Graham Hancock - Ancient Apocalypse: The Most Dangerous Show On Netflix

Full transcript: Graham Hancock on London Real

2:36 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

2:49 My guest today is Graham Hancock, the British journalist, filmmaker and best-selling author. Your career began over 40 years ago as a writer for some of Britain’s leading newspapers, including The Times, The Independent, The Guardian and The Economist. But since 1990, you have dedicated your life to researching and exploring ideas outside the mainstream narrative, where you believe that much of what we are told about our history is wrong. As an author, you’ve written 26 books, including the international bestsellers The Sign and the Seal, Heaven’s Mirror, Fingerprints of the Gods and the sequel, Magicians of the Gods, which have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and been translated into 27 languages.

3:25 Your latest venture, the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, sees you visit archaeological sites across the world to uncover evidence of an incredibly advanced ancient civilization that you believe existed thousands of years ago. The show has been a massive success and featured in the top 10 most watched Netflix shows in 31 different countries. Graham, welcome back to London Real. Thanks, Brian. Good to be back with you.

3:51 Great to be here. It’s been just over 10 years since you were first here back in September 2012. This is your fifth appearance here. Yeah. And, you know, a few months ago I got this strange email where your production company was asking for a small little sliver.

4:06 That’s right. Of one of our shows together, and I honestly, I couldn’t have been more excited to get it to him. We just stopped everything here, we found it on the hard drives, and I was anticipating this series. We obviously had to keep everything quiet. Yeah.

4:18 And then to watch it drop on Netflix, to see it like number two in the world, to watch that opening shot where you’re walking people through your ideas, I just, it made me feel great. Good. And the fact that the whole world got to finally see 30 years of your research, and it’s been so well produced. You put so much work into going to these sites. I’ve been reading your books for years and I didn’t know a lot of the details of what you were talking about.

4:44 What’s this process been like of filming it, now seeing it, and then also dealing with all of the feedback or criticism that we say? I think it’s the, I think it’s the first time that a thoroughly researched alternative view of prehistory has been presented on a major platform. Of course, there are many shows which question the history of the human race, but my thesis is that we have lost an episode of our story, that during the Ice Age there was a civilization on planet Earth which was not an alien civilization.

5:31 It didn’t have anything to do with aliens. It was not any particular unique race of people. It was human beings who had risen slightly above the level of hunter-gatherer. The general view is that during the Ice Age our ancestors were entirely hunter-gatherers, and that’s not to say that they were unsophisticated or stupid. Hunter-gatherers are very smart people, and we still have hunter-gatherers living in the world today.

5:54 And actually, if our civilization were to collapse, which is by no means impossible, the people who would be most likely to survive on Earth are the hunter-gatherers, not us in advanced, so-called advanced industrial civilizations. I’m actually not talking about a super advanced civilization during the Ice Age. I’m not talking about a civilization that had cell phones or televisions or sent people to the Moon. I’m talking about a civilization that had reached a level of knowledge that is above that which we would normally expect for hunter-gatherers, and that level of knowledge includes exploration of the world and mapping of the entire world.

6:36 And part of the evidence I present is ancient maps which show the world as it looked during the Ice Age, and yet which have extremely accurate relative longitudes. Longitude is a problem our civilization didn’t crack until the middle of the 18th century. So the fact that there’s evidence of a map-making, global, exploring civilization during the Ice Age immediately suggests that they had at least reached a level of technology similar to our own level of technology in the mid-18th century, and I wouldn’t claim more than that.

7:12 What I’m interested in is the kind of knowledge that they focused on. There’s evidence for astonishingly advanced knowledge of astronomy deep in the last Ice Age, knowledge that could only result from really hundreds or thousands of years of consistent observations and detailed record-keeping of those observations. I can go into more detail on that, but it particularly concerns a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, which changes the rising times and positions and orientation in the sky of constellations, because the Earth is the viewing platform from which we view the sky.

7:49 Changes in the orientation of that platform change our perspective on the sky, and this is a regular cyclical process, but it’s very, very slow. It unfolds over a period of just under 26,000 years, a complete cycle, and to observe that and calculate it precisely and have exact knowledge of it is not something that archaeologists believe happened until the time of the Greeks, roughly 2,200 years ago, let’s say. But the evidence is that it was present during the Ice Age.

8:19 It’s present in cave art in the Ice Age, and it’s present in myths and traditions which come down from the remotest antiquity. And I’m not the only person saying this. Professor Giorgio de Santillana, who is Professor of the History of Science at MIT, and his co-author Hertha von Dechend, who was Professor of the History of Science at the University of Frankfurt, wrote an amazing book back in the ’80s called Hamlet’s Mill, which documents this extremely ancient knowledge of precession, and they, as a couple of historians of science, wonder out loud in there, but where did this come from?

8:55 And they can only conclude that there must be some lost ancestral civilization that had accumulated and acquired this knowledge, and that fragments of it were then passed down over thousands and thousands of years and finally entered into the historical record. So I’m not talking about a civilization that’s quote unquote advanced in the way we imagine ourselves to be. I don’t think we should be looking for any plastic bottles. I don’t think we should be looking for any remains of motor cars.

9:24 I think we’re looking for a civilization that was different from our own but that had a high level of achievement in areas that we ourselves have been, you know, relatively latecomers to. That’s the kind of perspective that I have on it. Don’t look for ourselves in the past, look for something different from ourselves but nevertheless was capable of doing things that archaeologists tell us nobody was capable of doing at that time. And this theory is something you’ve been thinking about and talking about for decades.

9:52 Yeah, I’ve been involved in it for a very long time. I mean, it started for me back in the ’80s, at which time I was a journalist, and my beat included Ethiopia, and I became interested in the, I was based in Nairobi in Kenya at that time, was East Africa correspondent for The Economist, and I came across the Ethiopian claim to possess the Lost Ark of the Covenant, which I found that archaeologists sneered at, and yet it was central to Ethiopian culture, and I began to investigate it. And as I began to look into it more deeply, I found that there was much merit to the Ethiopian claim, and eventually wrote a book about that which was published in 1992 called The Sign and the Seal.

10:36 But that was the first time that I’d stepped out of current affairs and used such investigative skills as I have to explore a historical mystery, and in that exploration I became aware of two things that I hadn’t been aware of before. Firstly, that archaeologists often do not do justice to the past, the sneering, condescending attitude to the Ethiopian claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant, just dismissing it out of hand without looking into all the underlying evidence that supports it, to my mind, is very shameful on the part of archaeology. They need to have more respect for the ancient traditions of cultures that they talk about.

11:16 So I realized then, back in the late ’80s and the early ’90s, that in archaeology I was dealing with a discipline which had a particular fixed view about the past and was not willing to widen that view out in any way. And the other aspect of that investigation, well, it took me to Egypt. You can’t tell the story of the Ark of the Covenant without considering the story of Moses and his Egyptian background. It took me to Egypt, and then I found myself for the first time in 1989 actually confronted by the majesty of the Great Pyramid and the mystery of it, and I was stunned.

11:56 I was just awestruck by this enormous, incredibly precise, beautiful thing, and I immediately wanted to find out what archaeology is saying about it. I found that same kind of very narrow, very limited focus in the archaeological accounts. They insist that it was the Great Pyramid, it was built as the tomb for a specific Pharaoh, when in fact there’s no evidence that it was built as a tomb for a specific Pharaoh. In fact, there’s 100-plus pyramids in Egypt and no body of any Pharaoh has ever been found in any one of them.

12:29 There was great excitement when they found a sealed chamber inside the Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara, and in it a sealed sarcophagus, and the hope was that they would find the body of a Pharaoh inside there. When they broke it up and the sarcophagus was empty, there was, it had never been looted, it was totally locked and closed, but it was empty. So it’s a great mystery about these things, the evidence that the pyramids were built as tombs, particularly the Old Kingdom pyramids, particularly the Pyramids of Giza.

12:55 The evidence that they were built as tombs is extremely flimsy, and yet that is the story, that is the narrative that archaeologists present. And my feeling was, I need to question this narrative. I need to look at, nobody’s questioning this narrative, somebody has to question it and say, well, does it really make sense when you’re building a tomb for a Pharaoh? Yeah, I get it that you want to build something big and impressive, but would you go to all the trouble of aligning it within a tiny fraction of a single degree of true north?

13:26 I mean, that is a major technological achievement, to get your pyramid, which weighs six million tons and has a footprint of 13 acres, aligned very precisely to true north within 360th of a single degree. Nobody’s going to know that. Your monument is going to look equally impressive if it’s five degrees off true north, but the very great care that was taken to do that suggested to me that there’s something going on with the heavens and the sky. And then of course I came across Robert Bauval’s really important work, the Orion Correlation Theory, which shows that the pattern of the pyramids on the ground represent is a model of the three stars of the belt of the constellation of Orion.

14:08 And Orion wasn’t just any old constellation, it was the figure of the god Osiris in the sky as far as the ancient Egyptians were concerned. So Egyptological arguments that this is just a random coincidence are completely defeated by the fact that the constellation chosen was the single most important constellation in the Egyptian system. And then furthermore, the orientation of the pyramids on the ground in their relation to the three stars of the belt in the sky only becomes perfect 12 and a half thousand years ago.

14:44 It’s not perfect four thousand five hundred years ago when the pyramids are supposed to have been built. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that the pyramids were built 12 and a half thousand years ago, but what I am saying is that there was a deliberate intention to use the language of astronomy and monumental architecture to memorialize a specific time, and that specific time, when you look at the astronomy, is roughly between 12,800 years ago and 11,600 years ago. Things move slowly in the sky.

15:15 It’s an epoch, it’s not a moment. It’s an epoch of about 1,200 years, and that epoch turns out to have been a cataclysmic epoch on planet Earth. It’s known to geologists now as the Younger Dryas. So I’ve just gradually worked my way into this subject, and my purpose has been, I feel that archaeologists have enjoyed a monopoly on the narrative of the past. They are the ones that we in our civilization entrust with telling us the truth about the past, and we’ve got into the habit of not asking them questions, of not questioning their pronouncements about how the past worked.

15:56 And I felt that there was a role and a need for somebody who, in an intelligent, thoroughly worked out, thoroughly referenced and sourced way, would question the mainstream archaeological narrative and specifically to consider the possibility that they’ve missed something really big in our past. And to me that’s where all the evidence points to. It’s like a black hole, you almost recognize it by its absence. There’s something missing in the past, and there’s loads of anomalies that come down from that, that can only be explained by a forgotten episode in the human story.

16:29 So I’ve made it my business to be an advocate of that position, to question the mainstream narrative and to offer an alternative narrative. And I don’t insist that people believe me, I just want to add it to the mixture of information that people receive so that there’s not this monopolistic control of information on our past that archaeologists have undeservedly enjoyed for the last century or so. And what was the reaction early on, kind of Fingerprints of the Gods type of time?

16:57 This is pre-internet as well, which is easy. Yeah. And yet the book sold massively worldwide. It did. That’s probably where you first started feeling the resistance.

17:07 Yes, it’s when I first started noticing that archaeologists respond to my alternative narrative not actually by deconstructing that narrative but simply by making statements of authority. Hancock is wrong. A hundred years of archaeology has not found any evidence for a lost civilization, therefore his claims are bogus. And then they started to add to that, Hancock is a pseudoscientist or a pseudo-archaeologist. These are labels.

17:36 First of all, you come from a position of authority and say, we’re archaeologists, we know everything, this man is an outsider, he’s just a journalist, what does he know, don’t even listen to him. And then secondly, when you find that people are listening to him, you then attach a label to him and say he’s a pseudo-archaeologist or a pseudoscientist, as though I’m pretending to be an archaeologist or a scientist. I don’t pretend to be an archaeologist or a scientist.

18:00 I don’t want to be an archaeologist. I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I am investigating a story where one narrative has controlled people’s understanding of the past for far too long, and my purpose is to provide an alternative narrative, and I do so as a journalist. So I object to being called a pseudo-archaeologist or a pseudoscientist.

18:22 It’s ridiculous to label me with that. But it’s a very clever way to dismiss an opponent’s work, is to say, oh, he’s just a false example of what we really are, and just hope that people say, oh, he’s a pseudoscientist, will not investigate this any further. Somebody hears my name for the first time and may be remotely interested in the ideas that I put out. Very first place they’re going to go is Wikipedia. I went there this morning.

18:48 Yeah. And the Wikipedia page will announce that I’m a promoter of pseudoscientific theories, first line, first line, right up there in the front. And so the purpose of that is, the purpose of that is to get people who might be interested in my work to switch off right away and not take it further. And it’s a deliberate purpose, because Wikipedia pages are generally editable, but my page is not. You can’t make edits on my page.

19:11 There’s a team of moderators who closely control the page, and anybody who attempts to edit it, all edits are rejected. The page is locked and controlled by moderators who include archaeologists and friends of archaeologists. So actually Wikipedia is a hive of censorship. Wikipedia is not serving up an honest, unbiased, objective approach to my work. What Wikipedia is serving up is the view of a small group of archaeologists about my work.

19:41 That’s what’s happening. This is not an encyclopedia in that sense. I mean, it makes me wonder, I happen to know my own story and I happen to know, you know, the facts of that, but it makes me wonder about every other single fact that Wikipedia presents. Is the whole thing agenda driven? Is it serving the interest of a small specific interest group who have taken control of that page?

20:04 I think Wikipedia need to change their policies. They should not, they should not allow one side of a debate to control what is supposedly an encyclopedia talking about that debate. Both sides should have their say if it’s to be balanced in any way. Yeah. Wikipedia has completely conflicting narratives all throughout that I don’t trust anything they say.

20:27 And unfortunately, with the title and the name, it shows us if it promotes itself as some unbiased absolutely. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I know from my own experience that it is deeply biased and totally unobjective, and I suspect that that is true with many other Wikipedia articles as well. So these days if I do want to search information on a subject and Wikipedia comes up as the first hit, I may look at what they say, but I’m going to check very carefully, I’m going to check very carefully the authenticity of what they’re saying.

20:58 And it’s most unfortunate because Wikipedia could be a beautiful thing, but it should not, it should not taint itself by handing over pages to particular interest groups who have skin in the game and wish to put another interest group down. And it usually gets top five, top ten search, that’s the problem always, and people just trust it for some reason, and it’s just as co-opted as any other social platform with all sorts of strange agendas and all sorts of strange actors in the back with, you know, with false names that are trying to push their agenda. Yeah, yeah, it’s so just as a note, and I took a look this morning just because I wanted to see, and I couldn’t believe the very first line.

21:40 It’s Graham Hancock, pseudoscience. Yeah. It’s like, okay, this guy’s been writing books 30, 40 years. Yeah. He’s got a massive show on Netflix, he’s got a massive following, and that’s the way you want to introduce him to the world?

21:51 Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then when they do their coverage of the Ancient Apocalypse series, they solely quote hostile archaeologists. They don’t look at anything else as though that is just, anything that an archaeologist says is an absolute unquestionable fact. That’s how they present it, because that’s what we’re supposed to find in encyclopedias, is absolute unquestionable facts. That’s what we expect to find.

22:13 So if Wikipedia produces a page which cites hostile comments from archaeologists, members of the general public are going to think, oh, that’s a fact, but it’s not a fact, it’s an agenda driven position of a certain group of archaeologists. Now, Graham, you’ve been dealing with this since the ’90s, has it changed at all over the years? No. It for years and years it almost got quite boring actually, the pseudoscientist thing. I’ve given up trying to do anything about that.

22:43 There’s just no point. Wikipedia cannot be persuaded at all on that, because there’s a specific interest group that want me labeled as a pseudoscientist. It serves their interests, and they’re the ones who protect and defend that page and don’t allow any balance to be entered into it. But that’s been going on for so long that I’ve kind of got used to it, and I think that my audience, those who know my work, are aware that what Wikipedia and other archaeologist-based sources are saying is not true.

23:16 But the concern obviously is that people who don’t know my work and who might find my work interesting will be turned off right at the outset by this propaganda campaign. That’s actually what my page on Wikipedia is, it’s a propaganda campaign by a particular interest group who want to see me marginalized. What’s happened with Ancient Apocalypse, with the Netflix series, is that the whole thing has ramped up to another level. I think the problem all along has been that archaeologists see me and my work as a threat to them and as a threat to public perception of who and what they are, and because my work is thoroughly researched, typically in one of my books you’re going to find 2,000 footnotes.

24:04 I don’t state facts without referencing the source. People can follow that up and see whether the source is worthy or not. The point about it, the point about it is that I have consistently and coherently presented an alternative narrative which is thoroughly worked out and thoroughly researched. I don’t just sit in an armchair, I get out into the field and investigate in the field what I’m talking about. When I wanted to write a book about sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age and the possibility that structures were submerged beneath the sea, the sea level rose 400 feet at the end of the Ice Age, 27 million square kilometers of land that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now.

24:49 Well, in order to investigate that I did seven years of scuba diving all over the world. I am a boots on the ground researcher. So it’s very offensive to me to find a Wikipedia page which says that I’m promoting pseudoscientific and pseudo-archaeological theories. I am a journalist, I do my legwork, I do it thoroughly, and because I do it thoroughly, archaeologists are threatened by it, and the response to that threat is to try to marginalize and minimalize me as much as possible but not to engage with my work.

25:24 So I was a big enough threat already with best-selling books, but now suddenly there’s a Netflix series being viewed all over the world by millions of people, and this has resulted in an almost hysterical kind of immune reaction from the archaeological community, who again are not actually refuting anything that I’m saying, they’re using labels. So now the latest label is to say that Hancock’s theories support racism and white supremacy. I couldn’t believe that when I read that.

25:57 I couldn’t believe it either. And again I have to say, I’m a human being with feelings. I’m married to a woman of color, I have four mixed-race children, I have seven mixed-race grandchildren. To be accused in public platforms of promoting racism and white supremacy gets me right in the heart, especially when it’s based on a completely flimsy and non-existent argument. So what it comes down to is that in Fingerprints of the Gods, I report, back in 1995, I reported a number of indigenous traditions.

26:31 Those traditions were recorded by Spaniards in Mexico and in Peru in South America shortly after the conquest. They’re part of the earliest documentation that we have, and in those traditions there were frequent references to a white-skinned bearded figure. In South America he’s called Viracocha, and in Mexico he’s called Quetzalcoatl, and I simply reported those traditions as they had been passed down to us from the indigenous people, translated by Spanish interpreters and then passed down into tradition.

27:10 The argument of archaeologists is that by reporting those traditions I am supporting white supremacy. To me that argument, they’re simply dismissing the local traditions. They’re right, it in a way it’s they who are being racist by denying these traditions, and they seem to be going back to try to rewrite the past. So the movement now, the argument now amongst archaeologists is to claim that all of those traditions were interfered with by the Spaniards, that the Spaniards served the Spaniards’ interests, that the bearded civilizing figure should also have a white skin.

27:46 But I find no evidence for that whatsoever. I find lots of archaeologists arguing that and saying we think this is what happened, but I don’t find any facts. So I will stick with indigenous traditions that were recorded within 20 years of the conquest by major figures like Bernardino de Sahagun, who’s regarded as an absolutely authentic, authoritative commentator working with indigenous peoples in Mexico right after the conquest. He reports these traditions of the white-skinned bearded civilizer, and I’m simply passing that on to my readers.

28:19 An archaeologist may wish to say that those traditions were modified by the Spaniards, they’re welcome to say that, but they haven’t proved it, and until it’s proved I would prefer to stick with the authenticity of the indigenous traditions, and that’s what I’ve reported. But the funny thing is that in Ancient Apocalypse I don’t mention anything about race at all. Race is not mentioned in any way. I to me, I’ve never understood the racist mentality. It’s been my privilege and my opportunity to travel the world for almost all of my working life and to live amongst different communities of people all around the world, and what I find is that people are the same everywhere.

29:03 The skin color is the least important aspect of a human being. People are the same everywhere, heart and soul, the same hopes, the same dreams, the same fears, the same ambitions. Doesn’t matter if you’re amongst hunter-gatherers in the Namibian desert or in the Amazon rainforest or if you’re in the middle of a big city, we’re all basically the same. What unites us is far greater than what divides us. And the point I often make is, why do we regard skin color as important?

29:30 What is the reason for this? Skin is a large physical organ, it’s supposedly the largest organ in the body. Why don’t we concentrate on another large organ? Let’s look at the colon, for example. Would it be rational to divide people up according to the length of their colon?

29:45 You know, if you’ve got a colon that’s half an inch shorter than somebody else’s, somehow you’re less advanced or less superior than them. It’s a ridiculous idea to take a physical characteristic and use that as the prime definition of a human being. So I think that the issue of race is fundamentally a deeply unimportant issue in this area. What we need to be doing as a human species is moving forward and realizing what unites us, our similarities at the level of DNA.

30:19 We’re all incredibly closely related, but at the level of being human creatures, we’re all incredibly closely related as well, and it’s a false dilemma to impose race on this. Let’s focus on the human creature. Does it show you how desperate they are, the more ridiculous these claims become? I think it does. I think it’s a desperate strategy by archaeologists.

30:41 So we didn’t succeed in turning people off his work by calling him a pseudo-archaeologist or a pseudoscientist. Clearly we didn’t succeed in turning people off his work because he’s got this Netflix. So what can we do to turn people off his way? Oh, let’s call him a racist and a white supremacist. You know, let’s let’s look at a couple of indigenous traditions that he reported 20 years ago and let’s say that on the basis of that Hancock is a racist and a white supremacist.

31:07 It’s a cheap trick, it’s a low blow, but that’s what I’ve come to expect in this field. And it’s odd the way that this story about the past is getting co-opted by modern American culture wars, which is completely unnecessary. I’ve heard even accounts of archaeologists now who will not sex the skeletal remains of human beings who they excavate in ancient sites. They will no longer commit to saying this is a man or a woman, because that might be sexist, you know.

31:43 This for this kind of dialogue to enter into the archaeological field, where we start using our particular modern perception, a relatively recent one, and we want to impose it on the past and we want to rewrite the past so that it fits with how we think it should be today, that’s a mistake. The past should be allowed to speak for itself, and when the past speaks for itself, it’s beautiful, it’s clear, it’s open and it tells the truth. Humans have always tried to use history to support their current agenda.

32:12 Yeah, yeah, and this is just that happening on a scientific level. Yes, but it’s so petty. Yeah, it’s so, it’s so productive. Is it? And it’s such a, it’s such a waste of time.

32:21 How much more interesting it would be, rather than archaeology simply trying to dismiss me as a crank, as a pseudoscientist and as a supporter of racism and white supremacy, why not get to grips a bit with the ideas that are involved here? Why not? Why not consider the possibility that there might be a lost civilization deep in our background? The Ice Age was a very strange time, it was a very tumultuous time, and the end of the Ice Age was a huge global cataclysm.

32:52 There’s just no doubt about that whatsoever. And weirdly, the beginnings of what archaeologists think of as civilization begin immediately after the end of the Ice Age, 11,600 years ago. Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, the appearance of agriculture there. I think what we’re looking at is a reboot of civilization at the end of the Ice Age. I think something was lost during the Ice Age, there were survivors, they attempted to reboot, and we’re seeing the evidence for that.

33:21 I don’t think we’re seeing the origins of civilization at the end of the Ice Age. I think we’re seeing a reboot of a civilization that existed previously. Now why don’t they go to the locations, you win at each episode of the series, and have these conversations with you? Because it’s fascinating, you went on location in so many different places around the world, wouldn’t that be a way to debate you? And I know you’ve asked for it.

33:44 Well, let me be clear about that. Well, yeah, first of all, I’m very willing to debate. There is a particular archaeologist who’s called John Hoopes at the University of Kansas who’s been stalking my work for 30 years, very much involved in the pseudo-archaeologist and pseudoscientist thing, and who even before the Netflix series was released had Kansas University put out a press release saying that he was ready to talk to the press about how my work supports racism and white supremacy.

34:15 This is even before he’s seen the series, a series which once he’s seen it he discovers that there is actually no mention of race whatsoever in the series. Then he claims to know my mind and says that Hancock is simply cleverly disguising his racist views by not mentioning it. So whether I mention race or not, he’s determined to label me as a racist and as a white supremacist. Now when I was on The Joe Rogan Experience with Randall Carlson and Joe a few weeks ago, Joe suggested, why not have a debate?

34:49 And we’ve done a debate on The Joe Rogan show before with Michael Shermer, which is quite an interesting debate actually. Yeah. And we put out that call, but it became clear to me that the majority of archaeologists who’d responded to that call were not people who’d been engaged with my work, were not people who had been following my work for 30 years, who pronounced themselves in a press release as an expert on my work and who’d labeled me as a racist and white supremacist.

35:17 So my feeling was, the person I want to debate live on The Joe Rogan Experience in front of millions of people is John Hoopes from the University of Kansas. Let him put his money where his mouth is. He’s been saying all these things about me from behind his keyboard, he’s been doing everything possible to smear my name and my reputation. If he really feels strongly about it, if he really has something to support what he’s saying, let him sit in front of me in a live recorded debate.

35:44 Let him sit in front of me and we’ll talk it out face to face. So I issued that invitation and he immediately declined. He says, I have nothing to debate with you, I don’t debate metaphysics with science. But he’s willing to just spend 30 years smearing my work, but he’s not willing to meet me face to face. That in my view, I call a spade a spade, that is cowardice, that is intellectual cowardice.

36:09 The unwillingness to back up one’s loud mouth in a face-to-face encounter is cowardice, and I’m not going to debate any other archaeologist live on Joe Rogan’s show. The moment that John Hoopes, my principal critic, chooses to come out of the shadows and meet me face to face, I will debate him on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Joe has made that platform available for that. But I don’t want any of these other minor figures who are simply trying to ride off my reputation to boost their own profile.

36:38 I want the main antagonist, and that’s John Hoopes from the University of Kansas. And John Hoopes from the University of Kansas is a coward, and I would say, you know, John, if you’re watching, listening to this, you probably will, is that you’ll get a fair shot on that show. You know, and Joe’s had you and Shermer before, and that’s actually probably one of the fairest places you could go. Yes. And have an open-ended debate where you could talk for two, three hours and really get to the heart of it, and it’s probably the best chance you would have.

37:08 Exactly. If John Hoopes believes so strongly in his own position, he’s got an incredible opportunity to put it forward there. He’s got the opportunity, if he’s in a strong position, he’s got the opportunity to defeat me in a debate, to do a great service for archaeology, which he claims to be doing, but he won’t do it, and that speaks to me of something very strange about this individual and about archaeology in general. Because the best way to sort out a disagreement like this is face to face in a three-hour conversation.

37:36 Then the weaknesses and flaws in each side will become apparent, they can’t be hidden in any way, and I’m ready for that. But unfortunately my principal archaeological critic, John Hoopes from the University of Kansas, is too cowardly to participate in that debate. Well, I encourage the rest of the community that is throwing, you know, darts and arrows at you to encourage him to do this so we can just get this played out. Let me ask you a question. Do you find the younger archaeologists, the students that are starting off, to at least have more of an open mind to your work, or they might engage with that work, or is that institution in this camp that we can only exist and continue to get funded, which might be an issue as well, if they completely don’t engage with the world?

38:17 It’s complicated. I have come into contact with quite a number of younger archaeologists working on digs at various sites that I visited, and I’ve had some very freewheeling, open, off the record conversations with those individuals, and many of them have read my work, and many of them say that they’re interested, that they’re interested in the idea of a forgotten episode in the human story during the Ice Age. But they’re not in a position to do anything with it, because the moment they start trying to do something with that, they’re going to bump head on into the senior archaeologists upon whom their future depends.

38:55 Will they get grants for their field work? Will they get promotions? All of that will be stripped away if they start even looking into the claims that I’m making of a forgotten episode in human history. So institutionally it’s very difficult for young archaeologists, even though they may disagree with the system, it’s very difficult for them, if they want to pursue a successful career in archaeology, it’s very difficult for them to turn against the paradigm, to turn against the mainstream narrative.

39:24 And there’s so many examples of this where archaeologists have had the guts to actually say, I think we’ve got things wrong and we need to look again. And the classic example is so recent, is the claim of archaeology that the culture that they know as the Clovis culture was the first, where the first inhabitants of the Americas, the so-called Clovis First theory, which dominated American archaeology for 50 years, claims that there were no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years ago, and that this so-called Clovis culture, which is only called the Clovis school, we don’t know what they call themselves, but the first artifacts associated with this culture were found at a place called Blackwater Draw in New Mexico, and the city of Clo, the town of Clovis is nearby there, and that’s where the archaeologists used to go to get a drink.

40:25 So they called it the Clovis culture. We don’t know what that culture called itself. They made beautiful spear points and arrowheads from flint and other materials. So they’re the artifactual evidence for their presence begins 13,400 years ago and ends dramatically 12,800 years ago, which is the beginning of the Younger Dryas cataclysm. And for decades it was the absolutely rigid and fixed mainstream view of archaeology that there were no human beings in the Americas before Clovis, none before 13,400 years ago.

40:59 Then Jacques Cinq-Mars up in the Yukon finds evidence, compelling evidence, that human beings have been in the Americas for at least 24,000 years. Okay, what happens to him is that his career is destroyed. This is in the ’80s and ’90s. He’s putting out these new fires that he’s made at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon, and what happens to him is that his colleagues in archaeology literally destroy his career. Nobody will speak to him, he’s shunned in corridors if he passes colleagues, his research funding is stripped away, he’s accused of all sorts of marvel his aunts, as though he’s somehow making the whole thing up, exactly the same kind of that’s being poured at me.

41:41 And then as the years pass, a new excavation is done at Bluefish Caves, and lo and behold, it’s suddenly recognized Jacques Cinq-Mars was right. Too late, too late to save him from the humiliation and the destruction that he went through. So there’s a lesson for every archaeologist in what happened to Jacques Cinq-Mars. If you go against the mainstream, you are going to pay a very heavy price for it, and therefore most young archaeologists have no incentive to go against the mainstream, even though in their hearts they may know that there is something to be done.

42:16 And the funny thing with the Clovis First model now is archaeologists are now, this is typical of this, they’re not saying, oh, we knew it all along, we always thought there were people in the Americas before Clovis, so we got rid of that debate in the 1990s. Rubbish. There are still stories being published today saying Clovis First model finally debunked, stories published in 2020 and in 2022. You know, this is, it’s like a zombie that keeps on popping up again.

42:41 It still has its advocates, and to claim that archaeology got rid of that in the 1990s is ridiculous. It remained a strong thesis in archaeology right through into 2010, even 2015. Academia is such a strange place, it’s so Orwellian, and, you know, I’ve had conversations over the years and I’ve talked to people in academics, sometimes when it comes to even psychedelics, and they said, I can’t talk about that, I’ll lose everything in there. And I think we send, we have our experiences at university and we just think that there’s always, you know, everyone doing good there, but it’s a very treacherous and dangerous place to be if you speak out.

43:15 It’s a very treacherous and dangerous place to be because particular theories, and this is, it’s I think it’s probably true across all the sciences, but I think it’s particularly true with archaeology, and there I have to raise a question mark over whether archaeology is rightly defined as a science at all. I’m not sure that it is a science, because there’s so many things about it that can’t be tested in scientific ways. Basically what archaeologists are doing is they’re dealing with relatively small amounts of material that they dug up out of the ground from relatively small amounts of sites, and they are then drawing conclusions from that, which are their conclusions, which they then present as a narrative which magically transforms into statements of fact.

44:00 These are not statements of effect, they’re statements of opinion based on a particular interpretation of a particular set of artifacts. That’s what we’re dealing with with archaeology, and I don’t think that that’s science particularly. So when it comes to prehistory, when it comes to the time of the Ice Age, really you move from the domain of archaeology into history the moment that you start having written documents. When you have written documents that have survived, if you can translate those documents, and you can’t always, we have never translated the Indus Valley script, for example, but when you can translate them you can begin to get a fair sense of how history was unfolding at that time.

44:38 But from a time where no documents have survived, from the Ice Age, you’re dealing with very limited interpretations and very limited data sets, and it’s not just it’s not just the limited interpretation. Archaeology would like us to believe that they have a full enough understanding of humanity during the Ice Age to absolutely write off, without any need for further investigation, the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age. That is the archaeological position.

45:13 If you actually look at their attempts to refute my Ancient Apocalypse series, it all boils down to, we are archaeologists, we know the facts, Hancock is wrong, go away. Okay, but here’s what bothers me about that. There’s so much of the world that archaeology has never looked at or never looked at properly, and I think it’s important to give specific examples. One that’s one that, as I mentioned earlier, I devoted seven years of my life to scuba diving.

45:41 That’s because of the 400-foot sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. Now, the best real estate on Earth during the Ice Age was along the coasts. That was the place to be. There were all the resources of the sea to harvest. That was where people would naturally have migrated to.

45:56 These lands were covered by rising sea levels, and when sea level rises you have a period of very high energy, the intertidal zone, when the waves are breaking against any structures, they’re destroying them and pounding them. What tends to get left is only big megalithic structures. And I followed that up by talking to local fishermen, talking to local divers in many, many places who’d spotted anomalous things, and they took me diving onto sites which are definitely man-made, massive structures under the water.

46:27 As far as I know, I’m the only person who’s ever devoted seven years to actually investigating the possibility that there are submerged structures from the Ice Age. Archaeology just doesn’t do that. They are interested in marine archaeology, but they have, because they don’t believe that there’s anything interesting to discover during the Ice Age, their primary focus is on shipwrecks from the Middle Ages, and most of the funding for marine archaeology goes into searching for shipwrecks, not into looking for a lost civilization that they don’t believe existed.

46:58 Well, I spent seven years doing that, and I produced the visual evidence that there are structures underwater submerged by as much as 30 meters, in some cases 40 meters. I’m a fairly good diver, but I’ve never learned to use mixed gases. It would be nice to get down beneath 40 meters. 40 meters is the maximum method you can dive with using compressed air, but we’re talking about 120 meter rise in sea level at the end of the Ice Age. I’ve been 40 meters down and I found massive evidence for huge structures at that time.

47:30 So the point I’m making is that archaeology cannot, it cannot claim to have absolute knowledge, sufficient knowledge to write off a possibility of a civilization during the Ice Age when it really hasn’t investigated the submerged continental shelves at all. There’s hardly any work that has been done, a little bit now, there’s some looking at this area called Doggerland between Britain and continental Europe that was exposed during the Ice Age, but really almost nothing. So there’s 27 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface, 10 million square miles, that was highly populated and highly attractive real estate during the Ice Age which archaeology is not looking at properly.

48:08 Then there’s the Sahara Desert, green during the Ice Age, 9 million square kilometers, nine million square kilometers, that’s bigger than China, you know, 9 million square kilometers of the Sahara Desert hardly been looked at by archaeology, even though we know that the climate of the Sahara Desert was congenial and attractive to human beings. There were huge lakes and river systems in the Sahara Desert during the Ice Age. How can they possibly claim to have complete knowledge, or let’s not say complete knowledge, to have sufficient knowledge of the past to be able to write off any possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age when they haven’t looked at the submerged continental shelves, and the archaeology that’s been done in the Sahara is absolutely minimal.

48:49 And that leaves one other area, which is the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon rainforest, seven million square kilometers, tragically there’s only about five and a half million square kilometers left that are still under dense canopy. Almost no archaeology has been done in those five and a half million square kilometers. New findings from LiDAR, light imaging and detecting ranging, looking down through the canopy, is finding enormous structures on the camera under the canopy, evidence of huge cities that once existed in the Amazon, and up till now very little archaeological follow-up.

49:23 Archaeologists are very keen to follow this up, and I hope they will, and I think that extraordinary facts about our past that have been hidden from us are going to emerge from the Amazon when the archaeology is properly done. But meanwhile, for archaeologists to say that they’ve got the past nailed and they can be absolutely sure there was no lost civilization during the Ice Age, I think they need to do more work in the Amazon rainforest, in the Sahara Desert and in the submerged continental shelves. That’s a huge area of the Earth that archaeology has never looked at at all, and I’m sorry, they’re in no position to write off the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age until they actually look.

50:01 Let’s talk a little bit about censorship, and I remember the time when TEDx took your talk off many, many years ago and put you in the little boys, the bad boys’ room. Yeah, yeah. Funny enough, my TEDx talk disappeared for a few weeks in 2020 as well. I found that fascinating. It reminded me of what you and Sheldrake had gone through.

50:20 But you were not allowed in certain sites during your Netflix series. That’s true. One of them was in my home country of the United States of America, and I think it might have been a national park site, and that bothered me. Yeah, that a visitor or a citizen wasn’t allowed to go somewhere. It should be the people’s land.

50:38 Well, yes, yes, specifically we wanted to film at Serpent Mound in Ohio, but the Ohio History Connection, which runs Serpent Mound, denied us filming permission. There was a long discussion, though I was not directly involved in the discussion. The discussion was between ITN Productions, who made the show for Netflix, and the authorities at Serpent Mound, and the outcome of that discussion was, when it became clear to the authorities at Serpent Mound that I was presenting the show, they then wrote an email which I’ve now put up on my website, it’s in my blog, their their entire email, and at the end of it what they say is that filming permission is refused because Graham Hancock’s view of Serpent Mound differs from our own.

51:26 That’s basically what they’re saying. They’re saying that because my view does not accord with their view, they’re not going to allow me to film there. Now to my mind that is plain, straightforward censorship, and anybody who doubts that I was censored, just go to my website, just go to my blog, look for the title For the Records, and for the record, and you will see reproduced the email that we received from the authorities at Serpent Mound, which undoubtedly, very clearly, in plain English, banned us from filming there because my views did not accord with theirs.

52:00 And then they have now changing their narrative on this and say now that they didn’t say that. But you have the proof, and you were there, you’ve got the proof in writing. And that proof is just going to stay there on my website with For the Record as the headline, so that people can satisfy themselves that any spin that Serpent Mound authorities are putting on this today, trying to tell visitors, no, I wasn’t banned or whatever, and I have heard, I have heard reports of that, any spin that they are putting on this can be quickly reconciled just by going and looking at their email.

52:29 You told me you’re no longer allowed to travel to Egypt as well. Well, I’m certainly not allowed to film in Egypt. We very much wanted to do an episode in Egypt. Egypt’s been a very important part of my argument over the last 30 years, and I was very keen to do one of the eight episodes in Egypt. But unfortunately, again rather like at Serpent Mound, when the Egyptian authorities learned that Graham Hancock would be presenting the episode, they immediately refused a filming permission.

53:03 And I think there are a range of complicated reasons behind that. One of them is a senior Egyptologist called Zahi Hawass, who has had ministerial positions in the past, he was Minister of Culture, and he’s now the primary advisor to the Egyptian government on anybody who requests filming permission. And I’ve had a long relationship with Zahi over many years, it’s not always been unfriendly. We’ve had a few jokes together. In some ways I quite like the man and his flamboyant ostentation, I enjoy it.

53:42 And actually he’s a good speaker, but we had a debate arranged between he and I in 2015, and unfortunately for Zahi he just completely lost it even before the debate began and started shouting at me and walked out of the room. And what was unfortunate for Zahi about this was that there was a member of the audience present who filmed this, and later on when Zahi, after finishing sulking outside the room while I gave my talk, after he’d given his talk, he was then asked questions by the audience, and some of that was filmed as well, and in those questions he revealed that although he regards himself as an incredibly experienced archaeologist, he had no knowledge whatsoever of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, the single most important archaeological site in the world today.

54:31 So he ended up looking rather silly on these two bits of video that were put out there, not because of anything I did to him but because he shot himself in the foot. And I think what’s happened is that he’s taken that very personally, and he doesn’t want, he doesn’t want me to be given any access to Egyptian sites. I would say that Zahi is undoubtedly the person who nowadays, ancient sites in Egypt come under the control of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the two are connected, and Zahi and the Minister of Tourism are close friends, there’s a photograph of them celebrating a birthday recently.

55:10 So it’s pretty clear that this is why I got banned. Underlying it is an objection to my notion that there is an unwritten background to the ancient Egyptian story. I revere and admire ancient Egyptian culture of the historical period. This was an extraordinary culture so dedicated to beauty and truth, everything done with absolute perfection. I’m a huge admirer of ancient Egyptian civilization, it’s a paragon of virtue and light in the ancient world.

55:48 But to deny that it has a background in my view is a mistake, because the ancient Egyptians themselves made it very clear in their traditions that there was a background, and they spoke of a remote period which they called Zep Tepi, the first time, when the gods, quote unquote, came to Egypt and brought civilization to Egypt and began to build sacred mounds all around the land of Egypt, and those sacred mounds would become the places upon which all future temples and pyramids would be built. So I actually am very happy to say that the ancient Egyptians of the historical period were the primary builders of the Great Pyramid and of the three pyramids of Giza, but that those pyramids stand on older platforms, and deep underneath the Great Pyramid is a subterranean chamber 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid.

56:42 I think that that particular site goes back 12 and a half thousand years, and the pyramids then honor and overbuild and respect that much later with knowledge that had been passed down. Also at Giza, the Sphinx, the megalithic temples in front of the Sphinx and a number of other structures on Giza in my view definitely date back 12 and a half thousand years. The geological evidence on the Sphinx that Robert Schoch has put forward, and kudos to Robert Schoch for being so courageous to run against the mainstream and go with his geological knowledge, that the Sphinx geologically is much older than 4,500 years and that the most likely time that it was made was between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, during the Younger Dryas.

57:24 So I think Giza is a very complicated site. I think some of it’s very ancient, some of it was indeed built by the majestic builders that we know as the ancient Egyptians of the historical period, but that as they themselves said, their knowledge, their understanding of geometry, their ability to make fantastically accurate observations of the heavens, this was all a legacy that came down to them from remotest antiquity. And so my dear friend the late great John Anthony West, who was just the most fantastic opponent of rigid mainstream Egyptology, he used to call them quackademics.

58:08 John makes a point that the ancient Egyptian civilization is not a development, it’s a legacy. It’s a legacy. And by following that point and by making that point about ancient Egypt, as I have done many times before, referring to ancient Egyptian traditions that speak of this legacy, this is what annoys archaeologists, the Egyptologists. They claim that I’m stealing the credit for ancient Egyptian achievements from the ancient Egyptians. No, I’m not.

58:35 I’m just saying that the origins of that knowledge are far older than Egyptologists are presently prepared to allow. It seems to me that your views would just bring more interest in these sites and more tourists and more, yes, and more excitement about the past, which is what everybody in this industry wants. Everybody wants excitement, excitement about the past. And this is another problem I have with archaeology, is that they seem to have dedicated themselves to draining the lifeblood out of the past, to find whatever is narrow and limited and doesn’t speak widely in the past and focus on that and not focus on the beauty and the truth and the magnificence and the mystery of the past.

59:11 It’s as though mystery is some kind of enemy that archaeologists wish to dispose of, and they go to great lengths to dispose of it and to just drain the blood out of the past. And it’s most unfortunate because the past is mysterious. I’ve said that during the time when we have documents, the past is less mysterious than it was from the time when we don’t have documents, but even from the time when we have documents, there are so many gaps, so many missing bits of the picture, that we should always be open to mystery in the past.

59:44 We should not, our project should not be to deprive the past of mystery, to understand why that mystery is there and what it means. The last episode is fantastic because you bring kind of everything together of all of your travels around the world and talk about this event that happened in a fascinating way I never thought of before, where it was a, I think it was like a comet’s wake that hit all around the Earth. Can you maybe talk about that? Because it then pulls in all the things that you just discovered.

1:00:12 It’s almost like a, it does indeed. When you’re talking about a lost civilization, you really inevitably have to talk about a cataclysm. You’re not going to lose a whole civilization to the point where it’s remembered in myths and traditions, where there are some anomalous and inexplicable art but artifacts, you’re not going to lose a whole civilization unless there was a huge cataclysm. And I was aware of this when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, which was published in 1995.

1:00:42 It was obvious to me from a whole range of sources that there had been a cataclysmic event, and I put it somewhere around 12,500 years ago. The astronomy is very important, that Orion correlation link to 12,500 years ago, the way the belt stars line up perfectly with the pyramids 12,500 years ago, the way that the Sphinx gazes directly at the rising sun with the constellation of Leo behind it 12,500 years ago, this was the astrological age of Leo. I was very confident that something major had happened around 12,500 years ago, but I couldn’t exactly specify what it was when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods.

1:01:20 And I looked into a number of possibilities, including Earth crust displacement, that might have led to a cataclysm on this scale. I was not to know that 12 years later a team of scientists in the United States would come out with evidence of a massive global cataclysm that unfolded over those 1,200 years between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, exactly the window that I had indicated in Fingerprints of the Gods. And they had very strong evidence for the cataclysm, not just myths, not just traditions, not just astronomy, but physical evidence on the ground, and that evidence takes the form of a layer in the Earth called the Younger Dryas boundary layer, which is filled with objects that can only result from an asteroid or a comet colliding with the Earth, or airbursting in the sky above the Earth.

1:02:15 And these objects include nanodiamonds, they’re created by the tremendous shock and heat of the impact. They include carbon microspherules, they include quartz that’s been melted at temperatures of more than 2,000 degrees, they include iridium, they include platinum, all of these are relatively common in comets and relatively rare on the Earth, and their presence in this boundary layer speaks of a massive event which took place all over the world, not just in one spot. So it started with a team of about 60 scientists who began to put this work into the public domain from the year 2007 onwards, and then we’re joined by astronomers who had been aware for some time of evidence that a very large comet entered the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago.

1:03:11 They reckon it may have been as much as 100 miles in diameter. These comets come from deep space, they come from an area called the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt, and they’re drawn in by random gravitational forces. They enter the inner solar system and they can go on an Earth-crossing orbit when that happens, as they go into orbit around the Sun. The evidence was that one of these comets entered the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago, and then it began to do what all comets do.

1:03:39 This is a universal feature of comets, every comet does it. When they enter an area of gravitational force, they start breaking apart into pieces, they start fragmenting. So your 100 kilometer single object is quite unlikely to collide with the Earth because it’s a single object, but if you start breaking that down into thousands of objects, some of which may be a kilometer or two kilometers in diameter, some of which may be just the size of your fist, if you start breaking it down into a debris stream of thousands of fragments, a stream that then spreads out and becomes very wide, suddenly you have a, you have a, has said that the Earth is crossing, in fact, twice a year, which is extremely dangerous to the Earth.

1:04:20 And the argument is that it’s the meteor stream that we call the Taurid meteor stream today. It’s called the Taurid meteor stream not because it comes from the constellation of Taurus, because it looks like it comes from the constellation of Taurus when you look up at the sky in November, beginning of November, end of October, and you start seeing shooting stars, they’re coming out of the Taurid meteor stream, and if you look in the background you’ll see the constellation of Taurus way back. That’s why it’s called the Taurid meteor stream.

1:04:45 The Earth crosses that meteor stream twice a year to this day. That meteor stream is 30 million kilometers wide. It takes the Earth 12 and a half days to cross it on each crossing, once in June and again in November. The Earth is passing through a cloud of debris. We know there are large objects in that debris.

1:05:03 The best known of those objects is called Comet Encke, named after a Sumerian god, oddly enough. Comet Encke is just a fragment of the original giant comet that began to break up 20,000 years ago. Comet Encke’s got a diameter of five or six kilometers. If Comet Encke were to collide with the Earth today, it would be the end of civilization as we know it. But it’s just one of hundreds of objects of that size that are orbiting in the Taurid meteor stream and which the Earth is passing through twice every year.

1:05:34 So it’s rather like crossing a gigantic sort of eight-lane highway wearing a blindfold and just hoping that you’ll somehow get through without anything big hitting you. And here’s the argument and the evidence that is presented in the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, that that comet entered the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago, it began to break up into multiple fragments, as debris trail became wider and wider. Around 12,800 years ago the Earth passed through a bit of that debris trail that contained large numbers of hazardous objects.

1:06:09 They reckon that two or three of those objects were in the range of a kilometer in diameter. They hit the North American ice cap, they unleashed huge amounts of melting ice water which went into the world ocean and changed global climate overnight. This is the beginning of the Younger Dryas, 12,800 years ago. But there were impacts all across the globe, many of them were airbursts, far away from North America. At Abu Hureyra in Syria there’s evidence of an air burst there at exactly the same time, 12,800 years ago.

1:06:39 It’s found in that layer in the soil, an object didn’t even hit the Earth, it blew up in the sky. We’ve had an object out of the Taurid meteor stream almost within living memory. It’s quite famous, it’s the Tunguska event in Siberia in Russia. Happened on the 30th of June 1908, that’s at the peak of the Beta Taurids. Remember I said we crossed the Taurid meteor stream twice a year, once in June, once in November.

1:07:03 That object that caused the Tunguska event on the 30th of June 1908 came out of the Taurid meteor stream. It’s reckoned to have been about a hundred meters in diameter. It wasn’t big enough to reach the Earth, it exploded, massive explosion in the sky. You’re looking at something like a nuclear bomb going off in the sky. It flattened 2,000 square miles of trees in Siberia.

1:07:28 Fortunately it was an uninhabited area, as far as we know nobody was killed there. There was massive destruction on the ground. If that happened over a major city, the death count would have been in the millions. It was a devastating event, and it was a relatively small bit that fell out of the Taurid meteor stream. So in this way we’re connected with events of 12,800 years ago and events today because we’re still in relationship with this stream.

1:07:54 And what we know is what the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis proposes is that the encounter with this particularly lumpy part of the Taurid meteor stream 12,800 years ago led to a sort of swarm of debris hitting the Earth, and as the Earth is rotating, that swarm of debris moves eastward and right across the surface of the planet is evidence of this, of these Younger Dryas impacts. And it immediately causes radical climate change, that’s because of the ice water coming off the North American ice cap from those big impacts on the North American ice cap. There’s a mystery at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, 12,800 years ago, because global temperatures plunge, but at the same time you get sea level rise, a sudden sea level rise, work of Cesare Emiliani.

1:08:46 You wouldn’t expect that during a period of freezing temperatures. You’d expect excess water to stay frozen on the ice caps, not to enter the world ocean. So what this speaks to is a great amount of heat and shock which was unleashed on the North American ice cap and caused this icy water to pour into the world ocean. One of the things that icy water did was to stop the Gulf Stream dead in its tracks. The Gulf Stream is part of what’s called the global meridional overturning circulation.

1:09:13 It’s the central heating system of our planet, it’s one of the things that keeps our planet warm, and plunging unspeakable millions of tons of freezing water into the Gulf Stream cut it completely, and for the next 1,200 years there was no Gulf Stream, and the world went into this frozen, frozen episode. And that’s when all the megafauna died off. That’s when the saber-toothed tigers, of woolly rhinos, the mammoths, the mastodons, you know, the giant sloths, they all went extinct during that period, not because they were overhunted by human hunters but because of a global cataclysm that took place at that time.

1:09:52 It was a time when there’s clear evidence of a massive shrinking of human population, population goes through a bottleneck at that time. It was clearly a devastating event in every way. Now there may be other explanations for it. What’s not in dispute is that the episode that we now call the Younger Dryas, and again I’ll give the dates, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, it’s an episode, it’s not a moment, it unfolds over a considerable period. What is absolutely clear and nobody disputes is that the Younger Dryas was a true global cataclysm on an enormous scale.

1:10:33 There are some arguments about what caused it. I accept that there, some people think that it might have been to do with solar activity, but I think the evidence that the Comet Research Group, and there’s now more than 100 scientists working on this, I think the evidence that they’ve put forward is the most compelling and it explains this situation best of all, that we ran into the debris trail of a disintegrating comet, that there were airbursts all over the Earth, that it changed global climate radically and led to the extinction of the megafauna, and I would say to the loss of a civilization that existed during the Ice Age. Now the interesting thing is that when the Younger Dryas comes to an end, it comes to an end 11,600 years ago and is equally dramatic.

1:11:15 Just as global temperatures plunged 12,800 years ago, 11,600 years ago they shoot up almost to modern levels, and then there’s a truly massive rise in sea level that’s called Meltwater Pulse 1B that takes place 11,600 years ago. And one of the things that interests me about that, and that my archaeological critics find most annoying, is that 11,600 years ago, before our time, let’s call it 9600 BC, is precisely the date that Plato gives us for the destruction and submergence of the lost civilization of Atlantis. Whenever you say Atlantis to archaeologists, they roll their eyes and laugh hysterically, but the fact of the matter is the earliest surviving reference to Atlantis comes to us from a highly respected source, which is the Greek philosopher Plato, and he sources that information with his ancestor, the Greek lawmaker Solon, who made a well-known visit to Egypt in 600 BC and was told the story of a great lost civilization destroyed and submerged beneath the sea.

1:12:19 And when he asked the priests, when did this happen, when was Atlantis submerged, they said, oh, 9,000 years ago. So do the math, this was 600 BC, Solon’s in Egypt, he’s talking to Egyptian priests, they’re telling him this story, actually taking it down from walls in the temple. And he asked them when did it happen, and they say 9,000 years ago. So that’s a date. Now that’s 9600 BC.

1:12:45 That’s exactly the date that geologists have established for Meltwater Pulse 1B, the largest single rise in sea level that ever took place at the end of the Ice Age. And yet archaeologists say Plato made the whole story up to make some kind of political point. Rubbish. He is conveying absolutely accurate factual information. How could he possibly have known about Meltwater Pulse 1B when he was writing, you know, 300 BC?

1:13:14 How could he have known about it? But the fact is that’s the time frame he gives us, and it ties in with the latest geological knowledge. So I think we should be taking Plato more seriously, and I think the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which provides an explanation not only for the beginning but also for the end of the Younger Dryas, requires to be taken much more seriously than the mainstream has so far so far taken it. The science on the beginning of the Younger Dryas, 12,800 years ago, is much more advanced than the science on the end of the Younger Dryas, but it is puzzling the way that temperatures shot up suddenly 11,600 years ago and the last ice caps just collapsed into the sea and we have this Meltwater Pulse 1B.

1:13:58 And even before the Comet Research Group got to work, way, way back in the 1980s, Fred Hoyle looked at this problem of the Southern sea level rise and the sudden rise in global temperatures at the end of the Younger Dryas, and unaware of any arguments about comets or anything else, he suggested that what could have caused that sudden rise in temperature was the impact of a comet or fragments of a comet in an ocean, not on land but in an ocean, creating a huge cloud of water vapor that goes up into the upper atmosphere, creates a greenhouse effect and results in the warming. So within this hypothesis there are explanations both for the beginning and for the end of the Younger Dryas, which are not offered by any other theory. So it’s my favorite theory.

1:14:43 And I’ve done my best, particularly in the last episode of Ancient Apocalypse, to talk to some of the experts involved and to present that theory in its full light. Could there be another explanation for the Younger Dryas cataclysm? Sure. I’m putting my money on the debris stream of a giant comet and the more than 150 peer-reviewed papers that have now been published on that subject, which nevertheless mainstream archaeology is completely ignoring. Fortunately the Comet Research Group have recently received some funding from a generous donor.

1:15:24 Comet Research Group, up till now, because they are going against the academic mainstream, even though they are all scientists themselves, have had to fund all their own research without any support from anybody else, and they’ve made huge progress since 2007 in nailing down the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis as the best possible explanation for what happened. But with the new funding that they’ve received, we’re going to see this issue absolutely settled within the next five years. Five years?

1:15:50 Yeah, we’re going to see this issue absolutely settled, and I’m very sure where it’s going to go, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is going to be proved correct. But where we stand at present, there’s one thing for sure, the Younger Dryas was a sustained global cataclysm. It was an immense event, it made extinct huge quantities of the megafauna of the Ice Age, it diminished human populations, and I think it’s a prime candidate for the loss of a civilization, a forgotten episode in human history, a golden age, a lost civilization that is remembered in myths and traditions all around the world, the very myths and traditions that archaeologists despise and ignore as fireside tales.

1:16:38 And the same community acknowledges that the extinction of the dinosaurs would have come from a very similar event. Yes. So they, it’s an interesting parallel actually, because Luis and Walter Alvarez, who were the father-son team who first proposed that the dinosaurs had been made extinct by an asteroid impact, and by the way that evidence has begun to change slowly, there’s now a feeling that it was a comet impact, more likely than an asteroid impact.

1:17:06 Again it doesn’t matter, it was a cosmic object that hit the Earth. When they initially proposed that some kind of cosmic impact had resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs, they were ridiculed and ignored by their colleagues, they were subjected to all the same kind of dirty tricks that Jacques Cinq-Mars was subjected to and that I’ve been subjected to as well, to try to marginalize and diminish their work because it challenged mainstream views that there could not possibly have been any event on such a scale, that the world proceeds in a relatively peaceable way all the time and we don’t need to take cataclysms into account in our history. Luis and Walter Alvarez directly challenged that view, and they challenged it initially on the basis of exactly the same impact proxies that have been found that speak to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.

1:17:55 So there’s a layer in the Earth from 12,800 years ago full of these impact proxies, and there’s another layer in the Earth from 66 million years ago which is full of the same impact proxies, and it was initially on that evidence, the impact proxies, the nanodiamonds, the shocked quartz and so on and so forth, that Luis and Walter Alvarez initially made their case. They were dismissed, then the crater was found, deeply buried beneath the Yucatan Peninsula and in the Gulf of Mexico, found with remote, remote scanning, and once the crater was found the critics no longer had a strong leg to stand on, and since then it’s been absolutely accepted that the collision with either a comet or an asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. And it’s important to remember that the first evidence for that was impact proxies, not a crater.

1:18:47 And those impact proxies proved to be correct in the case of the extinction of the dinosaurs, and I believe they’re going to prove to be correct in the case of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis as well. Besides, you wouldn’t expect to find a crater where the larger objects collided with an ice cap that was two miles deep. The crater would be in the ice, it wouldn’t be in the land beneath. You might find shock effects in the land underneath it. You wouldn’t expect to find a crater if you have 2,000 airbursts all over the planet.

1:19:16 There’s no crater left from the Tunguska event either, but the Tunguska event flattened 2,000 square miles of trees. Airbursts can be very, very devastating, and when you have hundreds or even thousands of them taking place within a span of a few hours all over the planet, you are looking at a massive global cataclysm. When you said within five years we’ll know more, Graham, immediately I thought, when’s the sequel? The sequel to Ancient Apocalypse? Yes.

1:19:41 I don’t know whether there will be a sequel. I hope there will. That’s a matter that’s entirely at the disposal of Netflix, and they will make their decision depending on the reactions of viewers to the show. That’s what they’ll make their decision. So it’s very clear that the archaeological campaign, they’ve reached out to a few of their friends in the media, particularly The Guardian newspaper here in Britain, and got them to write smear pieces about me which have no factual basis whatsoever.

1:20:13 It’s very clear that that is part of a campaign to persuade Netflix not to do a second season, that that is the objective of the hate campaign that I’ve been subjected to since the release of the series and the lies that have been told about me. The objective of that is to discourage Netflix from running a second series. I like to think that Netflix is bigger than that and they’ll make their own decisions according to their own priorities, not according to the demands and the authoritarian insistence of a group of archaeologists.

1:20:47 The Society for American Archaeology has actually written an open letter to Netflix asking that the series be reclassified as science fiction, and yet they claim that they’re not trying to censor me. To take a series out of documentary and reclassify it as science fiction is what they’re asking for. That is censorship, pure, pure and simple censorship that they’re doing there. I don’t believe that Netflix are going to give in to that. I think they’ll make the decision about a second series in exactly the same objective way that they make the decision about a second series of any documentary.

1:21:21 Did it do well enough? Is there enough interest in it? If it is, perhaps they’ll make a second series, but I don’t count on that. That’s entirely outside my control. Are you surprised to read things like we saw in The Guardian, just this, such an overt accusation, such a massive attack towards yourself, or were you expecting things like that?

1:21:41 I wasn’t expecting that, because I was a journalist at the time when there was some integrity in journalism, and you checked the basis of your story, you didn’t just sort of lie there supine and let archaeologists just tell you what to say, you actually would question them back. The Guardian there’s two pieces in The Guardian, one in The Guardian itself and one in The Observer, which is sort of the Sunday version of The Guardian, and they’re both equally devoid of any factual evidence refuting my work, but they are full of insults and alarmist claims, like claiming that this is the most dangerous series on Netflix and actually asking in The Guardian headline, why has this even been allowed? Okay, who is the person who is going to allow or not allow my freedom of speech?

1:22:32 Are archaeologists supposed to be the arbiters of that as well, as to who may speak freely about the past and who may not speak freely? I think we’re entering a most unfortunate situation where journalists are supporting archaeologists in seeking to impose restrictions on what may or may not be said about the past, in seeking to limit the breadth of points of view that can be brought to bear on the past, in seeking to say that archaeologists are the only people who have any right to speak about the past. I’m very disappointed in the low quality of journalism that has resulted in this smear campaign against me.

1:23:09 Not a single one of those journalists got in touch with me and asked me for my comments or my point of view. Yeah, I was disappointed, but then I just thought, wow, this is giving you more exposure, and they must be doing it because you’re hitting the nerve and they realize that the public is reacting. Yeah, and it was extremely popular, this series. I heard from people all around the world that were watching it, that sent me messages. And again, we’ve also been the subject of criticism in the past, and it usually means because you are resonating, yeah, an audience that they don’t want that message to get to very much.

1:23:45 So definitely they want their narrative to be the only narrative and that they don’t want any competing narratives. If there are competing narratives they want them to be so ridiculous that they don’t need to be addressed, but if there’s a serious competing narrative then they feel very threatened by it. And I’ve now seen it in the past month, the lows that they will stoop to, the dirty tricks that they will play in order to try and re-establish their narrative as the dominant narrative and the only narrative worth listening to, and to discourage people from watching my show.

1:24:16 That’s you know very much also been the purpose. And this is not how things should operate in a free society. If they’re so confident of their own position they should be relaxed about an alternative voice being out there. If they’re sure that they’re right, and if indeed they are right, they will be proven right in due course. Why be so insecure about their own position?

1:24:38 They actually want to suppress alternative voices and to frame them in such a way that people will not listen to those alternative voices. This isn’t archaeology, this is propaganda. You mentioned a free society, Graham, and it’s something we always spoke about when you were on the show, was that we should have sovereignty over our own bodies. Yes. And it’s something you’ve always talked even about, the psychedelic experience, a way of us experiencing something without some type of censor or without some type of filter.

1:25:05 Yeah. And getting the information from source or exploring it on our own. And yeah, it’s been something I’ve always admired about you, that you were able to do all of your research and put these ideas out there and also write these incredible books of fiction that went into the plant medicine experience. And now I kind of see that it’s all related, because you believe that sovereignty over your own body and the freedom of speech and the right to the truth.

1:25:29 Yeah, it’s all part of the same, it’s all part of the same thing. There are forces in our society that seek to minimize human potential and to turn us into just producers and consumers who never question the mainstream narrative. They don’t want us asking questions. And this is one of the reasons that psychedelics have been so demonized, because psychedelics do lead people to ask questions about the very nature of reality and about the nature of the society that we live in and about the nature of our own behavior as well.

1:26:02 Psychedelics are one, of the most important things that psychedelics do is allow a reset of the mind where you start to see things in a different way. It’s clear that the powers that be in our society don’t want that to happen. And it’s quite interesting that I’ve had a lot of experience with psychedelics. I wrote a book where it was fundamental and essential for me to take psychedelics in order to write that book. It was called Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.

1:26:30 I think that these are extraordinary and remarkable medicines, and I believe strongly that adults should be free to make sovereign decisions about their own bodies and about their own health and about their own consciousness, so long as they do no harm to others. I don’t think the state should have any right to intervene and say, no, you can’t take this particular medicine which, you know, grows naturally on Earth, but you can take this one which Big Pharma makes. This is a huge intrusion on personal freedom, and we’re seeing exactly the same thing in all the narratives that are at work in our society today, they’re all designed to shut us down and to stop us thinking and just be obedient, tame producers and consumers who accept the mainstream position, whatever it is.

1:27:19 And because I’ve been a contrarian for so many years, I inevitably end up taking quite a bit of the flak on this. It’s interesting actually that one another lazy way that archaeologists dismiss my work, one is to call me a pseudo-archaeologist, the latest one is to say that my work supports racism and white supremacy, which it absolutely does not, and then the final way is to say, oh, and Hancock takes drugs, so he takes psychedelics, so you can be sure that everything he’s saying is rubbish. They’re repeating that old old trope.

1:27:52 You know, science has caught up with psychedelics now. We’re getting major scientific research which is showing what incredible medicines these are. People with post-traumatic stress disorder cured in a few full-on sessions of psilocybin, people with deeply entrenched depression who just can’t get out of the hole have life-changing experiences with psilocybin under medical supervision which get rid of the depression virtually overnight. No need for years of expensive talking therapy, no need for Seroxat or Prozac or any of these big Pharma drugs.

1:28:24 Nature has provided us with the solution, and at last, thank goodness, science is beginning to catch up with that. So when archaeology tries to say, oh, don’t take Hancock seriously because he takes psychedelics, they’re even behind the time with science. Science is recognizing how amazing these medicines are and archaeologists haven’t caught up with that yet. But it’s any dirty trick, any way that you can smear an opponent and make their work appear less valuable, that’s what archaeologists are resorting to at the moment.

1:28:55 And I just hope that the public see through that and understand that a game is being played by archaeologists here, and that game is designed to keep their narrative on top of every other narrative about the past. It seems just, there is a theme here of trying to hold the status quo, very much so, many aspects of our society, I guess because there are people that they would prefer it that way, to keep their livelihood or their lifestyles or their control, their power structures. But it’s just fascinating, you know, to see it in so many different ways, from archaeology.

1:29:29 Yeah, to psychedelics. Yes, it’s right across society. We live in a society that is very subtly and very cleverly built around mind control. There’s no doubt about it, and that infects every aspect of society, it’s in every area of society, and primarily it’s designed to keep the population passive, to keep us producing and consuming and not to cause any disruption, just to keep things moving smoothly. Obviously that’s in the interest of certain small groups of people that it should be that way.

1:30:04 A passive, supine, unquestioning public is very, very useful, but what the human race needs is an active, awake, questioning public who questions everything all the time. That’s what’s needed. We need more questions, not less questions. We need more competing narratives, not less competing narratives, and that’s why I’m very disappointed in archaeology in the way it’s reacted to this, and in journalism in the way that it’s just taken on board what the archaeologists say without asking any questions at all.

1:30:36 What’s fascinating to me is, what, 10 years ago when we would talk about these things on our show, or psychedelics, or your stuff, was being just completely shut out of the mainstream media. Now we’re seeing you on Netflix, we’re seeing Michael Pollan not only talk about some things on Netflix, cook on Netflix, now he can go through all of the psychedelics on Netflix. It’s the world is changing. Yes, things are changing, and I have hope in that. I think that what I see also amongst my readers, amongst people who have given me feedback from the show, just general general viewers, is that there is a growing questioning mood in society, that people are not willing to be told what to think by so-called experts.

1:31:20 Yeah, yeah, they don’t want to be told what to think, people want to figure it out for themselves. There is a role for experts, there is a place for experts, but they shouldn’t be the sole voice. There should be room for members of the public to make their own inquiries into the past, and there should be room for mavericks like me to do thorough and detailed research. Over a period of 30 years I’ve been doing that research and to present that research to the public and let the public make up their own minds.

1:31:49 But for my 30-plus years of boots on the ground research, of scuba diving, of being in some of the most inhospitable and difficult places on Earth, and being in war zones and putting my life at risk, for that to be written off as pseudoscience and pseudo-archaeology by a bunch of chair-bound so-called experts is something that I will not accept. For you, Graham Hancock, final thoughts. In some ways it’s refreshing to see the public question like they never have before, government officials, health officials, everything.

1:32:23 I don’t even think we saw this five years ago. No, it’s a new, it’s a new phenomenon, and it’s partly because I think the internet, the internet is a very complicated thing, but it’s played a role in this. It’s allowed conversations to occur that previously would have been dominated by mainstream media alone. And I think that the other thing that’s happened is that government officials, governments in general, are being revealed as liars, that they just make stuff up all the time and the truth comes out, you know.

1:32:55 So we have experience that we really, we have direct personal experience that we’re unwise to trust everything our government says. Okay. And I now have direct personal experience that we’re unwise to trust everything archaeologists say as well. You travel a lot, and you travel a lot in America as well, and you see and feel and have your finger on the pulse of what people are saying or doing, and now what we’re seeing on our social platforms and the new ways we might be going, what do you think the future brings?

1:33:23 Is it going to get more divisive first? Is it going to be more challenging? Do you think we will find a way? I think we’ll find a way. I don’t see why it has to get more divisive.

1:33:34 I think it comes back to what I was saying earlier on, that we are all one human species. We all have the same hopes and fears and ambitions and dreams, we all want to love our kids, we want to be loved by our kids, we want to be surrounded by love, we want to give love. This is true of every human being everywhere in the world. The next step for us is to recognize our unity as a species, to recognize everything that brings us together and to start not paying so much attention to the things that divide us.

1:34:02 Often the things that divide us are artificial anyway, they’re invented by politicians. Politicians thrive on division, you know. But a politician becomes necessary if you have some enemy that is built up, that needs to be fought, then you feel you need a leader who’s going to help you against that. The politicians, and of all kinds in all countries in the world, are playing this game, making their population feel afraid and suspicious and feel hatred towards other people.

1:34:29 In many ways the huge problems that we face in the world result from the very low quality of leadership that we have in the world today. Very, very poor leadership, which is not motivated by concerns for the future of the human race but is only motivated by the immediate interests of the politicians concerned. And this is the veil is being ripped away from this now, people are realizing how many lies they’ve been told by those authority figures, and that is then leading to questioning of other authority figures all around the world.

1:35:02 And I think part of the reaction to Ancient Apocalypse is because I am questioning a particular group of authority figures. I’m questioning the archaeologists who claim to control, to have full knowledge of our past. I’m questioning them, and The Guardian actually expressed it that way: where does it stop? If he questions archaeologists, what’s going to be questioned next, our governments? You know, I mean this is, they clearly regard it as a slippery slope, if somebody starts questioning any kind of authority then this is a danger to all authority.

1:35:32 Well, perhaps it is, and perhaps it’s needed, perhaps we need to take a fresh look at the way we function as human beings on this planet and the way we relate to one another, and the very first thing we’re going to have to do is get rid of this really low class of leadership that presently is running the world. When you sat down at my table in our old studio 10 years ago, Graham, one of the most poignant things you said was, anyone who would consider running for political office should have 10 ayahuascas. Absolutely.

1:36:01 I remember you said that. I think you said it maybe on our show first. I stand by it as well. Yeah, I probably was on your show first. I absolutely think this, because of the way that psychedelics, and ayahuasca is particularly effective in this regard, but because of the way that they jolt us out of a rigid framework and status, start us being open to other thoughts.

1:36:22 I think that if politicians were required to have 10 sessions of ayahuasca before they could even apply for the job, oh, you’ve not had 10 sessions of ayahuasca, sorry, you can’t apply for the job. If they’d had those 10 sessions before they applied for the job, those 10 sessions would confront them with their own baggage. That’s the very first thing ayahuasca does, is it stuffs your own baggage right in your face. The harm and the damage and the hurt you’ve done is thrown at you, and this is, you deal with it.

1:36:53 They would have to deal with that. By the time they’d been through 10 sessions I would say the vast majority of them wouldn’t want to become politicians at all, they’d want to work on their own lives instead, to become better people than they were before, and they would realize that the path that they want to lead us down in terms of politics is a positive destruction aimed only at their own self-interest, they just wouldn’t carry on in that role. And those who did carry on wanting to be leaders would be better leaders than they otherwise might have been, because they’d have been forced into that introspection and looking at how they behave and about how their behavior impacts and influences others.

1:37:29 And this is something that politicians almost never do, they look at how it affects their numbers, they look at how it affects their votes, that’s what they’re interested in, not on the long-term consequences of the decisions they make. Yeah, well if I had become mayor of London, I would have at least had six ceremonies. And you know, when I had those ceremonies in Costa Rica a few years ago, and the movie Reconnected, you also have parts in, as you’re talking to me in the studio, you know, I was reminded of how Mother Ayahuasca really is the mother of psychedelics for me.

1:38:02 Absolutely. And for me it was, there are these other things here, but she was there giving me guidance. Absolutely, a game plan, literally Ten Commandments, the way I would go on to live my life for the next four or five years. Totally. There’s a real presence there, there’s a real presence, and most often that presence manifests in female form.

1:38:24 We speak of Mother, Mother Ayahuasca. This is a reality for anybody who’s done a sufficient amount of work with ayahuasca. Those who haven’t experienced ayahuasca just dismiss it and think, oh, this is impossible. But the fact of the matter, have the experience first and then see if it’s impossible. Don’t just write it off as impossible on the basis of your a priori assumptions about how the world works.

1:38:45 Have the experience and then talk about it. And I think that they would say very different things. There’s something very special about ayahuasca. There’s even something special about its manufacture and the way that it is made, as you know, it’s two different plants, one of them contains dimethyltryptamine, which is not orally active, and the other contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor which allows the DMT to be orally activated. This is a curious thing because the monoamine oxidase inhibitor is contained in the ayahuasca vine.

1:39:27 It is not psychedelic in its own right. The DMT is contained in the leaves of the chacruna plant. It is not active orally in its own right, you can make a tea of hundreds of leaves and drink it, you won’t have any effect whatsoever. So we have two plants that are inactive on their own, but when you put them together they produce this extraordinary brew that allows the powerful psychedelic effects of dimethyltryptamine to be mediated for four or five hours.

1:40:00 When people smoke DMT, which is the only other way to get it into your system quickly and easily, they have a 10-minute journey to the other side of reality. With ayahuasca that’s much slower, much more moderated, much more organic. You feel yourself to be part of this jungle, and you have a sense that we’re dealing with the mother goddess of this planet who deeply cares about the human race and who has time for each individual to say, examine your own behavior, this is what you were in the past, you don’t have to go on doing that, you can change your behavior, you can become a more nurturing, more positive, more helpful human being than you’ve been before.

1:40:43 Ayahuasca teaches these lessons. It’s very humbling, she puts us through a humbling experience, and I would like to see all politicians have the guts to put themselves through that humbling experience before they decide to pursue a political career. Imagine if all the world just tried to maybe try to be a better version of themselves and, yeah, front their own baggage as opposed to go on Twitter. Well, see, this is what’s, this is what’s special. It’s not, it’s not unique to ayahuasca but it’s particularly strong with ayahuasca, it’s true with mushrooms as well, is that we have these mechanisms for pretending to ourselves that we’re all perfect, that everything’s okay, that we didn’t hurt anybody, we didn’t do anything.

1:41:22 Ayahuasca just strips all that away and just shoves it right in your face. This is who you are, deal with it. You have the opportunity now to make yourself a better person because you know what you are. It’s up to you, the choice is yours. Yeah, they’re brutal sessions.

1:41:36 I have a part of the movie where I’m talking to Dennis McKenna right before we’re going in, and I’m like, Dennis, I’m feeling a little bit of trepidation, and he said, Brian, he’s like, if you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention. Exactly, exactly. So it is a kind of a hero’s journey together. It is a hero’s journey, and this is something that people who don’t know about ayahuasca need to understand. There’s a lot of propaganda about cause addiction.

1:42:00 Absolutely nobody’s ever been addicted to ayahuasca in the history of the universe. On the contrary, you brace yourself for an ayahuasca, it’s not something that I look forward to, it’s work that I feel I need to do, it’s stuff I need to learn about myself and how I’m functioning in the world, make sure my path is right, but it’s hard work. There’s the physical consequences, the diarrhea, the vomiting, and then there’s the emotional turmoil of dealing with the truth about yourself.

1:42:27 So ayahuasca is not something that anybody rushes into for a recreational effect. You’re going to be put through the mill in an ayahuasca journey, and being put through that mill will help you to understand yourself better, and if you understand yourself better there’s the opportunity to make choices, better choices, in the future than you made in the past. Yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me. My second ceremony was a big one, it was the single most profound experience of my life, it was probably the single most challenging night of my life.

1:42:56 Yeah, very difficult, but I brought so much back with it and I was able to make so many necessary changes that, quite frankly, Graham, I could have got to my 80th birthday and looked back and thought, what did I waste my life? Yeah. Doing, playing so small, not doing the right things. Exactly. I’m glad I did it, but I’m not rushing back, but I know I need to go back.

1:43:16 Yeah, because I know I need to do the work. Ayahuasca is work, that is fundamentally what it is, it’s work. And the work is there in the session itself, and it’s there after the session as you try to integrate what you’ve learned into your life practice in the years that follow. That’s the real hard part. It is.

1:43:33 And who knows where that technology came from? Well, this is the amazing, this is the amazing thing, the point that I was making earlier, that discovering these two plants that are orally inactive in their own rights amongst the hundred thousand plus species of entries in the Amazon and putting them together and producing this highly psychoactive brew. How was that done? How did they know that these two plants, which are not active themselves, when put together would produce this amazing effect?

1:44:06 Trial and error doesn’t seem to answer it, and shamans in the Amazon say, well, the plants taught us how to do it, because they believe, and I think they’re right, the whole universe is intelligent. It’s not just empty matter. Plants aren’t just pretty things, these are part of life on Earth, they have their own consciousness and they have their own way of communicating, and it’s astonishing the communications that plants reveal to us in, for example, the ayahuasca experience, or that fungi revealed to us in the psilocybin experience.

1:44:40 Anybody who’s been in depth into those experiences will no longer dismiss the idea that plants have intelligence and that plants communicate. They do communicate, they do have intelligence, they just don’t use words of a human language. Yeah, so true. I think that Netflix is going to want another series, and I’m looking, fingers crossed, if they do, do you know what you might want to go do? I say I certainly do, but I won’t go into it here.

1:45:09 There’s the thing about a TV series, especially when you’re dealing with half hour episodes, you know, is there’s only so much you can pack in there. There’s only so much you can do without sort of overwhelming the viewer, and it’s necessary to keep the story moving along. So there’s many more things that I would like to say, much, much more, and I’d like to go back and make an episode in Egypt. I just have to get around this political problem first. Well, I’m sure that can be done.

1:45:38 So it’s Ancient Apocalypse, you can watch it on Netflix, it’s incredible. Eight episodes. Yeah, eight episodes, each episode is about half an hour. They were all released on the same day on Netflix, which was the 11th of November 2022, and they’re all out there all over the world, in any country, to be viewed. Netflix, you know, do subtitles and voiceovers in various markets, but it’s available everywhere, it’s not limited to particular countries.

1:46:03 And it’s done extremely well. I mean all the information I have is that it’s done extremely well. I mean it was a number two here in the UK for a few weeks when I was watching it. Yeah, and that’s number two of all television series, not just documentary series. So that’s number two.

1:46:19 So the number one at that time was The Crown, you know. Yeah, I know, which is a drama. So I was pleased to see myself almost up there competing with drama series, because documentary series don’t normally do as well as dramas, you know. It was very good to see that. All the indications are that we’ve had a huge viewership all around the world, and I hope that people who’ve started watching the series will stick with it, because it is a story that unfolds, and as you rightly said, we bring it all together in episode eight at the end.

1:46:53 That’s when everything comes together in the series. Yeah, yeah, I would say wait to the end because that’s when it all comes together. Yeah, and brings it together. You know, I know you’re in the middle of this, but you know, congratulations on the success, because to see it, I saw it next to The Crown and I was like, wow, this is a big moment. And again, I knew this was coming for about six months and I didn’t know, and to have it received on that platform, yeah, with eyeballs, when also it actually made me feel good about humanity as well, Graham, because people had so many choices on Netflix, huge number of choices, and again there’s a lot of nonsense out there, a lot of stuff that just, you know, I engage this or it’s just entertainment.

1:47:31 They’re spending time watching you going deep into history and archaeology and actually entertaining that when they could be doing anything else. Yeah, it was incredible. I’m very encouraged by that too. It’s good. Yeah, and then of course you unfortunately have to deal with all the pushback and the hate and the ridiculous allegations, but on the same point it’s a sign that you’re doing something important and it’s going to get you more eyeballs.

1:47:52 So I know in the short term it can be a pain and difficult, but in the long run it just means your message is being more effective. And for me this was the crowning achievement, or one of many crowning achievements, to your whole career of hard work that a lot of times wasn’t noticed unless they were Graham Hancock fans, etc., but for me it felt like your overnight success for the world right after 30 years. Yeah, I feel very privileged to have been given that opportunity by Netflix.

1:48:18 I feel very privileged. It’s a rare opportunity to be given that space, eight episodes to present a thesis in a case which goes against the mainstream. I feel very, very lucky to have had that chance, and I hope in the series that I’ve lived up to that opportunity. Yeah, because it’s extremely well made, extremely interesting. I was lucky to have an incredibly good team.

1:48:41 Not many people know this, but Netflix don’t make many programs directly themselves. Almost all their programming is brought in from independent producers, and I was very lucky that the independent producer in this case was ITN Productions here in the UK. That’s the team who make Independent Television News, they also have a production house, and they were the ones who initially approached me and said would I be interested in making a series, and then they pitched it to Netflix, and eventually it took more than a year, but eventually the series was picked up by Netflix.

1:49:13 And I was very lucky that it was ITN Productions who were the production company, because they’re represented all over the world, they’re a highly professional news team. I had an excellent director in the form of Mark Tylee, excellent executive producer in the form of Bruce Kennedy, fantastic camera crew and sound crew, drone crews, everybody was working at the peak of their professional expertise and doing a beautiful job and very dedicated, very dedicated to that job. So I feel very, very privileged first of all to have had the chance of making the series at all, and secondly for the great team from ITN that I worked with.

1:49:49 Yeah, and it shows, it really shows, and I watch a lot of content, we create a lot of content, and it showed, and it just took what was a great message to the next level. Thank you. And so yeah, congrats to the team, congrats to you. And I just want to thank you for being you, thank you for your career, you know. But I mean, honestly, you know, you’re out there slaying dragons, and you would have easily, it could have been convenient not to talk about your psychedelic journey, it could have been very convenient for you not to write fully fledged fiction books about ayahuasca.

1:50:20 Again, that would, again, I want to clarify that particular point actually, because I am known as a non-fiction author and that’s what I write and that’s what I make my living from. I write non-fiction books, I’m not known as a novelist, but weirdly enough, in a series of ayahuasca sessions that I had in Brazil in 2006, I think it was, or 2007, I was given the whole story of a novel in visions over a period of five days, and I was given a very specific instruction by Mother Ayahuasca, which is, you’re going to go away and you’re going to write this, and I did. I went away and I wrote a novel called Entangled, which very much concerns psychedelic issues, a young woman 24,000 years ago, a young woman today, who are entangled in time, doing battle with a demon who travels across time.

1:51:13 This was the idea that came to me from ayahuasca, and then subsequently, because I found I enjoyed writing novels, I’ve written a series of three novels about the Spanish conquest of Mexico called War God. There’s a fourth, there’s a fourth novel to complete that series. Well, very few people buy my fiction because I’m known as a non-fiction author, but I’m glad that ayahuasca gave me the incentive to explore my own potential to write fiction, and if people enjoyed those books, great, I’m very happy, but fundamentally I did it for me.

1:51:47 I wanted to see if I could do it, I wanted to challenge myself and explore a different field of writing, and once ayahuasca had given me the courage to do that, I found in the second series of books, the War God series, that I could really get into writing fiction. There’s stuff you can do with fiction that you can’t do with non-fiction, you can get inside your characters’ heads, you can explain motives to people in a way that’s very difficult to do in non-fiction. But then the last of the War God novels I think I finished in 2013, and then suddenly came out this massive new information on the lost civilization and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and I had to go back to that, and so I put the novels aside and I went back to writing non-fiction, and I published Magicians of the Gods in 2015 and then America Before in 2019, and these are detailed, in-depth, factual investigations of the mystery of our past.

1:52:44 And everything is kind of brought together in Ancient Apocalypse, the series on Netflix. It’s beautiful, and I remember us talking about War God, and yeah, when Mother Ayahuasca tells you to do something, it’s hard to refuse. Smarter, it’s hard to refuse. It’s hard to refuse, but the fact that you did that, knowing that that would have been fodder for all your critics, just shows the world who you are, and I just appreciate you honoring that, Graham, and always being open and honest.

1:53:07 And so, you have no idea how excited we were to see the success of this series, and I encourage everyone to go watch it, and I can’t wait to come back here to talk about the second series. Absolutely, let’s hope that happens. I will very much enjoy talking to you about it again if it does. All right, in the meantime get some rest, you’ve been out promoting and working super hard, and just keep doing what you do, and thank you so much, Graham. I will.

1:53:30 All right, bless. Thank you all right, take care. Thank you.