Graham Hancock’s Theory about Ancient Civilizations | Joe Rogan

Well, I think people can develop these patterns of behavior that are destructive with anything, whether it's with alcohol or cannabis or sex or anything. They get in ruts. It doesn't mean that the cannabis is bad. It means that you are on a bad mental path. Yes, exactly. I mean, I'm not encouraging it for everybody because some people, it genuinely, biologically, doesn't jive with them. Yeah. The fundamental thing is we, as adult human beings, need to take responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions. And we need not hand that responsibility over to governmental institutions, especially when it concerns something as intimate and personal as our consciousness. And my view is the ancient world had the right attitude to this kind of thing. And the modern world does not, and that we can sit down and learn a lot from the ancient world. And for me, you know, Hancock, you've been arguing that there's been a lost civilization in the human story. But what sort of civilization do you think it was? Well, one of the things I think is it was a civilization that used psychedelics. I think it was a civilization that emerged from shamanism, but did not stay at the hunter-gatherer stage, but that took the essence of shamanism and integrated it into a very different kind of civilization from our own, which pursued things in different ways. A lot of archaeologists have said to me, but we don't find any plastic bottles from the Ice Age. That means there was no advanced civilization during the Ice Age. Well, hang on. Maybe an advanced civilization might have decided never to get involved in plastic in the first place. Maybe there would have been a clear choice not to make plastic. Maybe they did things in completely different ways. Maybe they cultivated powers of the human mind that we dismiss and regard as completely, completely unimportant, woo woo. Yeah, this is the thoughts about Egypt, correct? It's about Egypt and about other things. The specific example I give is above the king's chamber in the Great Pyramid are five further chambers. And these chambers are roofed and floored with granite beams that weigh about 70 tons each. And there are hundreds of them. And these 70 ton granite beams, which to put in context, a 70 ton beam is equivalent in weight to 35 large SUVs. These 70 ton granite beams have been elevated to a height of more than 350 feet above the ground and carefully and precisely placed in position. It is very hard for archaeologists to explain how that was done using purely leverage and mechanical advantage. You can say, oh, perhaps they built a ramp and hauled the stones up the ramp. But then you have to confront basic laws of physics. You can't haul a stone weighing tens of tons up a slope that exceeds 10 degrees. Then you start doing the calculation, how long a ramp do I need with a 10 degree slope to get to 350 feet above the ground? And the answer is you need a fucking long ramp, which should still be there because it couldn't have been a sand ramp. It would have collapsed under the weight of those stones. It had to be as massive as the pyramid itself. So this begins to seem like an absurd idea, the idea that is foisted on us by archaeology. Maybe the idea that they regard as absurd, namely that psychic powers were cultivated by ancient civilizations, that they could use powers of the human mind that we have allowed to lapse. Maybe that idea deserves further consideration. We have gone down a path of leverage and mechanical advantage. We used to relying on machines. But we hear anecdotal reports of people who have telekinetic powers, who can move things with their minds, of people who have telepathic powers. And our automatic reaction is to just dismiss all of that because science says it's impossible, because science regards consciousness as local to the brain and doesn't see how it can exert itself outside of that. But maybe we should open up to those possibilities that we're dealing with a very different kind of culture that used techniques that we have allowed to lapse. And maybe we could wake those techniques up again. Maybe the ability of human beings to do almost superhuman things is resident within all of us, but sleeping. Pete Bock Well, it's pure speculation that they use some sort of a telekinetic power, but it's absolute. Jared Polin Pure speculation. Pete Bock But it's absolute that they did something that we don't understand. If you think about the distance between us and the construction, just the modern accepted construction dates of the Great Pyramid. It's more than 5,000 years ago, or close to 5,000 years ago. Jared Polin Great Pyramid is supposed to be about 4,500 years old, yeah. Pete Bock That's really old. Jared Polin It's incredibly old, yeah. Pete Bock To think that someone back then could do something that would perplex us today with modern machinery. And that somehow or another they figure this out. It's almost like what they had done was leave behind something that was so stupendous, so monstrously impressive that it would transcend time. Jared Polin Yeah. Pete Bock And that you would have to look at it even thousands and thousands of years later and say, hey, like this defies conventional explanation. This is not a simple, and I've seen some of the conventional explanations of the construction of the pyramid and they conveniently neglect those chambers above the king's chamber. Jared Polin They do. Pete Bock They conveniently neglect a lot of those massive stones. Jared Polin Yeah. Pete Bock It's because it's one of those things you just go, oh, I don't know. What is this, Jamie? Jamie Tworkowski There are the chambers above the king's chambers and each one of those floors consists of a row of 70 ton granite blocks that have been raised 350 feet above the ground and not only that but brought from Aswan in the south of Egypt 500 kilometers south of the Great Pyramid. Pete Bock If there's any time in history where you could go in a time machine and go back and observe, would that be the time? Jamie Tworkowski I am just completely fascinated by the ice age at the moment. Pete Bock The ice age. Have you had one shot to go back and see what it was like in some place? You wouldn't go to the construction of the Great Pyramids? Jamie Tworkowski I think right now where I'd go is 12,800 years ago in the beginning of the Younger Dryas. Pete Bock Ah, just to see. Jamie Tworkowski Because I think that's where the whole human story changes. I think that's where we change tracks from one path to another path and following those cataclysmic events of the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, following those, the signs of civilization that we see emerging are not the beginnings of civilization, they're a restarting of civilization that had existed before the cataclysm. And for that reason, I would like to be present during that cataclysmic event if only to satisfy myself that it was indeed a comet. You see, the one thing there's no dispute about anymore is that the Younger Dryas was a cataclysm. You can't argue about that, the megafauna that die off, the disruption of human activity that takes place at that time, the huge climate changes. This was a cataclysm by any standards. Where the argument still goes on is what caused the cataclysm. I vote strongly for comets, multiple fragments of a comet hitting the North American ice cap and hitting Greenland as well. But there are other researchers in the field like my colleague Robert Schock who thinks that the sun is more involved. This is healthy. This is very, very healthy that we should be approaching this problem from many different perspectives and trying to figure out what the fuck caused this extraordinary event that occurs at a pivotal moment in the human story, the end of the Stone Age, the beginning of the Mesolithic, the end of the Ice Age, the beginning of the current age of the Earth. And suddenly we see these signs of civilization appearing and in places like Gobekli Tepe, those signs already include highly sophisticated knowledge. And that's why I feel we really need to investigate the Amazon. There are three places in the world which are really lacking in the investigation right now. One of them is the Amazon, five and a half million square kilometers, very little archaeology done. Another is the Sahara Desert. The Sahara Desert, tough place to work. I can understand why there's little archaeology done there. But the Sahara Desert was green during the Ice Age. It had a completely different climate regime. We should consider the possibility that missing parts of the human story are there. And then under the continental shelves, because sea level rose 400 feet, these are three domains that archaeology has largely not investigated. And it has largely not done so. They say, well, why would we spend the money on marine archaeology? Much better to spend it on looking for shipwrecks rather than looking for signs of a lost civilization because we archaeologists know there was no lost civilization. So that's the argument for the resources there. And the same with the Amazon and the same with the Sahara Desert. Places in the very places in the world that those amongst us who are charged with the responsibility of interpreting the past have not looked at are the very places we should be looking at.