Graham Hancock - The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilisation

Full transcript: Graham Hancock on London Real

5:20 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Graham Hancock, the British journalist and author of the best-selling books The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, the War God series, Supernatural, and your most recent book, Magicians of the Gods.

6:43 You specialize in unconventional theories involving ancient civilizations, stone monuments and megaliths, astrological data from the past, and altered states of consciousness. Your books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 27 languages. Graham, welcome back to London Real. Thanks, good to be with you again. Great to have you here.

7:01 You’re the only time we’ve ever had a guest on for three times, and so, you know, it’s just always a pleasure to have you here. Well, thanks. If I actually mark your visits, it’s kind of like a history of London Real. You were here first four years ago, the early days. Yeah.

7:15 And then three years ago, and I still remember that first visit. It was so powerful. I remember I prepared like four days for it, and you came on and you just spoke so honestly about everything, about consciousness. We talked about ayahuasca, cannabis, and it was just great. And I just, before we even get started, I just want to acknowledge you for all the work you’ve done and just, you just keep it real all the time, Graham.

7:38 And I that’s, whenever I see you on an interview or on a Rogan show, you’re always speaking, you know, hard truths, calling the world out for what it is, and it’s refreshing. Well, thank you. That’s nice of you to say that. I just do what I do. I mean, there’s nothing complicated or special about it.

7:58 Yeah, you seem to be very true to what you’re doing. So what has been happening with you the past three years? I know Magicians came out last year. People had waited a long time for that book. I believe Fingerprints was out in ’95, is that right?

8:11 Fingerprints of the Gods is definitely the book that I’m best known for, and it proposes that we are a species with amnesia, that there has been a forgotten episode of high civilization in the remote human past, back during the Ice Age. That was the case that I made in Fingerprints of the Gods. It was a very controversial book. It tackled many of the ideals of mainstream history head-on. It suggested that the whole story we’ve been told about the origins of civilization is wrong, and that book was published in 1995, which is, well, we’re sitting here in 2016, so amazingly that’s 21 years have passed since I wrote Fingerprints.

9:00 And that book came about because you were a journalist in Africa, you had made a trip to Ethiopia and you started just asking questions, right? Because you didn’t set out to be… I had a very little interest in the ancient past. As a matter of fact, I was totally a current affairs guy during the 1970s and the 1980s, but it was reporting a current affairs story in Ethiopia that led me to Ethiopia’s claim to possess the last Ark of the Covenant, which is actually central to the whole culture of Ethiopia, and I thought that was a story worth investigating.

9:33 And it was a story about the past and it drew me into the past in most unexpected ways. And I suddenly found that I think of myself as an investigative journalist, but let’s investigate the past, let’s look at what’s going on in our backyard, let’s see what the, let’s see what really may have been the story of humanity. Let’s not just accept what we’re told by the so-called experts in the field, let’s look into this ourselves. So that was my project with Fingerprints of the Gods was to bring that.

10:04 Now of course it’s not even in 1995 the notion of a lost civilization was not a new idea. That notion has been around for a very long time. We can take that notion actually back thousands and thousands of years. The most famous example is Plato, the Greek philosopher Plato, who gave us the story of Atlantis. From Plato comes the story of Atlantis, a great advanced civilization which had navigating and seafaring skills, which could explore the world, which built gigantic buildings, which had advanced knowledge in every area, which was prosperous and powerful.

10:43 But then Plato says that corruption crept into this society, that it became cruel and avaricious, it became greedy, it began to impose its power around the world, and he has a very ringing phrase. He said that Atlantis ceased to wear its prosperity with moderation, and the suggestion is that it’s this hubris, this conceit of Atlantis that had become so sure of itself that somehow the universe struck it down, and we have the cataclysm of flood and disaster, and that Atlantis is submerged beneath the waves. Now of course the view of historians and academics is that Plato’s story is just made up, he just made it up to make some political or philosophical point, but this cannot be so, that view can’t be right.

11:38 I was very suspicious of that view the first time I heard it from a mainstream historian. Why are they saying that Plato made this up? Plato repeatedly states that it is a true story, and as we look into it further we find something else that Plato puts a date on the destruction of Atlantis. He says Atlantis was submerged beneath the waves in a huge global cataclysm nine thousand years before the time of Solon. That gives us an absolute date for this.

12:05 We know Solon, we know who he was. Solon was a famous Greek lawmaker. He was an ancestor of Plato, as a matter of fact, about 200 years before Plato, and around 600 BC Solon, the great Greek lawmaker, made a visit to Egypt, and in Egypt the priests at a temple of Sais in the Delta told him the story of Atlantis, and they said that it was written on the walls of the temple, and he said, when did this happen? When was this great civilization destroyed? And they said 9,000 years ago, and that was in 600 BC.

12:39 So that’s 9600 BC in our calendar. That’s 11,600 years ago. Plato is telling us a great civilization was destroyed in a global cataclysm of flood 11,600 years ago. He’s laughed at by all academics and historians, but then geology comes along and lo and behold, what do we find? 11,600 years ago is a truly cataclysmic episode in geological history.

13:07 It’s called Meltwater Pulse 1B. We have a massive rise in sea level as the ice sheets on North America and northern Europe just crumble and collapse into the ocean. If Plato made the whole thing up, he was just astonishingly on the money with the latest geology, and I think that we really have to reconsider our attitudes to these stories that have come down to us from the past. Academics have been too quick to dismiss them, too quick to say, oh, we figured the whole story out, there’s no mystery there.

13:38 Maybe there’s a huge mystery there. Maybe we should listen to these clues and hints from the past that speak of a great civilization. So when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, it was at the end of a long lineage going back to Plato and before, and of course famously Ignatius Donnelly in the 1900s, the early 1900s and late hundreds, wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, which was a huge investigation of Atlantis. So this subject has been tackled again and again and again and again.

14:10 Mainstream academia has said no, it’s impossible, there could be no lost civilization, we know everything about the past, and it’s been dismissed. But the problem is that new evidence keeps coming out which can’t be explained by the existing historical model, new evidence that just doesn’t fit the picture. And my sense is that this evidence is now becoming overwhelming and that we’re reaching a tipping point, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but within our lifetimes we are going to see a completely new understanding of the past, a radical revisioning of the past, and therefore of our place in the world as well.

14:49 Did you know when you published that book in ’95 that you were picking a fight with academia, that you were going to soon be their nemesis for the next 20 years? I didn’t know that really. I understood that there were academics with entrenched positions on this subject, but I didn’t realize how violent it could become, how really, really powerful the reaction could be and how concerted and organized it could be. I didn’t realize that actually the past is an ideological subject in our society, and that it is a subject that is therefore tightly controlled as to what we are to know and not know about the past by the current politicians, the current people, not just academics.

15:40 You see, when you have a huge civilization as we have to do today, with billions of people all around the world and you’re in a leadership role, you want them kind of organized and productive and doing stuff, and you want them to feel good about that, so you want to tell them a story about why that should be good, why they should go to work every day and basically maybe not enjoying themselves but they go to work and their salary and buy consumer goods. This is what our society is about, it’s about production and consumption, and we’re supposed to feel good about that, and the historical model that we have at the moment tells us that we, 21st century technological society, is the absolute apex and pinnacle of human achievement. We are it, we’re the bee’s knees, you know, we’ve made it, we’re the end of that long story and here we are, and we should just produce and consume endlessly in this sort of hedonistic binge, and that is what life is all about.

16:39 And that is very nice for those in positions of power, because if people will buy into that, they stay quiet, they don’t ask questions, they don’t complain, they don’t riot in the streets, they just do their jobs. And I would suggest that the historical model that we have at the moment is part of that system of control. It’s part of saying that it’s perfectly normal and right that things should be as they are, we should be very pleased with ourselves, we’re not doing anything wrong, and let’s just carry on doing what we do.

17:06 So when you shake that up and publish a book that has a lot of research to it, a lot of thought to it, it starts upsetting lots of different people and the academics come after you, but there’s a lot of people that just don’t want to hear this. Well, academics and their friends in the media, this is a very substantial issue. There’s a whole network of ideas. I’m not talking about a conspiracy, actually. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just the way the world works, but the way the world changes is that people come along and suggest things which may be very uncomfortable for those who are in power, and when you’re in power you don’t like to feel uncomfortable, so you do whatever you can to put that down.

17:48 Now from an academic’s point of view, let’s say a professor of archaeology, he has invested his whole career in a particular model of the past, he or she have invested their whole career in a particular model of the past. That model was already set when they went into the profession. Right there, the very moment they start doing their first exams at university, a filter is being applied. If they are in any way outside the accepted teaching, if they are suggesting that things are not as they are taught, then they will not pass those exams or they will not do well, and they will not.

18:23 So in a way, in order to do well academically in that field, you have to buy into the existing model, because if you don’t buy into the existing model, your paper will be marked down and you will not get the results that could eventually lead you to becoming an academic. So by definition, academics are already people who’ve bought into the model and their careers are invested in that model, and they’re all decent people, they’re all good people, they believe passionately that they’re right and that this is how it is, and that belief also becomes existential in a way. You start to, it’s very easy for people to become deeply invested in their ideas.

19:02 I think we all do this. We have a certain set of ideas, we become deeply invested in them, and when those ideas are challenged it’s not just an intellectual discussion anymore, we take it as an attack on us in person. That’s what I think that’s fundamentally why academics reacted to me in the way that they did. I was arguing that the whole field of history and archaeology may have got the origins of civilization completely wrong, but at a personal gut level that was taken by many academics as a direct attack on them and their place in the world, and that then resulted in a counter-attack on me.

19:39 Now the counter-attacks on me would never have happened if my book had been a failure. There’s lots of books of alternative history that say radical things, but most of them don’t appear above the radar. This one did appear above the radar, and as a result there was a concerted effort made to discredit me, and that is a bit of a conspiracy, you know, when you have academics who write to the BBC and they say, you must bring this man down, you know, when they actually say that, and the BBC makes a program which is designed to damage my reputation, and that program is then later found to have been unfair by the Broadcasting Standards Commission, something odd is going on here.

20:20 Yes, something a little bit to do with reality control is happening there, and this is systemic because it doesn’t stop with the BBC, other media sources. TED, you’ve had your ups and downs. It’s very weird with TED. I just find it very, very strange because I used to like the odd TED talk when I heard it, and you know, I thought, well, okay, ideas worth spreading, I’ll go with that, and some interesting discussions. And I think it’s fairly well known, I did a TEDx event in January 2013.

20:51 I’m there, Rupert Sheldrake is there, Satish Kumar is there, a bunch of other people are there. We all give talks and they go up on the TEDx TED YouTube channel, and then two weeks later TED removes my talk and it removes Rupert Sheldrake’s talk, and well, naturally there’s a fuss about this and people want to know why, and TED say, oh well, because these were pseudo-scientific ideas. Well, they never justified or supported that. They accused us of representing ideas about consciousness which were not scientific.

21:25 That’s not the case at all. Rupert Sheldrake is a highly credentialed scientist. These ideas were scientific enough, they were the kind of science that these people don’t like. There’s a certain faction in science which is called materialist reductionism, where everything is reduced to matter, so the idea that there could be anything to consciousness beyond the brain is anathema to such scientists. Those scientists believe that consciousness, they call it an epiphenomenon of brain activity, okay, we have these big brains, we evolved them in order to survive in the jungle of survival of the fittest, and the kind of accidental byproduct of that, we got this thing called consciousness.

22:06 Believe it or not, that is what people like Richard Dawkins actually believe, that consciousness is an accidental byproduct of brain activity, which Rupert Sheldrake and I were suggesting that that’s not the case, that it’s much more mysterious than that. And that’s why they took our talks offline, not because they were unscientific but because they challenged a dogma of a particular faction of science. And in fact Rupert and I received huge support from many scientists out there who said that TED were way out of line to do this and that the ideas that we were presenting were not unscientific, they were leading edge, but they were not, um, not unscientific.

22:42 So in the end TED were forced to put the talks back, not on their YouTube channel but on their main site. They were forced to publish the reasons why they’d taken them offline, they were forced to cross all those reasons out. A very humiliating climb down for TED, and those are still left online with all their bogus reasons for removing the talks crossed out and our rebuttals placed there and the talks back online. So a few years later, in 2015, a TEDx organizer in Reading in England comes up to me and says, would I do a TED talk with him, TEDx event?

23:14 And I said, well, you know, I’ve had a bit of trouble with TED in the past, and he said, yeah, but I like your subject and I want you to speak, and I’m an independent organizer and I want you to speak. So I said, okay, I’ll do it, and I went and did it, and lo and behold, after two weeks, this time TED think they’re getting smart, they realize they got a massive backlash from censoring me and taking me offline, so now they leave it online but they stick a huge health warning on it, basically saying this is not politically correct, this is not sanctioned, authorized science, you know. And so the museum of TED seems to be that actually its audience can’t make up their own minds, that they’re like children, that they’re not capable of deciding for themselves, and that TED must curate and shepherd everything and to present them with the correct material for their minds, and to me this is absolutely astonishing.

24:02 It’s astonishing that TED would that, well, I’ll not get involved with TED again. I thought I’d give them another chance, I thought they’d learned from the previous experience, but now I see that they haven’t, they haven’t learned at all, and there’s no point whatsoever in using their platform. Yeah, I think they’re very sensitive about consciousness, psychedelics. You probably are one of the very few talks that’s even up there, oddly enough. They’ve covered, they have covered psychedelics in talks before.

24:29 I don’t think that’s the problem. I think they’re willing to talk about psychedelics, particularly in view of the fact there’s such a lot of good scientific research going on, psychedelic stuff. Yeah, they want to talk about that, but the question is how do you position that talk? If you were to suggest, as I do, that in altered states of consciousness we may access valuable and useful information which may be of fundamental importance to humanity, that’s a step too far for an organization, and then they call it pseudoscience or something, and then they kind of redact some of those accusations.

25:00 Yeah, I had Lawrence Krauss in here and he did the movie with Richard Dawkins, The Unbelievers, right? I think both of them have this theory that you know the consciousness, there really isn’t anything more to it from a scientific viewpoint, and they need to go take some DMT. What happens when you challenge people, that you’ve, someone challenged Richard Dawkins? I did that, I challenged Richard Dawkins. He came to speak in my hometown, which is Bath, and he spoke in the public library, so I thought I’d go along, and he was promoting a book called The Magic of Reality, so I wanted to question him about his views on reality, and my question to him, which I recorded and put on YouTube, and his answer was that there are cultures who believe that reality is much more complicated than just matter, and that they believe that drinking a visionary substance like ayahuasca can give them access to those realms.

25:54 Have you ever, as a scientist, have you ever tested your own prejudices by working with one of these substances and seeing what the experiences, what the effect that the experiences have on your thinking? And he was interesting, he said, yeah, under the right circumstances, with, you know, correct medical support, as long as I could be sure I was safe, I would do it. So I await the day when Richard Dawkins has his first massive DMT trip and possibly thinks again about a few things.

26:24 Right, and there’s a possibility, right? He’s probably, well, I think there is a possibility, especially with attenuated, it’s not impossible. The conditions that Richard Dawkins set, which would be when I asked him that question and he publicly answered it, was that he wanted medical supervision, he wanted to be assured that he would be safe. Well, there’s work going on with psychedelics at Imperial College in London right now which will provide him with all of those things.

26:48 So if Richard Dawkins actually wants to put his money where his mouth is, he can contact Professor Richard Nutt and he can have at any rate a deep psilocybin experience in Imperial College, and I think he would find that interesting. I think even if it didn’t shake up his view of the world, he would find it an interesting thing to do. Yeah, he can do that, I think legally now, because Dave Nutt has of course the ability to do that. I think they are doing a DMT study next, so hopefully a DMT study is coming up.

27:14 Did in some way did Fingerprints of the Gods put you on a journey to start thinking about altered states of consciousness? Was, I mean, as you get more into looking at some of these monuments and monoliths in the history, did that contribute to that journey, or was it just you exploring as an individual? I had become aware, if you like, of the spiritual side of life, not through the mainstream religions in the West but through my studies of ancient Egyptian scriptures and religions, and immersing myself in that material had, I suspect, opened me to the possibility of other realms, of other realities, but I hadn’t really considered how one enters or explores those realms.

28:02 I’d always thought that the Great Pyramid, whatever else it is, is connected to consciousness in some way, that it’s like a huge instrument which is designed to enhance or affect consciousness in certain very specific ways. If you ever have the opportunity to be alone inside the Great Pyramid, as I have had on a few occasions, it’s truly a mystical experience, especially if the lights go off. It really can be very extraordinary in effect, it affects consciousness.

28:33 So I was aware of consciousness, I was aware that there were views that we live in a complex reality, that there are spirit worlds which quantum physicists might call parallel universes. All of this was, I was aware of it, but I hadn’t really thought this is something I would look into. After I’d finished Fingerprints of the Gods I then went on and wrote a series of other books on the lost civilization theme. The huge book published in 2002 was Underworld, documenting seven years of scuba diving looking for ruins underwater.

29:07 And I wanted to do something different after that. I wanted to get away from the whole lost civilization and these endless bloody arguments with academics and their mates in the media. I just thought, I’ve done that. I was interested in human origins, and I mean, I need to cut a long story short here, but the background research I did focused on the issue of cave art. When did our ancestors, why did they suddenly start creating this fantastic art in these deep caverns deep beneath the ground or in rock shelters high in mountains in South Africa, all over the world?

29:42 And then I found there was a really good explanation for that. Let’s pay tribute to the late great Terence McKenna and his book Food of the Gods, the Stoned Ape theory, implicating psilocybin in the emergence of modern human consciousness, but let’s also pay tribute to David Lewis-Williams, who’s a professor of archaeology and anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and David Lewis-Williams, right back to the 1970s, had been arguing that the secret of rock and cave art all around the world was that it was shamanistic art, that these were shamans who had entered deeply altered states of consciousness, returned to the everyday state of consciousness, and painted their visions, and that’s why there’s so much in common with these images all around the world.

30:26 And I suddenly realized, this is fascinating. There seems to be this moment in the human story when the light just goes on and we become recognizably us. That’s what I’m going to look at. So then the next thing was, okay, I’m a hands-on researcher, I’m not just going to sit in a f***ing armchair and write about this, I’ve got to do some serious work. That’s the journalist in you, right?

30:47 I’m going to do some serious work. That’s the journalist, an academic would have just sat in the army perhaps. And indeed, and indeed David Lewis-Williams, who I have huge respect for, has done precisely that. He refuses to take any psychedelic, even though his argument is that psychedelics were responsible for cave art, he doesn’t want to take one himself. He says, I don’t want to burn my brains, and anyway, their research is the research is there.

31:08 I don’t work that way. If I’m going to write about something, I have to experience it, otherwise I shouldn’t be writing about it, and therefore I needed to have psychedelic experiences. I had had psychedelic experiences before, very few. I’d taken LSD in 1974 when I was 24 years old, and then I had no more psychedelics until I started to research the book that became Supernatural. I discovered that in the Amazon jungle there are shamans who are drinking a powerful visionary brew, and what are they doing afterwards?

31:41 They’re painting their visions, exactly like those cave artists. I realized it was a key, I could learn from this. So I went to the Amazon and I had my first series of ayahuasca sessions with shamans in the Amazon, and it was an extraordinary series of experiences which shook me to my core. It gave me what I needed to write my book, to do the research authentically, but something else as well. A whole new path opened up in front of me, and an area of inquiry and investigation that I’d never even considered before, and also valuable personal lessons to learn from these ancient teacher plants, because I believe that that’s what they are.

32:28 And our society, with its rabid, hysterical, demonizing attitude to psychedelics, is dead wrong, 100% wrong, and 100 or 200 years from now people will look back on this age and the persecution of the war on drugs, and they will see it as a terrible time in the human story when a dreadful, dreadful mistake was made, which was only corrected with great difficulty. You know, the people who created the war on drugs are the same ugly people who are invested in war and harm and hatred and damage all over the world, and since we’re suffering from the consequences of their actions in those other areas, we should wake up to the fact that the war on drugs is another one of those consequences, that those same vile and evil people who’ve turned the world into hell are the people who declared the war on drugs.

33:19 When it comes to psychedelics, are we getting small wins? Do you feel like we’re getting there? Yes. Okay, we are getting small wins in psychedelics. There’s a huge process underway.

33:29 It’s difficult to see the whole picture because we’re in the middle of it at the moment. It’s difficult to know where it’s going to go. I think the internet has played a big role in this. It means that information can’t be kept within exclusive little cliques anymore. It means that information is free and that people can gain access to information and find out things for themselves, and I think this has led to an across-the-board questioning of authority structures in our society.

34:01 See, the curious thing about democracies, we’re told democracies are great things, and democracies are great things of course, but what you have, what happens in a democracy, is that you get a massive investment in the manipulation of public opinion. See, a dictator doesn’t care about manipulating public opinion because a dictator doesn’t care about public opinion. He doesn’t need to manipulate the public opinion in order to bring the public with him because he’s operating by force.

34:31 In a democracy a politician cannot operate by force, they have to bring the public with them. Now if democracy really worked, if it was a really good thing, all information would be completely transparent, there would be no lobbyists, there would be no money being paid to give us information. But actually what we live in is a society where vast amounts of money are spent in shaping public opinion on particular areas, and this is the society that we live in today, where huge amounts of money are being invested in promoting a particular ideological position, and I think that where we’re getting wins is that people are waking up, they’re realizing that this is part of a system of manipulation and control.

35:18 They’re realizing we are sovereign adults, we have the right to do with our own bodies what we wish so long as we do no harm to others. I mean, what an absurd abuse of human rights for a politician to say that he will send you or me to prison because we’ve experienced a psychedelic. We didn’t do any harm to others, we underwent a personal experience, and for that we’re going to be sent to prison. This is the Inquisition, this is like burning people at the stake, you know, for not following a particular version of Christianity.

35:49 This is an appalling abuse that’s taking place in our society. So people are waking up to that, it’s part of an overall waking up to the way that the world is run, but I think it’s at the leading edge of that waking up. And then on the other side we have great scientists, people like David Nutt, who are refusing to be beaten down by the ideology, who realize that these substances have enormous potential, enormous therapeutic potential, and who, against stiff opposition, are doing the science, opposition from other scientists as well, from other scientists.

36:23 They are doing the science and they are getting incredible results. So now we’re finding that science is saying, actually, you know what, these psychedelics, they don’t really seem to harm people, and they actually do seem to do a really incredible amount of good. They can solve problems of depression, they can solve problems of anxiety, they can solve problems of fear of death amongst people suffering from terminal cancers and so on. They’re very healing, life-giving in the right way, used in the right way, responsibly, correctly, they can be very good things, and science is getting this now.

36:54 So it’s becoming harder for the dominator class to maintain its position on this subject, but they still do. Yeah, and of course in Britain we’ve just had, you know, the absurd Psychoactive Substances Act published, where I mean, can you believe this? Are we actually living in 2016 or is this 1984, that we are now living in a Britain where any substance that has any effect on your mind is illegal unless it is specifically exempted? What is specifically exempted?

37:26 Alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. All other mind-altering substances are now illegal. That means that no adult in Britain can make any choice about their own mind, any choice at all, without breaking the law. This seems to me a very strange situation, and but there’s hope in it, because the law is so ridiculous that it’s going to bring the law itself into disrepute, that if politicians are so stupid that they create such a law in the first place, sooner or later they will have been given enough rope to hang themselves.

38:04 Do you think Britain’s going backwards then, when the U.S. is going slightly… I think Britain, yeah, I think Britain’s going really radically backwards at the moment because we have a bunch of incredibly dull, narrow-minded, stupid politicians in Britain. Got plenty of dull, narrow-minded and stupid politicians in America as well, but America is a country where actually democracy can work. The citizens of Colorado decided that it was extremely inconvenient for them and an abuse of their rights as adults that they were not allowed to smoke cannabis, so they made cannabis legal.

38:42 They took a vote, they legalized it, and now you can go into beautiful cannabis boutiques across Colorado and be treated as an adult, buy whatever you want and leave, nobody is judging you, nobody’s asking you questions, nobody’s sending you to prison. This is a great thing about America, that individual bits of America can make up their mind on an issue regardless of the federal view. See, I can’t imagine Northumberland or Yorkshire making cannabis legal if Westminster disagrees, but Colorado and Alaska can.

39:18 So yeah, I think America is moving ahead, it’s a good thing too, because America as a state entity has been the driving force behind all the evils of the war on drugs, so it’s a very good thing that the American people at the grassroots level are saying enough and they are ending that war state by state, because make no mistake, the ending of the war on cannabis is the beginning of the end of the war on drugs, and those who are invested in the war on drugs are desperately struggling to stop the legalization of cannabis because they know that it’s going to open the floodgates and suddenly all over the world adults will be allowed to make decisions about their own minds, their own bodies and their own consciousness without asking anybody’s permission or breaking anybody’s law, so long as they do no harm to others.

40:08 It’s fascinating to watch this kind of a civil war in America, where the federal is saying one thing, the state is saying the other, they both don’t want to fight too hard against the other, but it’s changing. Yeah. And you spend time in Colorado. When you’re in a state like that that is open to this idea of having sovereignty over your own body, does that have a knock-on effect to, you know, the rest of the society? Does it just seem like a different place?

40:31 I think it does, yeah. I like the air in Colorado. I feel that I’m breathing the air of some kind of freedom there, that people have freely chosen a particular way and they’ve made it happen. Interestingly, people from all over America are flocking to Colorado, it’s a very attractive place to go and live now. I understand property prices are zooming up, you know, there’s a huge economic boom as a result of cannabis.

40:56 I suspect a lot of other states are looking at that. Yeah, and thinking this may be the way to go. You know, it’s still today, hundred and fifty thousand, three quarters of a million Americans are still arrested every year for possession of cannabis. That’s three quarters of a million Americans every year getting criminal records for doing what? Having a mild experience in their own homes, doing no harm to others.

41:21 Of course this is insane, and the same society even encourages them to drink alcohol, which is a far more dangerous drug. So we need to wake up as a human species, we need to, you know, we need to become our own leaders. This is the, in my view, the next step forward is, do we really need leadership? You know, if we need leaders then that suggests we are infants, that we’re not capable of making mature and informed decisions ourselves. And I think that if humanity is going to progress, if we’re going to move forward, that’s the next step that we have to come to, that the role of leadership in society gets reduced, that we don’t have these high-profile campaigns and these celebrity leaders going around.

42:08 We don’t actually need leaders, we can all be our own leaders. We need administrators, we need technocrats who can do certain things for us, but they’re working for us, we’re not working for them. You see, that’s the thing. It’s interesting you say that now that we’re in full bore of a, you know, incredibly, almost intensely insane American presidential race, where it’s not only leaders but it’s turned into celebrity, it’s almost turned into show business.

42:33 Yeah. And no one really questions the fact that we should maybe not be voting for someone and lead ourselves. It’s more who are we voting for, let’s talk about this person, but people aren’t really asking the questions you’re talking about. No, those questions aren’t being asked, but I think it’s interesting what we’re observing in America. I think what’s driving it in America is a deep distrust of authority and a deep distrust of anything that’s connected to the status quo.

43:02 There’s I’m not sure if politicians really got the message yet. There’s absolute revulsion at them here in Britain and in America. We’re revolted by our political class. They’re disgusting individuals. I can hardly think of a politician whose hand I would even wish to shake, and I would certainly be washing my hands afterwards if I did.

43:25 Really repulsive individuals. So the vote against, the vote for Trump is really a vote against them. I think it’s a vote against the system. I think it’s a vote against the system that has failed Americans again and again and again, and it’s the same system all over the world that’s failing Britons and failing the French and failing everybody else. It’s a global system of control.

43:47 I think people are aware of that, I think they’re fed up with that, and I think it won’t change. So Trump is getting support because he’s certainly not, you know, part of that. He looks different, he sounds different, he feels different. Bernie Sanders got a lot of support for the same reason, he looks and sounds different. They were saying very different things but both of them were anti-establishment figures, and that’s what’s going on here, that the establishment itself is losing its grip and we are seeing a kind of crazy chaos resulting from that.

44:19 But we will sort it out. Human beings are capable of sorting things out. We don’t need leaders to sort things out, we can sort things out ourselves. So this is progress really, I would say. So, okay, you mentioned cannabis before.

44:29 When you were here four years ago you talked about your relationship with cannabis and how another plant ally, Mother Ayahuasca, had kind of discussed things about the other plant ally, cannabis, with you. Has your relationship with cannabis changed since then? Yeah, a bit. I described it, so basically what happened with me and cannabis was that I had a very long relationship with cannabis. It started late, I didn’t start smoking cannabis until I was 37 years old, and by the time I was in my early 40s it had become a very central part of my life.

45:07 That’s when I discovered I could write with cannabis, as well as, you know, just enjoy nice food. So I actually wrote Fingerprints of the Gods entirely under the influence of cannabis. I was stoned. And my critics will say, oh, that explains everything, you know. And then they do actually do again.

45:28 Yeah, that’s one of the arguments: Hancock uses drugs, so we can’t, you know, we can’t believe anything he says. The ultimate ad hominem argument. Yeah. Okay. Right.

45:35 Okay. Yeah, so where was I? Oh, yes, the relationship with cannabis. Oh yeah, so the problem was, cannabis, like any of our plant allies, needs to be treated with respect. You know, if you use this stuff 16 hours a day, seven days a week, that’s not respecting it, and I was definitely getting bent out of shape in lots and lots of ways.

45:56 I realize now that at that period of my life, throughout about 2009, ’10, ’11 thereabouts, I had become extremely paranoid and very suspicious of other people’s motives. I lived in constant suspicion, and that’s when I had a series of five sessions of ayahuasca in Brazil in October 2011, and those sessions focused entirely on my cannabis habit, and they showed me that I was behaving in a way that was hurtful and damaging to other people, that this suspicion, this jealousy that was connected with cannabis in some way, was hurtful to others, and it was not a good thing, and I was given a very powerful kicking by ayahuasca, and when I came back from Brazil I found I couldn’t smoke cannabis anymore. You tried?

46:45 I tried, I bought the vaporizer in there, I couldn’t smoke it. I fired up the vapor, I filled this big bag of, you know, vapor and took one inhalation on, and I felt absolutely disgusted, and I never, I’d never known, I didn’t understand it at all, but I couldn’t go on. I literally couldn’t go on. Ayahuasca had made me stop completely smoking cannabis, and that carried on for three years, from October 2011 right through until the Joe Rogan Experience, the Joe Rogan Experience in September 2014.

47:19 Right, so I’m sitting talking to Joe live as we are now, and he says, as you just asked me, you know, what’s the thing with you and cannabis? Are you still, have you still, you know, not smoking it? And I said, yeah, nearly three years now, I haven’t touched it, but I’m beginning to think maybe I could dip my toes back in the water. So Joe says, why don’t you start now? And pulls out a nice fat California joint.

47:43 Joe doesn’t need a lot of encouragement for that. So we lit it up and smoked it on air, and I did enjoy it actually very much. And so what’s happened since then is that in situations like Colorado where there’s no hassle, okay, I’m not compelled, I don’t feel a compulsion to use cannabis anymore in the way that I did, but I do enjoy using it where it’s convenient and easy for me to do it, spending a lot of time in Colorado these days. I do, I particularly like cannabis in the form of oil.

48:13 I don’t really like, I don’t smoke, for many years I didn’t smoke, I used a vaporizer, but I think cannabis oil is a very interesting way to take cannabis orally. Yes, orally. And of course, you know, in Colorado with the whole medical marijuana industry they’ve really developed really excellent cannabis products, and you can, you know, pick and choose exactly what you want and with the full knowledge that it’s totally legal and nobody’s going to break down your door or wreck your life.

48:42 And again, safe, and you know what it is. And yeah, yeah, what a concept, right? It’s a really great concept. Yeah, it’s a very good concept. Talk to me about Joe Rogan, because I think probably the first time I invited you here, I had seen you on, back in those old days of Joe, where you went to his house and the screen was split, and I remember watching you there, and you know, you guys form this kind of incredibly unobvious relationship.

49:03 Yeah, the stand-up comedian, the MMA commentator, and Graham Hancock from England. But you two are obviously very close and you’ve kept up a relationship over the years. What’s that been like, and what’s it been like to be kind of so big on YouTube? Do you meet fans that know you from that show? I certainly do.

49:22 I think Joe Rogan is an exceptional human being. He’s a really remarkable guy with an incredible breadth of mind, many different skills and capacities and an ability to synthesize all of that and bring it into a conversation. I think he’s playing a fantastic role in the world in showing people what can be thought about, you know, in a way giving people permission to think about things that they never thought about before. I think he’s opening minds all over the world.

49:58 I’m incredibly grateful to Joe for the conversations I’ve had with him because it’s allowed me to express my views and my ideas to a very, very wide audience, and yes, certainly I meet people all the time who’ve seen me on the Joe Rogan Experience. So I was working as a banker in the City of London, absolutely miserable, Graham. I was going to work, everyone told me I was doing great and my life was great because I had this great job and was making this money and could do all these, that could consume a lot of things.

50:28 Yeah, but I would come home and the one bit of peace I would have would be listening to Rogan for two and three hours. I used to watch the old things when they were on Vimeo, they weren’t even on YouTube, and it was just this time where maybe I was given the permission to think about things I never thought, and it was quite honestly because of that that we’re here talking here today. I mean, London Real was inspired by Joe. Yeah. And, you know, I can never say that enough.

50:52 And so I think it was right when you came on the show four years ago when we finally got that tweet from Joe, it was just the most surreal experience I could ever have, that all of a sudden we were going to LA to meet and talk with Joe, and again just so gracious, so generous to just have us do that. But it was like, honestly, I felt like I was beaming out signals to like somewhere in outer space by broadcasting London Real and then someone had heard a signal and sent it back and it was Joe Rogan who had inspired us, so it was just this crazy thing. And to watch, we were episode 271, now he’s on 800 and something, and I can feel that it’s really a part of who he is now.

51:29 I think he can’t be Joe without having five episodes a week and talking about these ideas and getting people to talk about ideas. Yeah, yeah, I think it’s as important as his comedy and as his MMA and everything. I think it’s probably more important. You might be right. I think what he’s doing through that show is alchemical in a way.

51:48 It’s a transformation that is being worked on the minds of millions of people around the world. Yeah, it’s a great thing he’s doing, its own psychedelic. Yeah, and you know, Joe has not just heard in America, I mean, I travel the world all the time, I meet people in Japan, in South Africa, in Australia, have heard me on the Joe Rogan Experience. So there you go. Yeah, it’s everywhere.

52:10 When it comes to plant allies, what is your current relationship with ayahuasca? It’s something we talked a lot about on this show. Again, back to my kind of banker days, when we first did a before and after ayahuasca show, I think was before you, we saw you about four and a half years ago. I was terrified, I thought the Bank of England would never allow me to come back in the financial markets. Little did I know that would be a blessing at the time, but I was really paranoid.

52:33 People told us not to do it, not to talk about it on YouTube, blah, blah, blah, but we went ahead and felt it was the right thing to do, and we were very respectful of Mother Ayahuasca, always have been, but it was really transformative for me. I remember when you were on the show first time you said, I try to go every year. What’s that relationship been like? Yeah, my practice was to have a concentrated series of sessions, that I would take two weeks in the year and that I would have five sessions during those two weeks, and I was doing that every year for many years.

53:08 Sometimes I would have more sessions, but I tried to at least have five sessions a year. More recently I’ve reduced that, I don’t feel so eager anymore. I’ve had more than 60 ayahuasca sessions. The most recent one was in the United States, very close to Mount Shasta, amazing place to drink the brew. You’re a mountain like that.

53:35 Yeah, and the next day we had a different experience with a medicine called San Pedro, which is a cactus, the active ingredient is mescaline. It’s very interesting to work with ayahuasca one day, overnight, and then the next day with the San Pedro, which connects you to nature in an extraordinary manner and you’re deep in nature around Manchester. And that’s a daytime experience typically, the San Pedro experience, I would say is a daytime experience. Yeah, I would, it was my first experience with San Pedro and I would definitely want to experience it during the day in nature.

54:08 I want to be in nature, I want to be talking to trees. Okay. I’ve heard about it. I know if people go to South America for the ceremonies, oftentimes there’s a San Pedro during the day between ceremonies, but I’ve also heard from people that are very comfortable with the ayahuasca experience, not that you’re ever comfortable, but you kind of at least get used to knowing what the things you would expect, sometimes really thrown off by the San Pedro. Yeah, I haven’t taken enough San Pedro, I’ve only had the one session, you know, and that’s nothing to judge from.

54:36 You need to have multiple sessions before you can really know what you’re dealing with, but I didn’t find it full-on in the way that ayahuasca is. Ayahuasca, when you hit the right dose and it’s the right brew, will take you into this, you know, seamlessly convincing parallel realm where you are communicating with entities in a very meaningful way. I mean, it’s a very powerful experience. I’m told that can happen with San Pedro, but I didn’t find it primarily a visionary experience.

55:11 I found it an integrating experience, a sense of awakening to nature, you know, and realizing that yeah, we have this blessing, we’re living in the midst of this just this glory, this beauty, and it’s all sentient, it all has purpose, it all has function, and we just ignore it most of the time. San Pedro really connected me to trees, I have to say. Right. And I’ve never been a tree hugger, you know, but I have to say after that day with San Pedro I felt very attached to trees and I do occasionally find myself even hugging them.

55:45 And what is Mother Ayahuasca telling you these days? You know, she’s been kind of gentle with me. I’ve had no backlash for my occasional revisiting of cannabis. I think the problem, I think what ayahuasca was drawing my attention to was the relationship that I had with cannabis, and that relationship prior to 2011 was not a constructive relationship. I had an abusive relationship with cannabis and I paid a price for it.

56:15 What that ayahuasca session, that series of sessions, addressed was my relationship to cannabis, that if that was how it was going to be, I had to stop. If another relationship could be formed where I can work with cannabis occasionally with reverence, actually, because it is an amazing plant medicine, if that’s the case, if it’s not obsessional, it’s not every day, I can let it go for months, it doesn’t matter, then it’s okay. Ayahuasca is not beating me up about that at all.

56:44 Okay. I’m having less ayahuasca sessions these days. I don’t expect to have another one during 2016. One is enough for me. I find that the lessons taught, the experience is so powerful, it’s worth taking time to integrate it, and it’s never good to be too eager with ayahuasca.

57:04 I see people beating themselves up at ayahuasca sessions because they haven’t had visions. Relax, it all takes time, it’s a long process. But after my first ceremony, I think it was in ’11 or no, ’12, I forced myself to have a total of three that year just because I knew I had a lot of work to do. And it was my second one that was just super powerful. I don’t think many people know, but it was actually in this studio.

57:30 I was here and I remember crying so much that the tears streamed down my face and I remember them collecting in my ears and dripping down my ears while our female shaman was singing these beautiful icaros, and it was a really powerful moment for me, and I went right back to when I was seven years old and parents were divorced, and I realized I’d been building these walls around me to keep people from hurting me. Yeah. And it was just really powerful, and I’d shut a lot of people out of my life, and so it’s really stuck with me for a long time, and I have maybe why would politicians wish to make sweaty experiences illegal?

58:05 I don’t know, but we can really learn about ourselves and we can apply those lessons, you know, once you’ve seen the truth. It doesn’t mean that you’re automatically going to go implement it, but at least you have the opportunity to. I don’t understand why politicians would want to prevent people from having those experiences. A good politician who really loved the people of the country in which he lived would rather than trying to prevent that would say, well, if people want to have those experiences, let’s find the ways to make them as safe and as nurturing as we possibly can.

58:36 That would be good politics, instead of this beat them about the head and send them to prison and ruin their reputations and break down their doors, [expletive]. I think it’s a control issue like you said, and this whole war on drugs is just a control issue. It gives us excuses to control. And yeah, it comes back to that, that probably that democracy argument you’re making. So it’s fascinating to me.

58:53 I mean, I really believe, and I asked Professor Nutt this one day, that you know, one day, 20 years from now, 40 years from now, that different holiday destinations can be you going into the country and having a psilocybin or a DMT or an ayahuasca experience, and what did Grandma do last for vacation? She went to the countryside, she came back refreshed from her vacation with a new perspective, much more loving, kind of the way vacations used to. Absolutely.

59:17 Absolutely. And so I have, I like Martin Luther King, I have a dream that one day we’ll be able to do these things. I think what we have to get to grips with is that we have been systematically lied to, that there has been a powerfully funded ideological campaign running for more than 40 years to deceive us on the subject of these substances, and it is truly a liberating act to wake up to the truth and to understand that we’ve been lied to, because then we know at least that this whole fabric was false and that we can move ahead with, you know, clear knowledge of what we’re doing.

59:53 And when you say sovereignty over your own body, I remember that from four years ago, it’s something everyone needs to think about. We have to think about this because this is what we are, our consciousness, our bodies, this is us, and the right of other people to make legislation about us, about what we do. There’s a crucial distinction: if we’re doing harm to others there’s a place for legislation, so long as we’re not doing harm to others, I would say what the adult chooses to do with his or her own body or his or her own consciousness should be absolutely their own business, and any decent society would recognize that.

1:00:30 Instead of spying on people and interfering and listening to their phone conversations and breaking down their doors, what a horrible atmosphere to create. We don’t need to do this to ourselves, you know. Society just needs to chill a little bit. Yes, and oftentimes we just blindly follow those laws. I had the late Howard Marks in here, obviously a big proponent of cannabis.

1:00:48 Yeah, he’s amazing, but he said, Brian, I have friends of mine that won’t take cannabis because strictly because it’s against the law. That’s right. So where we build these prisons and then again the psychoactive substance, well, they must be right, so we better not touch it, these are bad. Again, no, take leadership. Let’s remember the bad laws.

1:01:06 It used to be a law that if a woman was found guilty of witchcraft she would be burnt at the stake. Was that a good law? Should people have followed that law? No, definitely not. It used to be possible to be burnt at the stake for saying that the earth went around the sun, even though that was correct, you know.

1:01:23 So the fact that something is a law doesn’t mean it’s right, it often means it’s wrong, actually. Let me ask you about War God, because with my limited experience of psychedelics it’s always made me see the good, yeah, in this world, and it always made me question what I was doing and make me do better things about myself, and so I had this idea that anyone taking psychedelic substances would always make them a better person, although I’ve heard definitely different opinions over that. And yet, no, that’s definitely not the case.

1:01:52 Yeah, it’s not the case. And first of all I want to ask about you writing fiction, because it’s something very few people go from non-fiction to fiction and even back to non-fiction. So Supernatural, but then the War God series, that first book, you know, really blew my mind. I think gave me bad dreams for a long time, but you talk about, you know, things that happened in Mexico, and these fascinating psilocybin was used in a very negative way by the Aztecs.

1:02:16 Most unfortunately. I think with psychedelics it’s important to realize, first of all, that they’re not a magic bullet to enlightenment. It’s not like you take the psychedelic and suddenly you’re enlightened. That’s complete crap, of course you’re not. Enlightenment only comes with work.

1:02:33 And secondly, not all is sweetness and light in the psychedelic garden. There’s a lot of unpleasant stuff going on there, a lot of exploitation, a lot of, frankly, unsavory characters who got into the ayahuasca business simply to make money, and I wouldn’t want to drink their brew. I don’t even know what they’re putting in that brew. I think with psychedelics what you bring to the party is really important, and if you bring a state of mind filled with hatred and anger to the party it’s possible that the psychedelics will take you in that direction.

1:03:11 That’s what appeared to happen with the Aztecs, who integrated psychedelics into their human sacrifice rituals in a really ghastly way. And sometimes a sacrificer would have taken psychedelics, sometimes the victim would also be given psychedelics beforehand. Very dark and negative behavior went around psychedelics in Mexico at the time of the Aztecs, but I would say that’s not the psychedelics, I’d say that’s the Aztecs, that’s their cruel, vicious culture that was behind that.

1:03:45 These are powerful tools, just like electricity is powerful. Electricity can be used for really horrible things and it can be used for really good things. So you have to make that choice for good when you work with psychedelics. I think it’s very important to be clear on that. You must make that choice for good, all your intentions must be good.

1:04:08 If you go into it with negative intentions, there may be negative consequences from it. It’s very important to have the intention right. Are we going to expect some more fictional works from you? So I’m writing War God 3 at the moment, the third volume of the War God series. I am deeply immersed in it.

1:04:27 I write very intensely. My way with writing, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, is I typically do 16-hour days. I’m at my desk usually at 7 or 7:30 in the morning and I often don’t finish until one or two in the next day, and then I just sleep and then I work again another 16 hours, and I do that every day. But it’s a great way to write a book, because you are immersed in the moment, you’re completely surrounded by your subject, you’re totally involved in your subject, you’re giving everything, heart and soul, to the subject for that period of time, and I think spreading it out over a longer period dilutes that a little bit, so I much prefer to write in these very intense ways, which I’m doing at the moment.

1:05:10 I do love writing fiction. It’s tremendous fun. I get involved in the story, in the characters, and I find this particular book is about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the War God series, and it’s been interesting because I write non-fiction as well, to say to myself, if I were approaching this as a non-fiction subject, would I be getting, would I be learning as much from it as I’m actually learning approaching it as a novelist? And I realized that no, I wouldn’t, because as a novelist I am required to get inside the heads of the principal characters.

1:05:45 You know, I can’t just report that Moctezuma did this or that, I need to hear his thoughts. And in doing that you suddenly find explanations for odd events that took place in history become clear. You get it, that was the personality of the guy that led to that. So I really enjoy it. I feel like a bit like a kid playing a computer game when I’m writing novels, I’m just totally in it and loving it and totally involved.

1:06:08 Writing non-fiction is also a passion, but it’s a slight step back. There’s not that sort of deep carried-away immersion in a narrative, it’s more an argument, it’s a matter of marshalling the facts, marshalling the evidence, making a coherent case that people can understand, understanding that I am putting forward radical ideas and that those need to be supported. It’s useless to just present a radical thought without backing it up. Yeah, so you know, they’re two very different kinds of projects.

1:06:38 I hope eventually my readers will come with me on the novels, but I write the novels for myself. I remember you said you took a break from non-fiction because you had to be so absolutely precise with everything you said and back it up that you just wanted to take a break. That was Underworld, published in 2002, 2,000 footnotes, I mean, come on, you know. My state of mind at that point is I’m bulletproofing every argument. I’ve been attacked so many times by the academics and their friends in the media that, you know, I want to make my arguments absolutely bulletproof, and that makes the argument bulletproof but also boring, and it makes it boring to write as well.

1:07:16 So in the new book, Magicians of the Gods, which is my new non-fiction, which is the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods, I’ve again tried to embrace that sort of daring approach that you find in Fingerprints of the Gods, but at the same time to couple it with very solid support for what I’m saying. The subject has moved on a great deal in the last 20 years. I really had thought after Underworld that I was done with the lost civilization, but then we have extraordinary discoveries from the late 1990s on into the 2000s, particularly Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, particularly the evidence of a giant cataclysm that unfolded between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago, and with this new scientific evidence coming in, I realized that I had to go back to the story and write another book which brought all of the new information together.

1:08:14 So I see the two books, Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995 and Magicians of the Gods in 2016, as, they work together, that the whole story is told there, and I think I’m done now. Yeah, I was about to say 2036 could be there. I think I’m done, although I have to say there’s two, there’s two things in terms of big non-fiction books, there’s two things that I’d like to do. I hugely value and honor my wife Santha, who is a brilliant photographer and who was a photographer long before I met her.

1:08:50 She, do your underwater photography, all the underwater photography, three Nikonos cameras down there at 120 feet underwater, everything, everything. And Santha has an archive of the most amazing images of the world’s most mysterious archaeological sites that she has compiled over the last quarter of a century, and I want to put together with Santha a big photographic book showing these beautiful, beautiful sights and the mystery and the magic of them. And then secondly, I think there’s a huge mysterious non-fiction book to be done about America.

1:09:24 I think, you know, we’ve all talked about Mexico, we’ve talked about the Andes, South America, we’ve talked about Egypt, we’ve talked about Turkey, but actually North America is a really fascinating, fascinating subject now that I know what happened in North America between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. I’m beginning to feel that it may be the place where the final clues come from, where we really put the picture together of what happened to our ancestors at the end of the last Ice Age. I think there’s a huge story to tell in America and I’m intending the universe allows.

1:10:02 And you spend a lot of time traveling through America. I’m traveling more and more in America and I and I really feel that it’s important for me to learn about the past of North America, which of course has been a past that has been ideologically massaged. As we know, the winners write history, not the losers, but the story of the Native American peoples and how they came to the Americas and when they came to America, this is an area of just burgeoning science at the moment.

1:10:29 There are huge new discoveries being made. I mean, for decades it was held that there were no human beings in America before 13,000 years ago. This is called the so-called Clovis model, that there was just no population in America before that and that the first Americans came across the Bering Strait about 13, 12,000 years ago and the story goes from that. It’s obvious now that’s complete rubbish, that America was settled 50, 60, 70,000 years ago. We have ancient human populations in America.

1:10:57 Recent DNA, really weird thing, and I’ve reported this in Magicians of the Gods, in the paperback, there’s a human ancestor or it’s more complicated than that, ancestry. We know about Neanderthals, right, and we know that we’re anatomically modern humans and we know we didn’t descend from Neanderthals but there’s some relationship and they interbred with us. Now we know that there were other human species like Neanderthals, people called the Denisovans, another species that are being called the Red Deer species.

1:11:30 These were all intelligent human beings but not quite us. Now the Denisovan DNA, the samples have been taken from like the middle of Siberia, southern Siberia in Russia. Okay, with Mongolia and just on the other side, the places in the world today where Denisovan DNA survives most strongly are amongst Native American Indians and amongst Aborigines in Australia. Now that’s really weird because Native American Indians are up there in North America and Aborigines in Australia are down there, for thousands and thousands and thousands of miles apart, and yet they share this chunk of DNA from a mysterious human ancestor.

1:12:14 So it’s like something big is missing from the picture there. There’s something in the middle. We’re seeing the edges but we’re not seeing the middle of the picture yet, and I think we’re just poised on the edge of a series of huge breakthroughs in our understanding of the past. I hope that the academics will allow those breakthroughs to occur, that they will not be so invested in their own careers that they will block the progress of science for another 100 years.

1:12:38 It does happen in science. I hope it doesn’t happen in archaeology. What’s been the reaction of Magicians? What was your biggest surprise about Magicians? In a sense there’d been no big surprise about Magicians.

1:12:53 Magicians is a continuation and fulfillment of all the work I’ve done over the last quarter of a century. The reason I felt I had to do it, I mentioned Göbekli Tepe. We talked at the beginning of this discussion about Plato’s Atlantis story and how he said that Atlantis went down 11,600 years ago. Nine thousand years before the time of Solon, that’s eleven thousand six hundred years ago in our time. That’s the date of the foundation of Göbekli Tepe.

1:13:24 It’s very set, very clear, absolutely founded eleven thousand six hundred years ago, exactly the date that Plato gives for the ending of Atlantis. And Göbekli Tepe doesn’t fit. It just comes out of nowhere, out of nowhere. We understand a site like Stonehenge makes perfect sense, it’s about four and a half thousand years old, Stonehenge. We know that it was centered in an agricultural community which generated surpluses.

1:13:57 Those surpluses allowed labor to be freed. You could fund people to become astronomers or architects or engineers, they need to be producing all the time. So we can understand the social and economic context in which a huge megalithic site like Stonehenge emerged. Go to Göbekli Tepe, you’re 7,000 years earlier. The entire area prior to the appearance of Göbekli Tepe is inhabited only by hunter-gatherers, there’s no agriculture whatsoever.

1:14:25 They haven’t built anything ever, and then suddenly, without any background or any preparation, appears this huge megalithic site which is incredibly sophisticated. Turns out, because a large part of it’s still under the ground, seen with ground-penetrating radar, that the whole site is actually 50 times bigger than Stonehenge and 7,000 years older. So how do we account for this? Did a group of hunter-gatherers in Turkey wake up one morning magically inspired, that they suddenly knew how to cut and quarry stone, move blocks weighing in some cases up to 50 tons, create gigantic stone circles in an area with no water, involving bringing a labor force and organizing that labor force and feeding and watering them, to create the world’s first perfectly north-south aligned building, which involves accurate astronomy, to do all of that and at the same time to invent agriculture?

1:15:28 Because at the same moment that Göbekli Tepe pops up, suddenly agriculture appears in that same region of Turkey. It’s obvious to me that that wasn’t a group of hunter-gatherers who woke up one morning suddenly equipped with the skills. What we’re looking at is a transfer of technology. This was the survivors of a lost civilization. They already knew how to create megaliths, they already knew how to do agriculture.

1:15:51 They settled amongst a hunter-gatherer people who they may have reached out to before. They settled amongst them and they created this project, and this project was to restart their civilization. It didn’t quite work but they got somewhere. They created this huge site, they invented agriculture. We are all the descendants of that.

1:16:11 All of the agriculture in the world today began around Göbekli Tepe 11,600 years ago. It’s an extraordinarily important moment. Are these aliens? Are they? No, they’re humans.

1:16:23 Humans, they’re human beings, but came from this and transfer technology over to this other space? Yes. First of all, it’s important to understand that the earth changes that took place between thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago were utterly cataclysmic, beyond all imagining. The science is now in, it’s very clear. We had an interaction with the fragments of a very large comet, a giant comet which originally may have been as much as 100 miles in diameter.

1:16:55 It was drawn into the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago. These things come from very far away, they come from a place called the Oort Cloud, which is almost a light year away. It’s so far away, it’s so far away, a huge sphere of trillions of comets in the very outer solar system. But disturbances, gravitational disturbances, can send comets out of those safe orbits winging in towards the inner solar system. It happens from time to time and the evidence now is that we got one of those, a big one, about 100 miles in diameter, about twenty thousand years ago.

1:17:31 It entered an orbit that crosses the orbit of the Earth, and for the next eight thousand years nothing bad happened. They missed each other, but twelve thousand eight hundred years ago, at least eight fragments of that comet, and we know comets break into fragments, many of your audience are young but those who were around in 1994 will remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit Jupiter with spectacular effect. It broke up into 20 fragments, each one of those fragments hitting Jupiter was equivalent to more than the entire nuclear arsenal of the Earth going off at once.

1:18:06 Something similar happened to the Earth 12,800 years ago. At least eight pieces of this large comet, some of them up to a mile in diameter, hit the Earth. The primary impacts were on the North American ice cap, there were impacts on the northern European ice cap, and the furthest east that we’ve documented in caps, uh, impact is actually Syria. 50 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface was devastated by this comet impact. Sea levels rose rapidly and the Earth’s climate plunged into a dreadful deep freeze that lasted one thousand two hundred years.

1:18:44 This event was of a scale, of a magnitude, that is quite capable of having wiped out almost all traces of a former civilization, and that’s why I think again about what Plato had to say, and I think also about our civilization, because we feel that we’ve got it all sorted out, we are very proud of our technology, and it is a stunning technology, there’s no doubt about it, we’re very proud of it, but we have not created a strong society. Those technologies work through interactions, through networks, through connections, nobody has all the pieces of the puzzle, everybody has a little bit of the puzzle, and we cooperate together and we pool our skills and we’ve created this world. But if you were to have a massive cataclysmic event occurring, if for example we were to face another comet impact as we did 12,800 years ago, then all the fragile networks that tie our society together would fall apart, and I don’t believe that our civilization would survive such a cataclysm.

1:20:01 Human beings would definitely survive but our civilization would not survive, because contrary to its surface appearances it’s actually very fragile and very easily broken. Those who would survive the cataclysm would be hunter-gatherers, people like the Kalahari Bushmen or the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon basin. They would hardly notice it. As a matter of fact, hunter-gatherers are in the business of survival in very difficult circumstances, and they would get through it.

1:20:30 We would not. Very few people in modern Western technological society know how to survive at all. We have no survival skills whatsoever. Food supply into our cities is on a just-in-time basis, two, three days maximum food supply in a city, then you have people starving. How rapidly and radically this civilization would fall apart faced by a gigantic cataclysm, it’s almost impossible to describe.

1:20:52 The people who would carry the human story forward would be the hunter-gatherers, and ten thousand years from now their descendants might tell a story about how there had been a time when there was a great civilization on this earth, so advanced its powers were almost miraculous. Do you know, they could send people to the moon, they could fly around the world, they could speak to each other on other sides of the planet. But something went wrong. They became cruel, they became arrogant, they began to impose their will on others.

1:21:30 They ceased to wear their prosperity with moderation and the universe struck them down. I think there’s a message in the Atlantis story for our civilization. We should stop being so f***ing arrogant and proud in our achievements. We should show some humility and we should learn the lessons of the past. And it’s not just the fact that we’re not hunter-gatherers, we can live as a civilization of people without having a lot of these bad aspects of it, without having the corporations, without having the politicians trying to control us.

1:22:02 Yeah, we just need to find that way. Yeah, yeah, we have to find another way. There’s an iconic photograph of a young Graham Hancock standing on a pyramid that I always see when I google your image, and I was wondering if you could tell me about what was that Graham like back then. And I also just want to make reference to when you were here last time, we talked about ego and you said, you know, Brian, I’ve had my ayahuasca experiences but I also embrace my ego because that’s how I go forward and I do things, and it’s this constant, you know, relationship I have with it, and so those are my two questions.

1:22:36 Yeah, well, I mean, the ego, I mean, what is the ego? It’s also, you know, it’s impossible to function as a human being if you don’t have a sense of who you are. I mean, you have to have a sense of some purpose, some purpose in life, but what you should not have is a sense of your superiority, because none of us are superior to anybody else in any way. I mean, I may have a skill that another person doesn’t have, but that person is going to have a skill that I don’t have.

1:23:02 So I think that where ego is useful is as a driving factor. You know who you are, you understand your mission in life and you’re going to do it. Where I think it’s very negative is when it becomes a comparative thing, where you start to feel that you’re great and everybody else is in some way inferior to you, which is what most of our politicians feel. Psychopaths and egoists at the same time. I think it’s important to work on the way we behave with other people and to be, to try as far as possible to be nurturing and positive, but you know, also to be honest, that’s the most important thing.

1:23:39 And that you asked me about that young man, I’m the same guy. I am the same person I was when I was 16 years old. I’m 66, so 16 years old seems a long time ago now. 50 years ago, let me tell you, it is the blink of an eye. It is the blink of an eye.

1:23:56 A lifetime, a human lifetime, is the flutter of a butterfly’s wing. It’s so precious, it’s so short, we should embrace and love and celebrate and enjoy, enjoy every minute of this precious gift that we’ve been given. Are there things that at 66 you realize where you’re like, okay, now I have a newer perspective on things, or the things you’ve changed your mind about? What I’ve tried to do, I realized my certain faults and weaknesses. I have a fault with anger.

1:24:28 I get angry sometimes very quickly, and sometimes have, always have always had, and I sometimes express that, and usually when I express it I regret it. I’m trying to work on being a calmer person but it doesn’t always work, you know, it doesn’t always work, but it’s worth it’s worth, I think, all of us trying to think of the impact we have on others and as far as possible to try to be a positive person in a fellow human being’s life rather than a negative person, and to be a positive person we can’t be all ego, we have to consider the ego of the other person too. We have to help that person and be positive to them.

1:25:10 Next five years, you have a work rate that’s almost, you know, it’s almost maniacal sometimes. I think this is the 17th book. Is going to be the War Godzilla, I kind of lost count. Okay, I mean, you produce a lot, 16-hour days of writing, you’re traveling all over the U.S. Is that going to slow down?

1:25:29 Can you live without it being so fast? Who do you look up to? If there’s someone that you think of of the word successful, who comes to your mind? Is it a writer?

1:26:06 Is it a historic figure? Is it someone who was willing to, you know, step up and, you know, Dennis is the man. Very much so. Last words of advice to the people watching us. You know, there’s going to be 20-year-olds out there and even 40 and 60-year-olds, they’ve probably got open minds because they’re here talking to us, but like you said, the life goes by in the butterfly’s wings, what are some things that they just need to pay attention to?

1:26:34 Be your own leader. Don’t accept the leadership of others unless you’ve really looked into it and feel it has some value. Don’t just accept leadership from others. I think that’s actually the single most important thing that any of us can do is to say that we don’t actually need to lean on a guru or a teacher or some political figure for our security. We can be our own leaders, we can make our own path in life and question everything.

1:27:00 Don’t believe anything that you’re told, don’t take anything for granted. Look deeply into all matters and, more important than anything else, live in the world with love. Powerful message, Graham, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for coming here four years ago. Very powerful, always having you here.

1:27:24 We learned so much from you. Thank you. It’s been fun to sit down again. Yeah, it’s been great. I look forward to the next time.

1:27:30 Yeah, let’s do it again next. Take care of yourself and we’ll see you next time on London. Thank you.