

02:43:54.000 And that's it for now.

02:43:55.000 Bye-bye.

02:43:56.000 Big kiss.

02:43:56.000 See you soon.

02:44:14.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 13, 2013

Joe Rogan Experience #417 - Graham Hancock

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