Graham Hancock - America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization

Full transcript: Graham Hancock on London Real

5:29 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Graham Hancock, the British journalist and author of numerous best-selling books which have sold more than nine million copies worldwide. You specialize in unconventional theories involving ancient civilizations, stone monuments and megaliths, astrological data from the past, and altered states of consciousness. You’re best known for your nonfiction investigations of historical mysteries, including the blockbuster book Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, and its 2015 sequel, Magicians of the Gods.

5:58 Your new book, America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to explore the mysteries of the past and the profound implications of how we live our lives today. Graham, welcome back to London Real. Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be with you again. It’s amazing having you here, I can’t wait to talk about so many things about you. It’s glad you’re here.

6:20 I’m glad you’re here first of all, because I know a couple years ago you had some interesting, you know, scares with your health. Yeah, I’ve had some, I’ve had an interesting couple of years health-wise. You know, it’s a strange thing, this business of life, because we, you know, we start out full of strength and youth, and for years I never questioned my health. I just took it completely for granted that I had been gifted with a fully functional body and able to just get out there and take on, and take on any challenge.

6:54 But you know, as the years go by the machine begins to wear down a little bit, and then it throws you a curveball, and the curveball that was thrown at me was a series of massive epileptic seizures in 2017 while I was researching America Before. The first one happened in New Mexico completely out of the blue, totally, totally unexpected. Santha wakes up during the night and finds me not in bed and finds me on the floor in the bathroom with blood pouring out of my mouth, whisked off to hospital, totally unconscious, whisked off to hospital, sort of brought back to functioning and discharged after 24 hours.

7:39 But that was a minor one. The really bad one happened in Bath in England, where I live, in August 2017. How much later? Phew. So that was the first one, was in May 2017, and the second one was in August 2017, and the one in August 2017 started with a headache and I’m just lying on the sofa with Santha and then suddenly I’m gone, and the rest of it is no memory for me.

8:02 I’m only told about what happened. They have to call, I’m writhing and seizing so violently that they actually have to have two ambulance crews to bring me downstairs and out into the ambulance. Apparently I’m roaring in the ambulance, I don’t remember anything about this, and the ambulance is shaking from side to side. They take me to hospital, they cannot stop the seizures. I mean, I’m in a state of just continuous seizure, and then the doctor takes Santha aside, my wife Santha, and says to her, it’s bad news, we think you’re going to lose your husband, and if he lives he’s probably going to be severely brain-damaged.

8:41 As a last resort they put me in a 48-hour induced coma. They just shut me down completely, and amazingly I came out of it still functional. After I didn’t know what had happened, I woke up after those 48 hours and I saw several of my kids standing around the bed, one of those of my son who’s flown from Los Angeles, you know, another is my daughter who’s flown from New York. What are they doing? What’s happened to me?

9:12 I had no idea. It was a very mysterious, very, very strange thing, but I think it was sent to teach me some lessons. Okay, and what lessons are those? Well, the lesson is not to take anything too seriously, actually. That’s the problem, you know, you have to be driven and committed to do this kind of research and to make big books, and that’s all very well, but it also takes a price from the body.

9:40 So I’m just trying to be a little bit more laid-back in everything that I do and enjoy life. Right. I mean, look at the size of this book, and when you look through other books. Yeah. I mean, you’re an intense guy, and we just talked about, you know, your writing regimen.

9:56 Yeah, I think we talked about once before, when you go in. Yeah, you know, after you’ve done all of your preparation and research, when you go to write, it’s 16-hour days, seven days a week, for up to six months, as long as the book takes. It’s possible to spend three or four years actually writing a book, and I’ve done that in the past with a book like Underworld that I published in 2002. I allowed the writing to sprawl over a long period. What I found, and really works for me, is get all the travel and research, the really detailed research, get all that done, get it thoroughly done and thoroughly in my head, and then sit down and do nothing else but write for as long as it takes.

10:40 And typically for a book of this length the actual writing period can be six months, but you’re looking at two, two and a half, to three years of research in front of that before the book actually gets writing. But the writing, I like to keep it tight. I like to live with the book, I like to be deeply immersed in the story, not distracted from it in any way. So I just drop emails, I don’t take telephone calls, I don’t correspond with people, I’m totally there serving the book and living the story, and that works best for me, and I think it works best for the story I have to tell.

11:12 Did the writing in this come after your stroke? It did, and this was an alarming prospect for me, and by the way, not strokes but seizures. Seizures, yeah, it’s a different matter. I was concerned that I might have lost some memory. Uh-huh.

11:31 I actually did lose some memory in those massive seizures, particularly the ones I had in August in England, and I was concerned that this would affect my writing, but interestingly enough it didn’t, and that I think has helped me to understand the process of writing, which is, in a way, it’s a kind of download from the cloud, and as long as your connection to the cloud remains solid, it’s all right, everything is okay, and I found that all of the things that I feared didn’t happen, and I didn’t suffer from lapses of memory that would make it difficult for me to connect the dots in a big picture. Far from it, in a way I think it opened me up more to that. Interesting.

12:16 And is this cloud some collective consciousness? So there’s some other things going on besides all the research. I’m just not sure what it is, but what I’ve realized as a writer is the most important thing I can do is get out of my own way, don’t try and overthink it. Do all the groundwork, get that absolutely solid, but when it comes to actually writing, don’t overthink it, just let it flow. There’s a flow that you get into, and that’s what I call the cloud.

12:47 It’s like connecting to something outside oneself that’s where all the information is stored, that’s where everything is stored, and it’s drawing down from there, putting it into a picture. And how is the health now? Does anything you changed up there? Any other scares or seizures? It’s been a little while now, but yeah, it’s iffy, you know, because the fact is I can have another seizure at any time, and I would not like to find myself in that dark place again, because that’s all I remember from the 48-hour induced coma is just darkness.

13:25 You know, I had a near-death experience when I was a teenager. I had a massive electric shock, and that experience was actually filled with light. I left my body. I think I was 19 or 18 years old. I came out of my body, I was up around the light in the kitchen looking down at my body sprawled on the floor, and I just remember thinking, there’s very, really interesting.

13:50 I wasn’t afraid at all, and there was a sense of a vast expanse beyond, and then I was back in my body. I didn’t get the tunnel of light, I didn’t get the relatives, the deceased relatives saying it’s not your time. I was just back and I’m functional. But when they put me in that induced coma following the seizures, no light, total darkness. It was just like I’d been taken offline, you know, just switched off, and all that comes back to me from it is two things: a feeling of claustrophobia and, of course, a ventilator tube was stuck down my throat, you know, and to wake up with that still down your throat and you’re looking, you know, I’m not waking them out.

14:36 You know, what is this, what has happened to me? Very, very strange. So it can happen at any time, but I’m taking quite a number of precautions to try and make sure it doesn’t, and I refuse to let it get in the way of my life. I’ve got stuff to do, I’ve got books to write, I’ve got journeys to make, and I’ve got a family to love, so it’s all good, and you know, I just have to embrace it. Hmm, do you think that early near-death experience might have taken you on this path of your life somehow, or to think differently somehow?

15:09 I’ve had a lot of cause to think about that in the last couple of years, and yes, the answer is it did, it definitely did, because right there at a very early stage in my life I got very clear evidence that we are not our bodies. Yeah, the body is part of us, it’s the vehicle that we manipulate and move around this physical universe in, but we are not our bodies and we cannot be reduced to our bodies. Consciousness is a giant mystery, and I believe it manifests in physical form for certain specific reasons.

15:45 There are lessons we can learn here in this level of vibration, in physical form, where there are direct physical consequences for what you do, important lessons to learn. But I don’t think that’s the whole story at all. I think it’s just part of a much bigger, much longer journey. Yeah, you know, before we jump into this book, and I really want to find out why you wanted to write this and why now as well, and it’s a trilogy, right? It’s the third one in the series.

16:11 I don’t see it that way. Okay. What I would say is that for more than a quarter of a century I have been focusing on the possibility of a forgotten episode in human history, of a lost civilization, and undoubtedly my best-known book in that field is Fingerprints of the Gods, that was published in 1995, and then a series of books after that: The Message of the Sphinx that I wrote with Robert Bauval, Heaven’s Mirror, the big photographic book that I did with my wife Santha, an enormous book called Underworld that I published in 2002, based on seven years of scuba diving, looking for structures on the submerged continental shelves that were above water during the last Ice Age.

16:58 But what I see it as is a continuing journey. I don’t really neatly package it into a trilogy. My previous book, Magicians of the Gods, was headlined by my publishers as the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods, and I think that’s fair enough because that was taking a global frame of reference and looking at all the new information that had come out since 1995. For example, in Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995 I made a very clear statement that my evidence suggested very strongly that there had been a global cataclysm somewhere around 12,500 years ago, 10,500 BC, and that was the central figure in Fingerprints of the Gods, that there had been this event, but I couldn’t really say exactly what the event was, that something awful had happened to the world, and I explored quite a number of possibilities in Fingerprints of the Gods as to what that could have been.

18:03 But what then happened, as we come through 2007, 2008, 2010, is this mass of new evidence that comes out on precisely what I was talking about, a global cataclysm and the dating on it. This is science, this is not some, you know, journalist sitting writing a book at home, this is 60 leading scientists in the field of astrophysics and geology very strongly and firmly presenting evidence of a global cataclysm caused by a comet impact 12,800 years ago. So I was 300 years out in the estimate that I put forward in Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, and more than 10 years later science comes back with new information.

18:53 So I don’t see it so much in terms of a sequel as more in terms of following the evidence where it leads, and when the evidence starts to mount and becomes overwhelming, then I will do a book on it. And I remember you saying before that with every year we’re finding out that things are older than we thought they were all the time, and it always seems to be confirming a lot of what you’ve been talking about. I have been blessed in this way in the superior time, because if you had done your research fifty years ago maybe this wouldn’t have been happen and would not have been happening now, and perhaps it would have been impossible for me to do that research fifty years ago.

19:35 But what has happened is that really in 1995 I was treated by the sort of the scientific community as this total outsider: how dare he speak about this, he knows nothing about this, we are the experts and he’s wrong. And what’s happened since 1995 is that the evidence, drip by drip, has kept on coming in that actually validates what I was saying before, that there are missing episodes in the human story. A huge development was the site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

20:11 Along with others like John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, I’d been arguing for a long time that the Sphinx is much older than it’s supposed to be, that we’re looking at a 12,000-year-old monument, not a 4,500- year-old monument, and the response of the skeptical community to that was, but if there was a civilization capable of creating something like the Sphinx 12,000 years ago, then they must have created other monuments, and we don’t see any big monuments from 12,000 years ago, and therefore the Sphinx must be the age we say it is. And then what happens? Klaus Schmidt in the German Archaeological Institute discovers Gobekli Tepe, and lo and behold, it’s 11,600 to 12,000 years old, exactly in the window of the Sphinx, firmly dated, no dispute about it, a giant megalithic site, and suddenly the notion that the Sphinx is much older ceases to be in left field and starts to become much more central, because we’re seeing it’s part of a pattern, and that’s what’s been going on across the whole area that I work in.

21:15 Right, and yet some of the critics still say that those are independent occurrences, that it isn’t all linked, and I know you’re on Rogan with Michael Shermer and this was part of the dialogue. I remember him saying that he still could be independent. I know that happened about six months before some of your medical pieces. What did you learn from that conversation with him and the feedback? Well, first of all, it helped me to understand that in dealing with history, and particularly in dealing with prehistory, there is a difference, because history is based primarily upon written documents, and prehistory, you’re dealing with objects, artifacts that are dug up out of the ground.

21:54 I began to realize how ideological this is, that actually when I’m dealing with academics, with archaeologists or professional skeptics of any kind, I’m dealing with people who already have an ideological position, and that ideological position is confronted by the position I take. So in an ideological war, what you try to do is to destroy your opponent in any way, fair or foul, and it’s helped me to understand that there is an ideological war over our past. For example, when it comes to large-scale animal extinctions which happened at the end of the Ice Age, what they call the megafauna, the mammoths, the mastodons, the saber-tooth tigers, the, you know, the giant sloths, all of these creatures were in the world until 12,800 years ago and then they were gone, overnight, very, very radical, rapid change.

22:59 Now the mainstream, for some reason in this ideology, doesn’t like cataclysms, it doesn’t like cataclysmic events, it doesn’t want to think there have been cataclysms that have played a role in the human story. So seeking for a way to explain the disappearance of the megafauna, the natural option from mainstream archaeologists is to say, oh, that was human predation that did it, that was human hunting that did it, and suddenly we’re required to picture a group of hunter-gatherers who are so incredibly efficient and so ruthless that they wipe out the entire megafauna of, for example, North America in a matter of months. I don’t know any indigenous community that behaves that way.

23:44 They respect their prey, they live with them, they co- depend upon them, they don’t wipe them out. What does wipe them out is a giant comet impact which melts the ice sheets and causes huge flooding over North America. So there’s a tendency in the study of prehistory to want to keep the past kind of nice and calm and just the way it is now. There’s even a word for it, it’s called uniformitarianism, and it’s a doctrine that things should have unfolded in the past much in the way that we see them unfolding now.

24:23 So if we don’t have any giant cataclysms happening in the Earth now, then there wouldn’t have been any cataclysms in the past, and yeah, we know about the dinosaurs and they were made extinct by an asteroid, but that was 65 million years ago, surely within the human story there’s been no such thing. And as a result, scholars who attempt to investigate the possibility of a past cataclysm often find themselves in the crosshairs of very vicious attacks from their colleagues, as though somehow they’re upsetting the applecart in some way, and as though we shouldn’t think about these things. I don’t think that it’s deliberate, planned censorship.

25:05 Right. I think it’s the mindset of the individuals who we have entrusted with interpreting our history for us, and that is a mindset that is troubled by cataclysms. It doesn’t want them to have happened, whether consciously or subconsciously, and looks for other reasons to explain why things are the way they are. Yeah, it’s important you say that, because it’s not in your mind that conspiracy. It’s, don’t think so, a natural tendency for them to shy away from these things.

25:33 Yes, because also keeping things in the status quo keeps everything, yeah, the way it should be. Yep, assuming they’re saving jobs, their institutions alive. Absolutely, and so they just naturally become uncomfortable. Yeah, and resist when they hear these new theories. Very much so, and this is a classic example that I go into in this new book of archaeology going radically, drastically wrong, and it’s partly connected to that so-called overkill theory, where the megafauna were supposedly wiped out by this ruthless hunter-gatherer population, and it’s an archaeological theory called Clovis First, and it dominated American archaeology for 50 years, the notion that there’s a culture that archaeologists called the Clovis culture.

26:21 We don’t know what they call themselves, they’re called the Clovis culture because what’s called the type site, the classic site that they were at, is near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, in a place called Blackwater Draw, near Clovis, New Mexico, and apparently the archaeologists needed to go to Clovis to get beer, so they called it the Clovis culture. Okay. And this Clovis culture, there’s no evidence of it in North America before 13,600 years ago. It flourishes for about 800 years, and 12,800 years ago it vanishes completely from the picture.

26:57 The position of archaeology for 50 years is those were the first human beings to enter America, no human beings entered the Americas before 13,600 years ago, and those are the same archaeologists who repeatedly called me a pseudo-scientist or a pseudo-archaeologist for suggesting other possibilities. But lo and behold, what do we find round about 2010 onwards? The evidence becomes overwhelming that Clovis was not first, not first at all, not first by even a tiny margin, a huge margin, first by a huge margin, not 25, 35,000, 50,000.

27:37 As part of the research for this book I went to the San Diego Natural History Museum and interviewed Dr. Tom Deméré, who’s the chief paleontologist there. The reason I interviewed him was because he just had an extraordinary paper published in Nature in April 2017, and that paper documents human presence in North America 130,000 years ago. That’s ten times as old as the Clovis culture, and all archaeologists admit this now, that the Clovis First was a mistake, they got it wrong, completely wrong.

28:13 Human beings have been in America for much longer than that, but what they don’t comment upon is the careers that were ruined as a result, people like Jacques Cinq-Mars, who excavated Bluefish Caves in the Yukon. He had his career literally ripped to shreds by his colleagues because he was proposing humans in America 25,000 years ago. He had his research funding withdrawn, he could only continue on his own buck, nobody was supporting him, but he was right, he was right, and this happens again and again.

28:45 So when archaeologists of that type say, you know, Hancock is a pseudo-scientist, I say, hang on a minute, you guys are the pseudo-scientists. You guys sold us Clovis First for 50 years, you guys withdrew funding from research that might have exposed that lie earlier, you wouldn’t let it happen, and that’s not right, it shouldn’t be that way. Archaeologists should not take the view that they have got a firm and fixed picture of the past, because actually we know so little about the past, they should always be saying this is our provisional position, but we are open to other possibilities, because if they don’t say that, those other possibilities are going to come along and kick them in the ass pretty soon, and that’s what’s happened with Clovis First.

29:31 And Clovis First is not a small matter, because if human beings have been in the Americas for 130,000 years instead of for 13,000 years, why, there’s 100,000-plus years that archaeologists just haven’t looked at because of their preconceived notion that there was going to be nothing to find there. There was actually a dictum against digging below Clovis levels. You know how in archaeological strata it’s like a layer cake, and you have certain levels, and the view was let’s not waste research funds digging below Clovis because we know there was nothing before Clovis.

30:05 What an idiotic, what a ridiculous position to take. Those archaeologists who did risk it and who dug deeper, like Al Goodyear at Topper in the Carolinas, they found human stuff going back tens of thousands of years earlier. So you know, I think we’re dealing with an ideological discipline, and I think it should be more provisional in what it says and in what it claims, and it should be less despising of people who consider other possibilities, because that’s a useful thing to do.

30:34 It’s useful to consider other possibilities even if they’re wrong. We should never, science should never get locked in a narrow channel and say everything outside the bounds of this channel is not subject to investigation. It’s really a mistake. I mean, I was surprised when you went to America with this book, because I thought, what’s in America? You know, and because of all of the assumptions I am making, you know, I had been taught as a kid, you know, the simple, that the narrative was simple, as little as I knew, that there was nothing else.

31:02 Exactly, no, this was the view, and this is why America is so interesting, because what we have in the Americas, North and South America, is a gigantic landmass, enormously rich in resources, just the kind of place where a civilization could emerge. And then you take the Ice Age and you recognize that for very long periods the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world, but yet incredibly rich in resources. So now we know that there were human beings there from 130,000 years ago, and we know that archaeologists haven’t been looking at what they were doing.

31:46 Now’s the time to ask what were they doing, what was going on in the Americas in that time. And again, a need for archaeologists to be more humble. How much have they really looked at? Take the Mississippi Valley civilization, which plays an important role in this book. The famous sites are sites like Cahokia or Poverty Point or the Ohio sites such as Highbank and Newark.

32:17 Amazing, you know, huge geometrical earthworks, absolutely stunning, but the trouble is that in the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries there was massive large-scale destruction of these ancient monuments. They were not considered to be worth preserving, the needs of agriculture and industry were more important. So what we can say is that roundabout 90% of the monuments that were in the Mississippi Valley in, say, 1700 are gone now, they’re not there. So archaeologists, in drawing their conclusions about that culture, are drawing it on a tiny fraction that’s randomly left by chance from the mass-scale wipe-out that was caused.

33:02 And then when the archaeologists come to it with preconceived ideas about what sort of culture it should be, that’s another form of censorship that imposes itself upon the past. We should let the past speak for itself. And was that just human destruction without people thinking about it? Well, I mean, first of all there was the view, you know, things have changed, we live in a different world today, but America in the 18th and 19th centuries was aggressively expansionist, expanding westward, and that involved taking the land of the indigenous inhabitants.

33:37 Well, if you’re going to take away, you know, tens of millions of acres from people and stuff them somewhere else, then you need a good excuse to do so. So what you do is you depict them as savages and you say that actually we’re doing them a favor. You know, there’s a quote I put in the book concerning the horrific project called the boarding schools project in America, where Native American children, about 90% of them, were physically removed from their families and stuck in boarding schools in another state far away, punished if they wore any traditional clothing, given the whole ideology of Western civilization and encouraged to cut themselves off from their roots.

34:24 Well, no wonder we’re a species with amnesia if we take the entire cultural memory banks of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas and deliberately wipe them out. Yeah, and so what are some of the things that we’re going to learn from reading this book? What are some of the new insights about both North and South America that we might have just previously assumed, what I did, there’s not much happening there, not much we can learn? Yes, well, there’s a whole range of things actually.

34:49 The first, the most important issue to understand, and I’ve really done a great deal of work on this, is that North America was at the epicenter of a humongous global cataclysm, and it was particularly bad because it was a comet. The evidence is really compelling on this now. There are people who are proposing alternatives, one thing nobody disagrees on anymore is that there was a cataclysm 12,800 years ago. The best case as far as I’m concerned is the comet case, and we have a group of more than sixty leading scientists who are making that case very, very strongly in the pages of all the mainstream journals.

35:34 But we have to consider the nature of that cataclysm. It was very, very odd. At that time North America had been, and the world actually had been, emerging from the Ice Age for several thousand years. The world had been getting warmer, the ice sheets had been getting shallower. If they were, let’s say, two miles deep at 21,000 years ago, they were about a mile deep or less by 12,800 years ago.

36:04 So the world was warming up, and then something radical happens, you get a massive deep freeze that descends on the planet. So the planet goes back into the coldest of the Ice Age suddenly, literally overnight, and you get at the same time this massive die-off of animal species, and very weirdly you get a rise in sea level. Now normally in an episode of freezing you would not expect the sea level to rise. What you’d expect that extra water to do is to reform as ice on the existing continental ice caps, but it doesn’t.

36:43 You get a sudden spike, a very rapid spike in sea level right at the beginning of this event. That’s very, very puzzling, but what can explain it perfectly, perfectly, is the impact of several fragments of a disintegrated comet with the North American ice cap. The heat and the shock generated by those impacts release enormous floods of meltwater, which go, where? They pour primarily into the Atlantic Ocean, and there they stop the Gulf Stream in its tracks.

37:14 The Gulf Stream is part of the central heating system of our planet, it keeps the planet warm. It’s part of a global meridian or oceanic circulation that goes on, taking warm water from the tropics, bringing it up to the north, putting it down, bringing it round again. It stopped completely for about 1,200 years at the beginning of this episode, and that was caused by that release of meltwater, which is measured in the sea level rise that we see at that time.

37:45 Recently, just recently, there’s been news of the discovery of a very large crater in Greenland, actually 32 kilometers wide. It’s been discovered with remote sensing, and actually a lot of the evidence for the cataclysmic event that took place 12,800 years ago does come from Greenland. Why? Because they have had permanent ice cover in Greenland for hundreds of thousands of years, right through to today, so they’re able to put down big tubular drills deep into the ice and bring up a core which has different chemical elements at different levels, and from that they can tell what the climate was in the world at that time, and more than that, they can tell, for example, were wildfires burning, was there a huge amount of, they call it biomass burning going on, that leaves specific chemical signatures in those ice cores in Greenland.

38:43 Biomass is not burning in Greenland, it’s actually burning in North America, but it’s carried by the winds, the smoke and the soot are carried by the winds to Greenland and show up there, you know. So we have this discovery of a very large crater in Greenland. We’ve already had from the ice cores evidence that are called impact proxies, for example platinum, iridium, melt glass, nanodiamonds, they’re caused by the heat and shock of an impact, but now we have a 32-kilometer-wide crater in Greenland.

39:20 The scientists who are working on this regard it as a global event. There’s evidence of impacts as far south as Antarctica, as far north as Greenland, as far east as Syria, and right the way across the Pacific Ocean as well. It’s a global cataclysm, but the heart of it was North America, and the North American ice cap, the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice caps, were joined to the Greenland ice cap, they were all one thing. So this, to my mind, is likely to prove to be further evidence of the cosmic nature of this cataclysm that occurred 12,800 years ago, and it’s on a scale that were it to repeat in our world today, which actually is not impossible because the remnants of the original giant comet are still in orbit and they form a known meteor stream called the Taurid meteor stream, through which we pass twice a year.

40:16 If we were to have another event like the event that happened 12,000 800 years ago, I can say with absolute confidence that our civilization would not survive it, it would not survive it. All these great buildings, all this amazing machinery, all this tech, none of it would stand us in good stead. We would be gone as a civilization, it would become a punctuation mark in the human story. And when I look at that scenario, bearing in mind that we do pass through the Taurid meteor stream twice every year, for 12 days in June and for 12 days in November we pass through it, when I look at that situation I asked myself, who on the planet today would survive a disaster on that scale?

41:04 What kind of people would survive it? And I know it wouldn’t be me, I know it wouldn’t be the majority of urbanites or indeed scientists or any of the creations of the modern world. The people who are really fit for survival in a world in turmoil are the hunter-gatherers, they’re the meek of the Earth, you know, in Namibia, in the Amazon jungle, people whose daily business is survival. They would hardly be knocked sideways by this event, they would just take it in their stride and they would carry on, they would not suffer the psychological damage.

41:42 Can you imagine the psychological damage of billions of people who are used to living in the comfort of cities, with every necessity laid on for them every day without any difficulty in acquiring it, that suddenly all that stops? Can you imagine the effect of that on the educated Western mind? It would be extremely bad, but the hunter-gatherers would survive, and I think that actually was the case 12,800 years ago as well. I think it was the hunter-gatherers who survived and passed on the message.

42:15 So one part of it is, I’ve tried to really bring this home, how central America was to this cataclysmic event that took place across the whole world, and then consider what did that obliterate, what did that event obliterate, what did it wipe out from the human story? This is the lost civilization I always talked about. This, you see, when you’re looking for a lost civilization, and I mean a civilization, something that we would recognize as a civilization, I’ll tell you directly, I don’t think they flew to the Moon and I don’t think they had airplanes, but I think that we’re talking about a civilization more than 12,000 years ago which was as advanced as our civilization was, say, in the late 18th century or early 19th century.

43:12 In other words, they could navigate the world, they could explore the world, they could measure the Earth accurately, they had precise astronomy, they could create beautiful maps that were accurate in terms of latitude and longitude, that kind of level of civilization. I think that’s what we’re sitting there now. You need a place where such a civilization can evolve, and you need to explain why archaeology hasn’t found it yet, and I’ve considered many possibilities over the years.

43:40 Back in 1995 with Fingerprints of the Gods, Antarctica looked very interesting to me. Later I became very interested in what’s called the Sunda Shelf, which is the area of land around what’s now the Malaysian Peninsula and the Indonesian islands out to the Philippines. That was a continent-sized landmass that was above water during the Ice Age and is underwater now. Very interesting to look there and see what’s going on there, but one place that nobody ever looked, precisely because of the ideology, precisely because of what we’ve been taught about the Americas, was the Americas.

44:15 Nobody looked there, it was not considered worth looking there, and I think that’s a huge mistake, because the Americas stand out as a candidate with this amazing richness of resources, and then the second thing, because of the character of the Ice Age, there were long periods when the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world, cut off from the conflicts and the difficulties going on in the so-called Old World. What a beautiful and amazing place for a civilization to evolve, a civilization that was separate, that was different, that had its own way of doing things. That is one of the reasons why I think we need to take America very, very seriously, because we now know that the archaeological story we’ve been taught about the Americas is complete and utter, from beginning to end.

45:05 Clovis was not first, Clovis was a latecomer to the Americas. We know that archaeology has not had its eye on the ball because of Clovis, they’ve not been considering the pre-Clovis ages. It’s only now that they’re beginning to look at what happened before Clovis, so they’ve just closed their eyes to all of those possibilities. And then of course on top of that you have the massive destruction that took place in the Mississippi Valley and across the Americas of Native American culture and of Native American memories.

45:38 So we’re left with this puzzling series of mysteries which need to be explained, and as I go through the research I find certain things ringing bells with me. I’m working in the Mississippi Valley, I’m at Moundville in Alabama and I’m looking at a notice board. It’s just the beginning of my research into this interesting culture in the Mississippi Valley, and the noticeboard has been put up by the site and they’re telling us about the site, and what they say is that whole site was about afterlife beliefs, and that it was believed that on death the soul of the deceased would ascend to the constellation of Orion and then would pass through the constellation of Orion to the Milky Way and then would make a journey along the Milky Way, where it would face trials and tribulations and be judged on its behavior during life.

46:39 The weird thing is that’s exactly the ancient Egyptian system of religion. It’s exactly the system, it’s too detailed to be a coincidence. What is that narrow star shaft in the Great Pyramid doing if not pointing at the lowest of the three stars of Orion’s Belt, to send the soul of the deceased up to Orion, then indeed a journey along the Milky Way, trials and tribulations and the judgment, the same story exactly. But how do we explain that? How can it be a coincidence?

47:09 No, I don’t think so, details are far too complicated. So what’s the answer to this? Could ancient Egypt have directly influenced the Mississippi Valley? Well, no, actually, because ancient Egypt had ceased to exist as a civilization by the time that many of the Mississippi Valley sites rose to prominence, couldn’t have happened. Then the conclusion I come to is that what we’re looking at in both areas, in ancient Egypt and in the Mississippi Valley, is a legacy of ideas from a remote common source, which actually influenced cultures all around the world, and it’s why we find these astonishing similarities.

47:49 I think a deliberate effort was made by the survivors of that cataclysm, those who came from the lost civilization, the deliberate effort was made by them to try to restart their civilization, and they used the hunter-gatherers with whom they coexisted in the world at that time as their seedbed to try to plant and re-establish these ideas, and that’s why we find the same ideas cropping up all around the world in cultures that definitely were not in contact with one another, and trying to explain it by direct contact doesn’t work. What does work is going far back, 12,000- plus years back, going right back to that time when these ideas were seeded all around the world. And what reaction do you get when you talk about lost civilizations and you pose this fact that there could have been humans that were smarter than we were, say in the 1700s, many, many thousands of years ago?

48:44 Yeah, I mean, you already had some resistance when you say things are older than we thought. Yeah, now when you say that we used to be smarter than we were, what do you feel, what do you get? Well, I’ll tell you a strange thing, which is that, you know, archaeologists are decent people too, but I have a lot of critical things to say about them and they have a lot of critical things to say about me, but they’re not completely stone-headed, they do learn from experience, and the whole archaeological community in the last few years has come to accept, bitterly, with difficulty, that Clovis was not first and that things were going on in the Americas for tens of thousands of years before Clovis.

49:24 What that’s led to is more openness as to what those things might have been and a little bit more humility as to what might have been going on. So actually in proposing a lost civilization I don’t today find myself up against the same sort of bitter hatred that I found myself up against in 1995. There seems to be a growing realization that this is one amongst a number of options that we have to consider in order to explain the world we live in today, and the same goes with the issue of cataclysm.

50:00 Back in 1995 that was a very tough row to hoe, you know, it was very, very hard to get that idea across through the mainstream. Today, with more and more mainstream scientists focused on this issue, it’s much easier to get it across, there’s much more openness to considering ideas of this kind. I’m not saying that the battle is won, it’s far from it, but there has been movement in the right direction, and when I travel around researching this book, going to archaeological sites, meeting young archaeologists, I find them much more open and friendly to me than they were in the past, and, you know, even slyly admitting that they’ve actually read my books.

50:40 Things are changing, and they’re changing not because of me, they’re changing because of the evidence. The evidence speaks for itself, it’s overwhelming. Another area that I investigate at great length in this book is the Amazon rainforest, really fascinating. Sadly, tragically, because of the clearances of the Amazon, we have become aware of something in the last decade that we were not aware of before, which is that the Amazon is full of geometry. There are giant earthworks in the Amazon and they’re astonishingly similar to the giant earthworks in the Mississippi Valley, and they incorporate the same geometry as those earthworks and the same geometry that we find, for example, at Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid.

51:23 There, it’s really one of the remarkable discoveries of the last decade, is that there was a civilization in the Amazon that was capable of creating monuments on a giant scale. Previously they were regarded as just simple hunter-gatherers who couldn’t do anything of that sort, and goodness knows what is going to come out of the jungle once they start applying lidar to the problem. The case of Guatemala was recently in the news. Guatemala is a tiny country, I think it’s less than I think it’s less than 150 thousand square kilometers.

52:00 In Guatemala, within walking distance of the famous site called Tikal, within walking distance, they have in the last year found 60,000 structures that archaeologists didn’t know existed. They found them because of lidar. Okay, in a tiny country with a hundred thousand or 150 thousand square kilometres. We have in the Amazon five and a half million square kilometers of rainforest that have never been investigated by archaeology at all. The whole Amazon basin is about seven and a half million square kilometres, five and a half million is covered by dense rainforest, and it’s only because of these horrific clearances of the rainforest to make way for cattle ranches, one of the great stupidities of the modern human race is to sacrifice the rainforest so that we can eat hamburgers.

52:53 The side effect of that is that the clearances of the rainforest have revealed these humongous earthworks, one of them, by the way, has exactly the same base perimeter as the Great Pyramid of Giza and, like the Great Pyramid, is precisely oriented at north, south, east and west. It’s a structure, or like a placing of a plot of land, it’s an earth work. So okay, and honestly we have very similar earthworks in the UK. Everybody’s heard of henges, everybody’s heard of Stonehenge, but not everybody knows what a henge actually is.

53:26 A henge is the ditch, it’s a big ditch which is dug, usually circular in the British Isles, and then the earth from that ditch is raised up into an embankment, and the embankment is outside the ditch. That’s how you know that these structures were not built for defensive purposes, if you want to create a moat you put it outside your embankment, not inside the embankment. The Amazon is full of earthworks like that, like for example Avebury in Britain, a giant stone circle.

53:59 There are multiple examples of that in the Amazon, there are stone circles in the Amazon. All of this is new, all of this requires to be accounted for, requires to be explained. Why, for example, I get into DNA a lot in this book, and it’s fascinating me, and again it comes back to these old ideas and old theories about the peopling of the Americas. The mainstream view during that 50 years of Clovis First dominance was that the Americas were peopled only one way, and that was from Northeast Asia right across the Bering Strait, which was then a land bridge, the Bering Land Bridge, into Alaska, and then when the ice sheets had sufficiently reduced, down through an ice-free corridor into the Americas as a whole.

54:46 This was supposed to be the only way that human beings got to America, they walked, following the herds of animals that they hunted. The ma is changing that whole picture very, very radically, and one of the big mysteries which I go into in depth in this book is why on earth is there Australasian DNA in the Amazon jungle? There is a group of genes that are specifically connected with people from Papua New Guinea and Australia, Australian Aborigines and Melanesians, turns up amongst isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle, and here’s the kicker, it’s nowhere in North America and it’s nowhere in Central America, it’s only in South America.

55:35 That requires an oceanic voyage, that requires somebody crossing the Pacific Ocean a very long time ago, and I say a very long time ago quite deliberately because a skeleton has been found in South America that carries this DNA, and that skeleton is close to 12,000 years old, so we know it’s much older than that. Wow. And how do you find this stuff? You’re keeping your ear to the ground. All right, can I keep my ear to the ground all the time, and I have found geneticists great people to talk to about this.

56:07 I’ve been extended interviews with quite a number of the leading geneticists working in this field, and one of them, for example, Eske Willerslev, who’s professor of geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen and regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in this field, addressed himself specifically to that issue of Australasian DNA in the Amazon jungle, not anywhere else in the Americas. If they’d come across the Bering Land Bridge we should be finding that DNA all the way through the Americas, we should be finding it in an isolated pocket in the Amazon, and I asked him, what’s your view on this? And he said, well, to be honest, nobody can explain this at the moment, it’s a great mystery, and I said, well, what do you think about, do you think it’s possible that a group of people were able to cross the Pacific Ocean more than 12,000 years ago and bring settlers to the Amazon then?

57:02 And he said, well, according to the genetic data that is the most parsimonious explanation. When a scientist says parsimonious, this is a rule in science, that the easiest and simplest explanation is usually the right one, the more complicated and difficult you make it. So the simplest, most straightforward explanation for Australasian DNA in the Amazon is that a group of settlers came there across the Pacific Ocean, but he said that’s not practical because we know that people weren’t able to sail the oceans at that time, and that’s the point where I asked, what, hang on, how do we know that?

57:36 We don’t know that. That’s what archaeologists say, that’s not a fact, that’s an opinion about the past. Let’s not confuse opinions with facts, and maybe this strong Australasian DNA signal in the Amazon jungle should be taken as evidence for precisely that, that people were crossing the oceans thousands and thousands of years before we thought they were capable of doing. Everybody’s heard of Thor Heyerdahl and his work with the suggesting that Polynesians were involved in settling the Americas at all.

58:12 Was a great man, I knew him personally, I loved the man, he was a great, great guy, but he was wrong about that. The his work focused on 3,000 years ago on the Polynesian expansion, and it ultimately came to nothing. Yes, the Polynesians were great sailors, undoubtedly, but the real mystery isn’t much further back, much further back in the past. And yet this narrative challenges a lot of structures, not just the scientific community but the political community, because all of these dialogues create these new versions of who we are, you humans, to a certain extent.

58:43 I mean, that’s something to battle with, right? Because the admission that there used to be intelligence that far back we might have lost makes us question a lot about who we are today. Well, again, it comes down to this issue of ideology, because our self-image, the sense we have of ourselves as a culture, as a civilization, is very profoundly rooted and grounded in our understanding of our past, and that’s why, unfortunately, our civilization sees itself as the apex and the pinnacle of the human story.

59:20 In a sense the whole human story was all about us, and we take great pride in our incredible achievements, and our scientific achievements are incredible, they’re kind of magic in many ways, I wouldn’t put that down for a moment, but the mistake is thinking that it was all about us and that we were what it was all leading to. If it became clear to everyone that actually there had been a former high civilization way back during the Ice Age, and it was knocked down and gone, and no matter what efforts it made, even though it was able to pass down memories and traditions and teachings, it was gone, then the realization would come we could just as easily be gone. Maybe we should be a little more humble in the way that we function with this majestic garden of an Earth that the universe has gifted us with.

1:00:15 Maybe we should be spending a little less money on weapons of mass destruction so that we can kill one another in ever more inventive ways and a little more money on looking after this planet, and one of the ways we need to look after it is to pay attention to large chunks of rock that are orbiting on orbits that cross the orbit of the Earth. When I talk about the crossing of the Taurid meteor stream twice a year, this is a real danger, and many astronomers are waking up to this, and the calculations indicate in the next thirty years that we are going to face a number of substantial impacts out of the Taurid meteor stream. One that most people have heard of that happened, not within our lifetimes, but more or less happened in 1908, was the Tunguska event in Siberia.

1:01:08 It was a relatively small object out of the Taurid meteor stream that entered the Earth’s atmosphere, was calculated to be between 60 meters and 190 meters in width. It actually exploded in the atmosphere, it never hit the ground, it exploded in the atmosphere over, fortunately, a completely uninhabited part of Siberia, but what it did was it flattened 80 million trees across 2,000 square kilometers, an area larger than the City of London. And the astronomers who are working on this problem have pointed out, quite rightly, that if an object just of that size, 60 to 90 meters in width, we’re not talking a kilometer or three kilometers, and with quite a small object, if that were to blow up over a major city, everyone in that city would die, nobody would live, right out as far as the Ring Road, the whole of London would be gone, completely gone from a Tunguska-scale event.

1:02:09 And when we look back to what happened 12,800 years ago, we’re not looking at Tunguska-scale events, we’re looking at kilometer-scale events, not 60 or 90 or a hundred meters in diameter but one or two kilometers in diameter who come down. So I don’t want to spread gloom and doom, the fact of the matter is we can do something about this. My goodness, I mean, commercial interests are already looking at mining asteroids, it’s a practical proposition. We can move asteroids as well, we can move bits of comet that are on the wrong orbit, that are on a dangerous orbit, we can shift.

1:02:43 All it takes is the will, all it takes is a human species that is prepared to say we’ll set aside our wars for a moment because there’s a much bigger danger that affects all of us, and actually we can solve it quite easily if we put our minds to it. Yeah, but that’s not a popular narrative for politicians, defense companies, even technology executives, they would rather us worry about Instagram and these other things. Exactly, and they would rather have us all hating one another also, right, because that increases the power of the state, the more you can get your citizens to hate citizens of other countries, the less they’re paying attention to what your own politicians are actually doing.

1:03:20 So yeah, it’s not a popular narrative at all, and it’s a narrative that has been very much sidelined, and if there is a conspiracy I do see it there, but it’s driven by commerce more than anything. Right, which is one of the most powerful forces there is. You know, it’s interesting, because if you ask most people today and saying is your version of human history affect your decisions today, I mean, I think most people would say no, I’m open to lots of ideas, and yet everything in our core is we are the best civilization that’s ever been, you know, the dominators of the Earth, which is why we treat animals and the environment this way.

1:03:54 I mean, everything really is built on this version of history that we like to tell ourselves. I think it is, I’m largely unconsciously, people don’t think it through, we take it in with our mother’s milk, but this is how things are, and it leads to a great many problems in the world today which we need to change. The human, regardless of cosmic cataclysms, the human race is at one of those turning points right now. You know, we’ve reached this huge population, we have this technology, the whole world is in contact with one another, and all these petty-minded little politicians are sitting there trying to stir up hatred and fear and suspicion and make us constantly live in dread of other human beings and to forget the fundamental truth, the fundamental cliche if you like: we are all one family, we truly are all one family.

1:04:45 You can go anywhere in the world, to the remotest areas, and you will find that the same emotions and the same needs and the same hopes and the same fears that drive you and me are driving the people in that area as well. And you know what we need to do, I would say, is take advantage of this incredible instrument of the Internet, it’s already happening, recognize our common humanity, and, you know, retire those politicians, because they’re not doing us any good, they are not doing us any good, they are bad leaders, foul and awful. I think what’s needed is a recognition of how readily fortunate and blessed we are to live on this beautiful planet, and every minute of every day should be spent caring for it, caring for it, because if we don’t care for it it won’t care for us and will become just another dead end in the story of evolution.

1:05:42 It’s perfectly possible, we should not imagine because of our amazing tech that we’re around forever, far from it. If you look at the long picture in history you see that species come and go, and the human species could be one of those, and what a pity that would be, because what we don’t know about other planets, but what we know for sure on this planet, is that we are the thinking species that is able to understand what’s going on, it’s in a way the universe waking up to itself, that’s what humanity is, and to allow that to just be swept away by some cosmic disaster that we could easily prevent, or to allow it to be swept away because of some foolish war designed to inflate the ego or strengthen the power base of some obnoxious politician, what folly that would be, what stupidity that would be.

1:06:34 And it is an examination of the human ego and how it can destroy itself, but a lot of your work is based on, I guess. So I guess, I guess that’s why I find the past interesting, in the sense that it has messages to give us and lessons to teach us about the present, about what’s happening in the world that we live in today, and I don’t claim that I’m right in everything I say, but I do, who can be, you know, but I think what’s important is to question prevailing narratives all the time, and that’s what I’ve tried to do with my work in this particular field, is to question the prevailing narrative and to say, no, I don’t automatically accept that because you’re Professor X or Dr. Y, actually I’m going to look into this myself and find out what I can learn about it, and I see more and more that that’s how the general public feel as well, that people are rightly increasingly distrustful of so-called experts.

1:07:32 So we have this freedom of information here, and yet the things become more divisive on this side. Yeah, it seems to be, you know, and more abuse of the environment, more at war with each other, and a trade, and yet there’s also this more information, actually, with books like yours. Yeah, how do you put those two together in your head, that we live in a time, an extraordinary time of turmoil when all the cards have been thrown in the air and we don’t know yet how they’re going to fall, what’s going to happen, but I’m glad that one of those cards is, you know, my books.

1:08:03 Yeah, and I hope that they have some effect in leading people to think for themselves rather than accept, you know, the Orthodox opinion as the Word of God. It certainly isn’t. Do you think the Americans, who play both ends of those spectrums really well, freedom of information and divisive, this, how are they going to react to a book that starts saying that maybe you were a big part of this all happening, because it sounds like a very American thing to embrace that history.

1:08:32 Yes, and I hope that it’s part of the other American thing, which is embracing Native American culture, that’s happening now in a way that it didn’t happen in the past. There has been a big change in that area, and I think Americans are waking up to what was lost and the need to, you know, preserve what can be kept, because they were the wisdom keepers, they were the carriers of this information, and it was deliberately wiped out. Yes. I don’t know how this will be reacted to, but what I’m making in this book is a strong case, not only that there was a lost civilization but that its home base was almost certainly in North America, and I can even narrow it down, I would say we’re looking at the 500 kilometers south of Minnesota, in a strip right across North America, that area which was massively devastated in the floods at the end of the Ice Age.

1:09:35 If there was a culture there, nothing would have been left of it, it would all be gone. Wow. You know, you mention politics or politics there, in politicians, and I remember the very first time you were on the show, six and a half years ago, Graham, you said that I believe anyone running for president should have multiple ayahuasca ceremonies. I thought at least a dozen. A dozen, yeah.

1:09:58 And I remember that was such a powerful thing you said, and I asked you why, and it’s interesting how all of this kind of comes full circle, so you’re talking about things that happened twelve thousand years ago, thirty thousand, one hundred thirty thousand years ago, and yet it has ramifications of what we do today. You are no stranger to the spirit world and plant medicine world, and it’s another fascinating part of who you are, but you would have this almost strangely parallel journey where you wrote nonfiction and fiction about the plant medicine experience. What did you mean by that, when the politician should drink that, because this is a whole part of your message?

1:10:33 Yeah, well, specifically with ayahuasca, which I’ve had a lot of experience with over the last sort of 15 years or so, one of the universal effects of ayahuasca, it’s very rare for this effect not to happen, if you’re prepared to persist with it, it might not happen on your first night, but if you work with ayahuasca over a period of a couple of weeks, that’s why I say a dozen ceremonies would be the minimum, one of the things it leads you to do is to look back on the whole course of your own life in depth and why you did certain things and why you said certain things, what your motives were and your reasons for doing things, and you suddenly find that you’re not that shining hero that you thought you were, you’re really not a very nice person at all.

1:11:20 Ayahuasca shows you that right in your face, it’s not like something you read in a book, it’s a direct experience of who you actually are, and that’s an incredible gift because if who you actually are is not a very nice person, therefore the first moment you have the opportunity to change that, you have the first, you’ve been shown the truth about yourself and you can either ignore it or you can work with it, and what I find with ayahuasca overwhelmingly, for people all around the world, is they don’t ignore it, they do work with it, they do try to incorporate those lessons they’ve learned. So I think it would be very hard for a politician, a head of state, to behave in the way the heads of state typically behave, riding roughshod over other people’s rights and interests.

1:12:12 I think it would be very hard for them to do that after a dozen sessions of ayahuasca, because they would be really questioning their own immortal destiny. What happens to me at the end of this? You know, when I come to the end of my life and I look back on it, am I going to look back and think, by and large, yeah, he was weak, he had problems, but by and large that was a person who did good things, or am I going to come to at the end of it and think, by and large I was a complete piece of all the way through my life and I made other people miserable?

1:12:43 Ayahuasca brings that to the front and it gives you the chance not to be that piece of, it gives you the chance to make the choice to live life in a different way, and that’s why I was trying to say, sorry, I would like to see it inside all leading politicians. And I think you said once that most of them would probably decide not to run for politics because they, I suspect, might see that it was an egoic pursuit and not a service. Yes, I suspect that most would not want to run for politics after a match in the White House ceremonies, the White House ayahuasca ceremony.

1:13:16 Yeah, that would be fun. Might see it in our lifetime, we might. We might three other things and your history with ayahuasca, because I think when you first came on the show you had just had some ceremonies in the last year or two and some talking about different plant medicines and cannabis, and I know you had some ceremonies last year as well. I went and had three ceremonies in Costa Rica last year, the second one the single most profound experience of my life.

1:13:39 Mm-hmm. Really powerful, a lot of lessons that I can still remember in exact detail now. Yeah, can you talk about it, about your history with that medicine? Yeah, well, my history with ayahuasca goes back to, as with so much in my life, to a book I wrote, and that book was Supernatural, which was published in 2005, which was looking specifically at the role of altered states of consciousness in the human story. It’s another one of those stories that’s very neglected because our society has been so opposed to altered states of consciousness, as we all know, our society will send us to prison for altering our consciousness with certain substances, has been very, very opposed to it, and an ideological war has been projected against substances that produce altered states of consciousness, not all substances.

1:14:33 I mean, Ritalin produces altered states of consciousness, is made by Big Pharma, it alters consciousness and it’s freely prescribed to hyperactive teenagers. Seroxat and Prozac are antidepressants making billions for Big Pharma, they also alter consciousness, they’re okay in our society apparently, even though they’re often associated with suicidal thoughts and suicidal behavior and all kinds of negative activities. But other substances which alter consciousness, like psilocybin or LSD or DMT, those are demonized by our society and is considered a terrible, terrible thing to, you know, to do, to get involved with those substances at all.

1:15:20 So we’re, you know, we’re confronting an ideological conflict around those substances, and what I have wanted to show is that really for thousands of years, thousands of years, human beings have worked with plant medicines. They have been an integral part of human culture, central to human culture, not something bad or wicked, not an aberration, but something central to the human experience which was nourishing and teaching. That’s why they called them teacher plants in the Amazon.

1:15:53 And then we have our society that comes along, it’s just this little blip, you know, of a hundred years of high-tech industrialized civilization, and it suddenly pronounces that this whole human heritage is completely wrong and that we should only take certain consciousness- altering drugs made by particular companies and nothing else, you know. So it’s a mind control exercise which is going on around these plants, and what I’ve realized as I’ve gone further and further into it is that all ancient civilizations were using means to alter consciousness, and that they were central to some of the best and greatest achievements of those ancient civilizations. There’s no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were deeply into visionary experience.

1:16:41 There’s an amazing relief from the second shrine of Tutankhamun where you see a row of three initiates, and they are connected to a star in the sky by rays that are coming right down into their foreheads. You know, this is a visionary realm, this is a visionary experience that they’re having, and oddly enough the Skidi Pawnee in North America have the same thing of star visions, that they will gaze at a particular star and suddenly that star will start to communicate with them, and of course everybody in modern industrial society just laughs down their sleeves at that, but maybe we shouldn’t be laughing down our sees, that maybe we should be considering that the depth of human experience is more than just material things and technology and our egos. Maybe there’s much more to it than that, and that’s why I got into ayahuasca, was to, well, I did not feel that I could write authentically about the plant medicines if I had not had the plant medicine experience myself.

1:17:44 When I then had the plant medicine experience I realized that this wasn’t just a research project for me, this was work on myself that I needed to do, and that’s why I’ve continued to work with ayahuasca. It’s not something I rush towards, as you know, it’s hard work, it’s physically hard work, it’s emotionally hard work, psychically hard work. There’s all the vomiting and the diarrhea, sometimes more, sometimes less, you know, if they say it’s not something that you rush towards in absolute delight.

1:18:15 It’s like, this is a lesson that I really need to learn and I’m prepared to put up with a certain amount of discomfort in order to learn that lesson, and even a certain amount of fear, because ayahuasca trips can be very scary too sometimes. Yeah, I had been five, five and a half years before I had went until last year, and it was amazing, as we talked about it a lot on the show, but I’d still been not, and I went and again really powerful, but again very painful, and yeah, but the emotions are very raw for me, and I’m good at compartmentalizing my emotions, but that’s not allowed in the ceremony, of course. No, it hits me deep, and that’s what we want for our politicians, we want them deep.

1:18:55 Yeah, we want them hit deep so they can make wiser, more loving and more nurturing decisions. Do you think the war on drugs is just another example of this non- conspiracy of commercial and the status quo interests just saying, you know what, let’s not go here, the same ones that don’t want to talk about a lost civilization or don’t want to talk about a comet hitting us again and destroying things? Do you think that same is like, it’s kind of an egoic reaction of our own selves?

1:19:22 I say I actually think the war on drugs is and was a conspiracy in the way that perhaps history isn’t, the deliberate conspiracy to justify the creation of a police state. That’s one of the things that the war on drugs has done. Yeah, you know that because somebody privately in their own home is smoking a certain substance, the police have the right to break down the door of that home, arrest that person, humiliate them, take them off to prison and ruin their lives, and the ideology that accompanies it says, and this is okay because taking drugs is a bad thing, that’s what we’ve been taught, you know, for so long.

1:20:08 I think that it’s partly in the interest of Big Pharma to keep the control of these consciousness-altering medicines in the hands of Big Pharma, and it’s interesting with the growing legalization of cannabis in America, it’s not going to be long before we see Big Pharma stepping into that marketplace as well. I’m trying to, and trying to take it over, tobacco companies are already starting, they’ve already starting. Yeah, yeah. What do you see with the legalization of cannabis in many states in America, there’s talk of psilocybin being legalized in Oregon, I don’t know if that’s going to happen.

1:20:44 What do you see, because we are seeing a change? Yeah, and what do you see we need to keep people looking half out for in those change? Well, first of all, anywhere in the world that takes away draconian, unnecessary laws and says to people, actually, what you do in your own home as long as you don’t do any harm to others is none of the state’s business, I have to applaud that. I have to applaud that, and I have to applaud the American people, state by state, who have refused to put up with it any longer and who’ve taken it to the ballot box.

1:21:17 It is something Americans are brilliant at and Brits are not good at, is this domestic-level action, getting things done at a local level, getting things changed, and with the state system in America you can do that, you can actually have a ballot proposition, people can vote, and lo and behold the law was changed. I just read recently that California has just gone through the process of expunging almost ten thousand criminal records, unnecessary criminal records, for people for possession of marijuana. You know, the great thing about that legalization is they are no longer burdened with that criminal record, and the message is being sent to the big state that actually the inner sanctum of an adult’s consciousness is none of the state’s business, none of the state’s business at all, and actually the state will pay a price if it makes it their business anymore.

1:22:10 So I think it’s a great thing that America has done there, that the American people have done this. This is not the American state that’s done this, this is the American people, state by state, making decisions for themselves, asserting their sovereignty over their own bodies, their own health and their own consciousness, and that’s a big wake-up call, because nobody was really thinking about the war on drugs in that way before. That actually it’s an intrusion on individual sovereignty, it’s an abuse of human rights that is going on there, and that’s the wakening up that’s taking place, and as a result of that wakening up the right of the state to intervene in our private lives is being questioned in lots of areas, lots of areas, you know, the state has to stay away from many things.

1:22:57 So I’m in favor, of course there are dangers, and, you know, Big Pharma, the commercialization and entering this arena, I’m not sure how I feel about that, it’s difficult to avoid it in our society. I think the great good has been the recognition that adults have sovereignty over their own consciousness and that the state has no right to interfere so long as they do no harm to others. I think that’s the great takeaway from what’s happening in America, and it’s unstoppable now and it’s going to affect lots of things beyond so-called drugs, in every way.

1:23:31 It’s a big change of attitude that’s taking place, and I take it as a sign of people waking up from a century of sleep, and I therefore take it as a positive sign. Yes, we must watch out for the dangers that come with Big Pharma moving in on this area and taking control of it, but we shouldn’t forget the huge benefits that have come from the courage of the American people in actually doing something about this instead of just sitting there passively and accepting that they are not sovereign over their consciousness. And will that carry over to the UK?

1:24:02 I think it will eventually. The UK is always very slow in this sort of area, but that same level of consciousness rise that has taken place in America is also taking place in Britain, and sooner or later politicians, that useless shower of no-goods, are going to have to accept it. Hmm, can you talk about your recent ayahuasca ceremony and what you might have learned from it? I know it takes time to process these things, there’s only been a few months, but can you talk about that?

1:24:35 My most recent ayahuasca ceremonies have been at a place called Rythmia in Costa Rica. I like going there because it’s really comfortable. I’ve drunk ayahuasca in the middle of the Amazon jungle, I have walked the walk, you know, but give me a nice clean bathroom and a shower afterwards and a pool to dive in and I will go for it. So I’ve been drinking ayahuasca there. I took a pause in 2017 because of my seizures, because I’d had the two bouts of seizures in 2017.

1:25:11 When I went to Rythmia, I think it was December 2017, I did not drink ayahuasca. That’s the first time I’ve sat in ceremony and not drunk. But I went back again a few months ago and I had five sessions of ayahuasca, and it wasn’t overwhelming in the way that it’s been before, and I wonder whether the anti-seizure medication that I’m taking may be moderating the effects of the medicine, and I’m thinking almost, it’s the kind of risky thing I’d do, but I’m thinking almost that the next time I go for ayahuasca sessions I might give up the levetiracetam, which is the name of the pharmaceutical drug that stops me having seizures.

1:26:02 I might give that up for a couple of weeks before going there. But they were gentle, beautiful, reflective experiences, not filled with tremendous visions, which I have had many times in the past, but more a reflection of what I’m doing here on this planet and what I need to do in order to exit this planet feeling good about myself. Okay, all right, and lessons you’re learning from scares, comments about your life, things to take things in perspective? Well, I just know that the main thing I do need to do is to stop living on the edge all the time and just chill out a bit.

1:26:44 I’m a very, very driven individual, I have been all my life. I used to be a journalist, I was driven, I was driven as a journalist, and as it became clear to me that books are my realm and where I express myself best, I guess I’ve been fairly driven too. A lot of people ask me how, you know, how do you write books, and the answer is one word at a time, you know, you’ve got to sit down there and do it, it requires focus, it requires determination, you can’t do it with wishful thinking, you’ve got to ante up and be professional about the project.

1:27:18 But then that has costs on the body. Well, look, I’m 69 now, I’ve got a lot of books behind me, I hope I have a few more books in front of me, there are more mysteries to explore and more stories to follow to their end, but maybe I don’t have to go, you know, quite so driven as I have been for the past quarter of a century. Do you think great art comes from struggle and pain? Do you think a near-death experience is how great art is created? I think great art does come from struggle and pain.

1:27:51 I think of course it’s possible to have great advances in life out of joy and joy and beauty, but struggle and pain have lessons to teach us as well, and we shouldn’t forget that. What are things on your agenda for the next 10 years, 15 years, things that you want to make sure you do before you go to the next level of consciousness? My wife and I have worked together all the way through this huge adventure. Santha is a very gifted photographer, her photographs have illustrated all of my books, for which I’m very privileged, and we have done one large photographic book together, which was called Heaven’s Mirror and was published in 1997.

1:28:34 We intend to do another one, to take Santha’s archive of hundreds of thousands of images from all of the incredible sacred sites all around the world and put them together into a big beautiful story, because there is so much beauty in the past, so much to bring out of the joy and warmth and beauty of the past, and I’d like to do that in a book, that’s one of my plans, and to be more present for my grown-up kids and to be a better husband. Yeah, all of those things are on the agenda, and, you know, have a bit of fun, have a bit of fun. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the research, because I do, I feel very blessed to have had the opportunities I’ve had in life, I’ve been very lucky in a number of ways, and I’m grateful to the universe for that luck.

1:29:31 I’ve tried to pay back by producing books that hopefully will make people think. There’s an awful lot of this field, there’s an awful lot of weak argument, there’s an awful lot of poor an evidenced speculation. I’ve tried to separate myself from that. It may sound, it does sound a bit egotistical, but really what I would like to do is rewrite history. I would like to see the narrative that has been stuffed down our throats for the last hundred years changed radically, and I’m trying to do so in the most serious and thorough manner I can, and that’s why I document everything that I set out in my books, that’s why there’s 1,500 footnotes in that book, because I want readers to know that they’re not dealing with light and weak arguments, that they’re dealing with solid material, and that whenever I make a factual statement they can go to the source and check, where did that statement come from, what’s it based upon.

1:30:31 I try to be as thorough as possible in doing this. Can you talk about your own dance with your own ego, because I remember in the very first episode of London Real you said I do have an ego. Yeah, I had Michael Pollan in here, who wrote a book recently about psychedelics, and he said, yeah, I know, he said ego is what got the book written, you know, because I could have gone to have these experiences but you would have never known about it. Correctly, you go, and you’ve always talked about that.

1:30:59 Sure, there’s a there’s a place for ego, the sense of what does ego mean, I am, the sense of I am, there’s that, there’s a place for that, but where it turns into the sense of I am better than everyone else, then then it’s a mistake. And whenever, well, I actually don’t think that, but if such a thought were ever to occur, oh, I’m a better writer than X or Y, I try to knock that thought flat, because it’s not helping me or anybody, it’s a wrong idea. There’s no better in this field, everybody has something to bring to the table.

1:31:34 Yeah, what are some of your daily habits now, with, you know, just trying to keep fit and keep good with what you’re doing, are there things that you do every day? America Before has I ruined my health. I used to exercise in a moderate way pretty much every day, a routine of various calisthenics, you know, the usual stuff, press-ups, leg lifts, things like that, squats, and I was keeping that up even when I started writing this book, but into the third month of writing this book the writing was so intense that I just couldn’t carry on doing the exercises anymore.

1:32:12 I just had to give myself up completely to the book and to the mass of research that has gone into making this book, there just wasn’t space in my life for doing that. One thing I’ve done very, very recently which is a new development for me is I’m trying to give up coffee. I was very addicted to coffee, I love coffee, I had my morning ritual of, you know, two cups of espresso with foamed milk, but I wonder whether it’s also part of this being wired up and just being too, you know, too stressed out, and whether it may be a factor in migraine headaches that I suffer from, which are related to the epileptic incident as well.

1:32:57 So with great reluctance I’ve stopped drinking coffee for about 10 days now, and chamomile tea is very boring by comparison with coffee, but possibly better for the health. Do you see, is there potential here though for a coffee-free life and a happy one? Yeah, okay, there definitely is, no doubt about it. Yeah, I stopped regular use about a year and a half ago and it was hard at first but now I’m happy about that. Yeah, but you maybe sometimes miss that jolt, but it definitely adds up to be a bit too much.

1:33:28 It definitely has something too much. All right, and you know, age is a factor that just comes along and takes a spice by surprise and it has to be taken into account, and it’s part of the glorious human experience, you know, just as I have a four-year-old granddaughter who is just embracing life in every way with such joy and such excitement, that’s one part of the human story, being 69 is another part of the human story. We have to be who we are, you know, and so I don’t kid myself any longer that I’m 40 or 30 years old, I know I’m 69 and I feel it, but like I said some moments ago, it’s not going to stop me, I’m going to keep going as long as I can.

1:34:08 Life is a wonderful gift, we shouldn’t waste a second of it. I think there’s a picture of you, maybe it’s on one of the back covers of Fingerprints of the Gods, but it’s you standing boldly at the top of one of the pyramids. Yes, it must be a 47-year-old, that was a 40-something-year-old Graham, yeah, that was Santha took that picture. Santha took that picture in probably 1993, so I would have been 43 years old at that time, and that was one of the five climbs that we made of the Great Pyramid, another great privilege for which I count myself blessed that I’ve had the opportunity to do that and to explore that astonishing, amazing monument.

1:34:49 Because you can’t do that anymore. Well, I don’t think so, you can’t. I climbed the pyramid illegally and legally, and it’s still possible to climb it illegally if you bribe the right people, but there’s nothing compares with the experience of being up there, unhand not worrying about the guys with the whistles, just experiencing that beautiful place. And I think unfortunately the legal climbs of the Great Pyramid have been withdrawn, they were very difficult, before people died every year climbing the Great Pyramid, so the Egyptian government was facing some embarrassment over this kind of issue, but I’m glad I had the chance to do it when I did, and also, as I probably mentioned to you in a previous show, to find my grandfather’s graffiti at the top of the Great Pyramid.

1:35:40 Yes, that was an exciting and special moment. But what I’ve come to realize really with this book, with America Before, is how everything is connected in the world, you can’t separate things off. You can go, and we will be going with some friends in a couple of weeks to Avebury stone circle, which is quite near where we live in Bath, and you can think of it as a totally British thing, but then as you start to do the research you realize that it’s not, that it’s part of a worldwide pattern, that something has been going on behind the scenes of three that we have missed, and my mission and my project, more than anything else, is to pull back those curtains.

1:36:28 If I would ask Santha or some of your good friends and ask him, what’s Graham’s superpower, how is he able to produce these works and do all the things you do and continue to, you know, be healthy, what would they say it is? Oh, I think if they were honest they would say there’s no superpower at all, none whatsoever. The great thing about the human race and one of the reasons why we’re still around is we’re very diverse, you know, people have different talents and skills and they can become very good at a particular talent or skill, and my talent or skill is writing books, but it’s not a superpower, it’s just what the universe gave me, you know.

1:37:07 I’m not a really good plumber or electrician, but I’m good at writing books, and I really value the work of good plumbers and electricians. And you work your craft, you work hard, work my craft. Yeah, and that involves absolutely walking the walk, doing the research, being out there in the field. I will not write about something I haven’t experienced, that’s not authentic, I have to see it for myself, and then it involves the dedication and the discipline to sit down and make those words flow out day after day, even when you don’t feel like it, and often you don’t feel like it, and all you’d like to do is just sprawl in front of the television and chill all day long, but if you’re going to write a book you can’t do that, you got a, we got to be at your desk and writing those words six months in a row, six months in a row.

1:37:57 What what keeps you awake at night these days, if anything? I’d like to say the state of the world, but it’s more complicated, it’s more complicated than that. At the end of our days we have to come to reckonings with the lives we’ve lived, and we have to remember that we were given a precious opportunity to be born in a human body, and what keeps me awake at night is what am I not done, what am I not done that I should do, who have I not how that I should helped, who have I been unkind to that I should have been kind to.

1:38:39 These are the thoughts that do keep me awake. As to the state of the world, I just live in a continuous fury at our politicians, at their stupidity, at their greed, and their hand in glove with big commerce in every way, at the way that they mislead us, infuriating, but we are waking up. Humanity is waking up, and if we get through the next 200 years there’s a beautiful future lying ahead. Are we going to get through it? It’s up to us, our choice, always was, always will be, always will be.

1:39:19 And do you think sometimes it’s a reflection of us, you know, some of these politicians and these policies, and sometimes it’s somehow some weird way of us not wanting to focus on what’s important or not reaching out to other human beings or not knowing we’re all one? Well, the politician who wants to advance his or her career will look for the lowest common denominator and multiply that, whereas in fact they should be looking for the highest and most beautiful things and multiplying that, but if ugliness and cruelty and hatred and suspicion serve their career, that’s what they’re going to dish up to us. Yeah, now that’s what’s wrong with the system, shouldn’t be like that.

1:39:56 And just back to that picture of the 43-year-old Graham, when you look at that man, and it’s a great picture, what do you see? Who was that guy then, and how are you different now than him? Look like you’re about to take over the world. Yeah, I guess I had this sort of absurd self-confidence throughout my youth and well into my 40s, and I guess it’s partly reflected in that picture, and I definitely learned humility since then. I’ve taken some heavy knocks, and it hurts, I’ve taken health knocks of a major kind, and I’ve had to put up with a great deal of deep unpleasantness and shir downright nastiness from people in the academic community who my work doesn’t jibe with and their friends in the media.

1:40:54 That has been a teaching experience for me, I had to learn from that, precisely because I’m not superhuman, I’m just another person and I have emotions and feelings just like everybody else, and what my life lesson has taught me is never take anything for granted and never be overconfident in yourself. Confidence is a good thing, I’m not against confidence, but don’t be overconfident where it becomes overweening and you lose your sense of proportion as to how things are. We’re all just small parts of a great family, and yet the worst is probably over when it comes to the mass-scale criticism you used to have, because you’ve got a body of work, you know, I’ve got people now opened up, you’ve got Enfamil more information out there.

1:41:42 Is it safe to say maybe that worst part, which was maybe late 90s, early 2000s, as me, is probably behind you? Yeah, I would say that worst part is definitely behind, because the evidence is moving in my direction because those who attacked me have to get to grips with that and deal with it, that the evidence base has changed. This is how paradigms shift, they shift when amass the mass of evidence that contradicts the existing paradigm becomes so huge that only a lunatic could cling on to the existing paradigms.

1:42:20 Paradigms don’t give up their grip on the human imagination easily, but they will ultimately be overwhelmed by my evidence, and I think that’s what we’re seeing in my field. I think we’re seeing a recognition that the human story is much more complicated and much more mysterious than we’ve been taught, that there are vast areas of the behavior and activities of our ancestors that we actually know nothing about whatsoever, and the more we look and the deeper we dig, the more the evidence comes out of vast antiquity for the human story and an incredible wisdom and knowledge. The presence of sophisticated astronomies and sophisticated geometries way back in remote prehistory should in itself be enough to lead historians to rethink the paradigm, but it takes more than that, and that information is just now coming to the boil, and I would predict not two hundred years but within the next 20 years we are going to see a very radical accepted shift in the way that prehistory is looked at.

1:43:36 Are you looking forward to living really long so you can see more of your theories proven correct? Honestly, I’m happy to live as long as the universe allows and as long as I can have fun and be a useful contribution. It would be nice to see these changes, but I feel content to the level that I know I’ve given it my best shot. I’ve done my best to expose areas of the past that had previously been obscured and to inject into the public dialogue thoughts, discussions, narratives that had not been considered before, and I feel that that has been a worthwhile activity, and it’s an activity that I will continue with as long as I possibly can.

1:44:22 Graham, I always ask a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if you could pick up the phone and ring that 20-year-old Graham Hancock and give that young man a bit of advice, I’m guessing this is maybe before you became even a journalist, I’m not sure, and tell them everything you know now or something, what would you tell these On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received, could have been from a parent or a friend or a writer, anything that comes to mind?

1:45:16 The best advice I’ve ever received is from my beautiful and amazing wife Santha, which is to remember that it’s all about love. That’s what it’s all about, everything else is secondary. Love is what it’s all about, and love is not words, love is action, love is giving, love is doing, love is seeing the need of another person and helping that person, and I’ve seen my wife deliver that love to all six of our children, you know, from the three broken marriages, deliver that love not in words saying love is a good thing but actually doing it.

1:45:54 That’s the most important lesson I’ve learned, and I’m still learning it from that great teacher who I’m luckily married to. It’s a great lesson, I’m still learning it too. Lastly, to that 20-year-old that’s out there listening to us, someone, the one that might pick up a copy of this book, advice to them, you know, they’re born into this new age, this young, you know, technologically advanced age, but yet also in this age where they can learn a lot of things they couldn’t have learned 20 years ago.

1:46:24 Yeah, um, advice to them, question everything, question everything, don’t accept anything at face value and use the amazing resources of information that we have around us to do your research thoroughly, but when you do your research thoroughly look at the sources that it’s coming from and evaluate them. Are they solid? Is this reliable information or is it not? The most important, the most important thing I would say to any young person going out into the world is do not do what you’re told, rebel, because that’s what we need young people for, we need them to shake up the world and to move it on.

1:47:05 Don’t be a passive sheep who simply accepts the narrative that is thrust at us by society, question everything, question everyone, and don’t do that questioning in a Linsey lightwei, do it in a thorough way. Investigate what you’re questioning and come at it from a place of authenticity. Um, never let fear, never let fear stop you. Hmm, they’re going to build the future, aren’t they? The book, you know, America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, it’s going to be out, I’m sure it’s going to be on Amazon.

1:47:34 Also you have an amazing website with all this information. Yes. How can people find out more? Well, my website, I have a big page on the book there, and of course the book is up on Amazon with detailed, detailed descriptions. It’s, as we’re talking, it’s on pre-order, but it’s going to be published very, very soon in April, and yeah, there’s a mass of information out there.

1:47:55 I’m also going to be doing a lot of public speaking over the next months. I’m going to be doing, I think, 11 cities in the UK, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto in Canada, and 25 cities in the US, so it’s a big, big journey, and I’m going to be speaking up the main issues in this book and why I feel this book matters. North America has been the most neglected area in the world in terms of our understanding of human prehistory. I think it needs to be moved right to the center of our understanding of human prehistory, and that’s why I’ve written this book.

1:48:35 Have you done that kind of a tour before? I’ve done big tours before, this is one of the biggest, few bigger. Yeah, sure. Well, I’m sure this is going to be a blockbuster like your others, people love you around the world, and I still remember the first episode you did with us six and a half years ago, I remember it because I think the week after we went to the Joe Rogan Experience, and then when everyone heard us on Joe Rogan, the first episode they downloaded was you on London Real.

1:48:59 Right, and everyone was raving about it, and the story, I thought people were coming up to us and it was a big deal, and so I just want to thank you for being a big part of our history. I remember preparing for four or five days for that episode, and when you came it was so epic and you were so honest, Graham, that’s what I love about you, you’re so honest about your own personal failings, you know, and it’s just really refreshing. It’s also amazing how you were not afraid to talk about plant medicine, psychedelics, when you know not in the interest of a writer’s career.

1:49:31 Yeah, and how you constantly challenge politicians, the war on drugs, you speak your truth, you’re honest, and now I’m finally putting it together that many of your messages are very similar, you know, we’re all one, love is the answer, let’s be honest with ourselves and that way we can under cells understand ourselves better. Well, thank you for saying that, and thank you for, thank you for saying that, you’re going to give me a big ego if you can. You know, you’ve been here, this is a fourth appearance on London Real and you’ve really chronicled our entire journey, so thank you so much, and thank you for coming on that first episode.

1:50:02 I remember waiting five or six months because I think you were in a writing process at the time. Yeah, and I remember thinking, well, what’s going on, and now it totally makes sense, so wishing you all the best for this book, I can’t wait to actually read this. Thank you, Brian, it’s been a joy to talk to you again, back in the London Real studio, very, very enjoyable. Great, until the next time, till the next, thank you for appreciated.