#2051 - Graham Hancock

It seems like there's things that are concrete, right? We know when Genghis Khan lived. We know when they built the 16th chapel. We know a lot about the Parthenon and the Acropolis. We know about 2,000 years ago. We know when you start going way, way, way, way, way back, things get real sketchy and to not admit that seems so crazy when they find things when they're making apartment buildings sometimes, they're digging into the ground, they go, oh, hold on a second, what is this? Doesn't it happen in Mexico City all the time? Yeah, it does. And actually, that's how a lot of archaeology happens. Somebody's building a road or building apartment buildings or building a dam and they call in archaeologists to see if there's anything, any interesting archaeology there. And this is part of the problem I have with archaeology as a discipline. It likes to think of itself as scientific, but what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past. Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates. Yeah, I think it's a complicated mixture of things. First of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo woo. Anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with. And then it takes the next step and really seeks to attack out on the edge ideas. Now, I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out on the edge idea. We've had lost civilizations before. The Indus Vali civilization today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s. It was found by accident. And every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal new information, but the reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. But with ancient apocalypse, a much bigger platform reaching a much wider audience, the reaction was just hysterical. And it went on for a very long time. And it appeared to me, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I don't think archaeologists are involved in a conspiracy. I think the people who are attacking me genuinely believe in what they're saying and they genuinely think I'm harmful. But that's like calling it the most dangerous show on Netflix. How did they come up with that? How is it harmful to be speculating about ancient structures? It's interesting. Yeah, that's what I don't get. The other thing is the racist angle. We're talking about the exact same people. We're just talking about an older time. It doesn't make any sense at all. In fact, it kind of points to the superiority of the Egyptian race. Absolutely. I mean, whatever they did, however they did it, is unbelievably extraordinary. And I think pointing that out is amazing. I mean, what you're discovering and what you're showing on that show is that there are a lot of mysteries when it comes to the history of human beings and we should embrace those mysteries. Definitely. Because there's concrete irrefutable evidence, especially in terms of like Goebecli Tepe and some of the other structures. I mean, this is wild stuff. The idea that human beings had an advanced civilization 10,000, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, what happened? That's what's really interesting. What happened? And that's why it's ancient apocalypse because we know that there was a global cataclysm, a slow one, 1,200 years long, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago called the Younger Dryas. There's still arguments about what caused it, but the fact that it was cataclysmic is not really disputed. The accusations that were put against me and the show of being... The accusations included the words racist, white supremacist, misogynist and anti-Semitic. They give you the full hand. They didn't even give you one card. The show doesn't touch on any of these issues. Race is not mentioned in the show. So what the archaeologists were doing there, they were going back to Fingerprints of the Gods that I wrote in 1995, in which I reported indigenous traditions about the appearance of bearded foreigners bringing knowledge after a cataclysm to the shattered survivors of that cataclysm. And in some cases in those traditions, those knowledge bringers are described as white-skinned. And that is why the show was accused of racism because archaeology has since taken the view that all of those stories were made up by the Spanish. And that seems to me completely ridiculous, both in Mexico and in Peru and Bolivia, we have traditions. We have them, Vera Coccia, we have Quetzalcoatl, we have Bocica. This is a Pan-American myth. And actually, I think it's racist of archaeology to imagine that the magic powers of the Spaniards could impose a myth upon indigenous peoples all over the Americas, that they'd just be so stupid that they would fall for this story told by the Spaniards. Of course, these are indigenous myths and traditions. And I was reporting them in that book, and I stand by them. And it turns out that there's actually a huge argument within academia about this. And my critics were just giving one side of that argument. And what is the rest of the argument? What is the other side of it? Well, the other side of the argument that it's inconceivable that the Spaniards made up these stories. These stories were reported to the first Spanish visitors in Mexico and in Peru. They were reported to them by indigenous peoples as indigenous myths. And the fact that they're right spread across the Americas makes it very unlikely. I mean, if it was one story, but if it's a dozen stories, and they're told over a huge geographical region, the notion that this is a Spanish conspiracy, it's an ultimate conspiracy theory. I don't think we should take away these traditions from the indigenous people who reported them. But it gave a very useful handle for people to attack this series on. So the theory is that it was an uneven destruction, right? And that some places fared better than other places in terms of the Younger Dryas Impact theory, right? Yeah. And that those people might have reclaimed a modicum of civilization. Yeah, that's the idea. And by the way, on that point, I have never, in anything that I've written or anything that I've broadcast, myself suggested that white races were involved. Actually, it would be quite stupid to do so. Because if you look at Europe during the Ice Age, and I'm talking about a lost civilization of the Ice Age, Northern Europe and North America were absolutely inhospitable wildernesses during the Ice Age. They were frozen. They were dry. And they were dangerous. And they were not the places that people would go. People naturally gravitated south towards the equator, towards the tropics. That's where I would expect to find traces of a lost civilization. And that's where I do find traces of a lost civilization. You don't really find it. I've never reported anything about the UK. For example, in my books, we have Stonehenge, we have Avery, we have these stone circles. But they're not old enough. That was the time when the UK started to get warmer. And it's the same with the rest of Northern Europe. But it's the same with the northern part of North America. You have to go down to the southern part of North America. You have to go into Mexico. You have to go into South America to really find an environment during the Ice Age that would have nurtured a high civilization. And there's a lot of speculation as to why they weren't able to cross the Bering landmass too, right? Well, again, this is an area where there has been a narrative that archaeology has sought to impose upon us. And this was called the Clovis First idea. And there was a people who archaeologists called the Clovis people. We don't know what they called themselves in North America. And traces of their characteristic tools, particular sort of fluted points, arrowhead spear points, turn up from about 13,400 years ago and end abruptly 12,800 years ago. And for a long time, with the beginning of the younger dryers, and for a long time, archaeology maintained that this Clovis culture, so-called Clovis culture, we don't know what they called themselves, were the first Americans. And there were no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years ago. And bit by bit, the new evidence has come in, which has forced archaeologists screaming and tearing out their hair to back away from the Clovis First paradigm and admit that actually, yes, there were people here before that. But even then, they're reluctant to go very far back. We've recently had these footprints in White Sands in New Mexico, 23,000 years old or so. That's largely being accepted now. But there are much earlier dates. There's 130,000 years ago from the Sirot\u00ed Mastodon site near San Diego. That's the one that's being disputed because they say it could have been rocks that crushed the bones and made them that way. Yeah. What I see, again, is an unfortunate mindset where a new and interesting idea is proposed, supported by masses of evidence, and published in Nature. Nature has a pretty high bar to what it accepts. And then the critics look for any way to get rid of it. Can I stop you here? Are you aware of the bone yard in Alaska? I've heard of it. And it sounds fascinating. I don't think he's revealed much about that in public yet. Well, it's an amazing, amazing discovery. This guy's a gold miner. And he has this large piece of land in Alaska. They're mining for gold. And they start finding tusks and bones. And in one area that's only a few acres, they found thousands and thousands of woolly mammoth bones and tusks and saber-toothed tiger. Was it saber-toothed tiger? No. It was short-faced bear. They found all these like, All the megafauna. Many animals that weren't even supposed to exist in Alaska. And he's like, look, we have the bones of it. And one of the things they found recently was bones that were sawed, clearly sawed. Human workmanship. But like a sophisticated tool. Let me see if you can pull it up so you can see how it looked. Clearly cut. Isn't that amazing? Absolutely. So they're trying to find out what the dates on these are. That was my next question. Have they dated it? They just got these recently. This is fairly recent. So I believe he's had some issues with universities not giving back his stuff and selling off his stuff. Oh, dear. Yeah, well, he recently started a bone rush in the East River. Because it turns out that during the 1920s and 1930s, stuff that they had taken from his land before he owned it, they had dumped some of it. Because they had so much of it, they dumped it in the East River. And they were balking at it. But meanwhile, these people found it there. So here it goes. I think many of you are intrigued by these Ice Age bones found in the bone yard in Alaska. If you zoom in, you'll see that it's been sanded or somehow been worked down to a smooth finish on the end. I'm going to carbon date one of them. I'll post the results when I do. So this was three weeks ago. So it's probably going to take a little longer. But look how smooth it is on that one bottom. It's perfectly cut. And we'll look forward to seeing the dating results. But the fact that we're dealing with megafauna that went extinct between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago implies very strongly that it's at least that old. Not only that, his area has a very thick layer of carbon that seems to indicate some sort of a mass burn or some sort of a horrible disaster. So they're going through these layers of things. And they're finding an unbelievable amount of animals that died in this area. Just a mass die out. Yes. And what would cause a mass die out? Not human hunting. I'm strongly opposed to what they call the overkill hypothesis. This is one of the alternative explanations for why the megafauna went extinct at that time. Is that hunter-gatherers literally wiped out all the megafauna. And to me, for a couple of reasons, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense, first of all, because hunter-gatherers we know in the world today do not wipe out their prey animals. They live in coexistence with them. They live in balance with them. They don't just destroy them all. It's our kind of culture that destroys animals completely. Right, like what we do with the bison. What we did with the bison. And therefore, it seems very unhunter-gatherer-like activity to completely destroy the megafauna. And the other thing is the simultaneous extinction of large numbers of creatures that is happening very, very, very quickly suggests to me that we're looking at a disaster of some sort. And that's why the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which is solid science, although undoubtedly disputed, which suggests that multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet hit the Earth 12,800 years ago. Many of them didn't hit the Earth. Many of them exploded in the sky. They were not that big, maybe 100 meters in diameter. So they were airbursts, but they leave these characteristic signatures in the ground. Like Tunguska. Exactly like Tunguska. Tunguska event is a recent example of that. 30 June, 1908, happens to be at the peak of the Beta Torids. And the Torrid meteor stream is identified as the likely culprit for what happened in the Younger Dryas. Wildfires burning. You get these impacts smashing into the Earth. Bursting in the air over forests, they cause huge fires. And that's why you get enormous amounts of charcoal as a result. And then the larger objects, it's thought, hit the North American ice cap and caused a very large amount of meltwater to flow into the world ocean. And that's what brought temperatures down at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. We can argue there are alternative theories. Maybe solar activity was involved. Robert Schock prefers a change in solar activity. And, you know, Kudos to Robert. He's a brilliant scientist, and he's put his neck on the line by advocating a much older Sphinx. Any scientist these days in the field of archeology who sticks his neck out and says that the archeological narrative is wrong immediately gets massively attacked. And I think that's most unfortunate. A couple of points I'd like to make about this. First of all, we said at the beginning, most archeology, certainly in the industrialized countries, is a result of a dam or a road being built, an archeologist being called in to see if there's anything there. It's not a targeted search. It's kind of random. Something's happening, an archeologist go in there. And then there's huge areas of the world that have had very little archeology done in them. Those include the Amazon rainforest, where I've just been. I've been three weeks in the Brazilian Amazon, another couple of weeks in Peru. And there are extraordinary revelations coming out of the Amazon rainforest. Now, the Amazon rainforest, up until very recently, had very little archeology done. You're talking about six million square kilometers of the Earth's surface, which has hardly been touched by archeology. And now it is being touched by archeology, thanks to LIDAR, which is identifying enormous structures under the canopy. We're finding that we have to rewrite the whole story of the Amazon, that there were potentially populations of millions living in the Amazon, that there were cities, they were joined by roads, hundreds of kilometers in length. All of these things are recent discoveries, which says we should be thinking again about the Amazon. Same goes for the submerged continental shells. 27 million square kilometers of the best real estate on Earth that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now. Yes, there's been some marine archeology, but not enough to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization. And the same with the Sahara Desert, nine million square kilometers. A little bit of archeology done, but before archeology say, there was no lost civilization. This is what the Society for American Archeology said in their open letter to Netflix, complaining about my show. They said, we know that there was no lost civilization during the Ice Age. And my question to them is, how can they possibly know that when they've looked at relatively small areas of the Earth? The picture is not complete. They should be saying, we don't think there was a lost civilization during the Ice Age, fine. But to say we know there wasn't, that's completely wrong. Well, it's silly and it's also, it becomes more and more of a problem the more things get discovered. And the more they push back harder and more emotionally and more religiously. It's really kind of crazy the way they behave as if they have like an accurate map. Like the way they viewed some of the older hieroglyphs that depict civilizations that were 30,000 years ago, like kings and the- The king lists from ancient Egypt go back 30 plus thousand years. And you have to pretend that those are myth. Yeah, and yet for their chronology of ancient Egypt, they actually use the king lists. The moment those king lists start giving dates that fall within dates that archaeologists like, everything before those dates, they say, oh, they just made it up. How crazy is that? Wouldn't it be a fascinating alternative if you were an archeologist to go, you know what, maybe this king's list is legit. Maybe this thing really is 30,000, 40,000 years old. And maybe that explains a lot. And now we have to figure out how they do it. It would be a fascinating alternative, but unfortunately, it's not the way that archeology works at the moment. I repeat, a lot of archeologists have accused me of accusing them of a conspiracy against me and trying to suppress my- Well, they're just trying to make you look very kook. Yeah, I don't see any conspiracy. I see people who do believe what they're saying and who think I'm wrong, but who feel that I'm such a threat to the narrative that they present, that I must be neutralized in any way possible. And that's a sad state of affairs. Science should embrace and explore new and different ideas. And particularly when it comes to the human past, look, I mean, if I get in an airplane, I do want the pilot to be a properly qualified pilot. I want him to have undergone all the training and to be really good at what he does. But flying an airplane and studying the human past are two different things. And archeologists often compare themselves to airline pilots. They say, you wouldn't get in an airplane without a properly trained pilot. So why are you studying the past without a properly trained archeologist? And what I say is, you've got blinkers on. You've got a very narrow perspective on what the past could be. And you're defending and protecting that perspective and imposing a narrative about the past on the public. And that's where we get into a kind of religious aspect of this, that they become the high priests of the past. Well, like Zahi Hawass is an excellent example in Egypt. Zahi is an excellent example. It does not want to even entertain the notion that there's some sort of a gap in the knowledge of history. If you just say the word Atlantis to Zahi Hawass, he goes berserk. He absolutely goes nuts. And that's irrational too. Since we know that the Atlantis story comes from Plato, we know that Plato said the source of that story was in ancient Egypt, in the temple of Neith at Sais in the Delta. And Ancestor Solon visited that temple and was told the story, which he put into the word. Atlantis is not an ancient Egyptian word. That's one of the problems. But he called it Atlantis. But at Edfu in Upper Egypt, there's a whole story of a homeland of the primeval ones that was destroyed in a great cataclysm and flooded by the sea, leaving only a few survivors who traveled around the world seeking to restart civilization. It's told very clearly in the Edfu building texts, which fortunately have now been completely translated. Sadly only into German, I hope we'll see the full English translation in due course. But the translations I was working from when I first studied them are very good and they've been reinforced and supported by this new fuller translation. So I think the Atlantis story does have an ancient Egyptian origin. And I think the ancient Egyptians should be proud of it rather than throwing it away. And also, archaeologists should not seek to isolate the story of Atlantis from other flood myths and traditions all around the world. And that's a problem too. I mean, we have hundreds of myths and traditions from countries all around the globe, which speak of a great global cataclysm, a huge flood, often wildfires, destruction of human beings and of animals, a few survivors who seek to restart civilization. It's a global story, not a single story told by Plato. And I mean, if you hear the same story from so many different cultures, at what point in time do you go, maybe there's something to this? I mean, it's just very strange to try to deny that. Again, we have this- Especially with the physical evidence. Yeah, especially with the physical evidence. And it's interesting with the physical evidence like Gobekli Tepe, which is 11,600 years old. I mean, it used to be argued, Robert Chock and John Anthony West work on the great Sphinx, suggesting that the Sphinx could be 12,000 plus years old. It used to be argued that was impossible because there was no other site anywhere in the world, no other megalithic site of the same age. And then we discover Gobekli Tepe and it's 11,600 years old. Now, if you can make Gobekli Tepe with his 20 ton megaliths, beautifully carved representations of human and animal figures in those pillars, if you can do that, you can cut the great Sphinx out of bedrock as well. There's no reason to dismiss the geological evidence of the great Sphinx anymore. But instead, what archeology is doing is trying to finesse Gobekli Tepe. They're trying to say, oh, there was this gradual buildup to Gobekli Tepe. And they now talk about a people who they call the Natufians. Again, we don't know what they call themselves, who were predecessors of Gobekli Tepe around 14,000 years ago. And they show things that look like a tiny little stone wall that they built. The sort of thing that you can find, a dry stone wall that you can find anywhere in Wales to this day, you know. And this is supposed to be a prequel to Gobekli Tepe. I'm sorry, you just don't start off making dry stone walls and then wake up one morning and create 20 ton megaliths in huge stone circles, perfectly astronomically aligned as we have at Gobekli Tepe. Not only that, but how? Like, what did they do? How are you even, where are you getting those 20 ton megaliths from? How far do they have to transport? In the case of Gobekli Tepe, not far. How far? Oh, hundreds of meters. I've stood on top of one megalith that they partially cut out of the bedrock with the T shape, but then they found a fault in it and they left it there. It would have been a 30 ton megalith. They clearly intended to release it from the bedrock, but it had a fault, so they left it alone. The issue of the quarries for the rock at Gobekli Tepe is not too big a problem. But the transportation of those? Even the transportation, you get enough people working together and they can move large stones. That's not in dispute, but that's where the question comes. How do you get enough people together? How do you have the organizational skills? Where do you have the mindset that plans something like this at the beginning? And that is the problem that is not answered in the case of Gobekli Tepe, that happening suddenly. What were they using for tools? They're supposed to have just been using stone. There's not supposed to have been any metals at that period. Not even brass. Not even brass, not even copper. I have a complicated view on Gobekli Tepe. Let's say it's my hypothesis. It's not a fact. I don't claim this is a fact. I think that what we're looking at at Gobekli Tepe, there's no doubt that the population of around Gobekli Tepe were all hunter gatherers when Gobekli Tepe started to be made. And that's the weirdest thing of all, because previously, archeology always used to say hunter gatherer cultures did not have the manpower, did not have the organizational skills, could not generate the surpluses that would allow people to specialize in architecture and engineering and astronomy and so on. So it used to be said that hunter gatherers couldn't do that. Now archeologists have backpedaled on that and they're saying, well, yeah, clearly hunter gatherers did it. The funny thing is that during the thousand years that Gobekli Tepe functions, and it runs from roughly 11,600 years ago to say 9,600 years ago. During the 10,600 years ago, during those thousand years, the population of Gobekli Tepe transitions from being hunter gatherers to being agriculturalists. So we see two new ideas suddenly appearing at Gobekli Tepe, enormous megalithic architecture and a shift from hunter gathering to agriculture. And what Gobekli Tepe looks like to me is a transfer of technology that people who already knew how to work megalithic architecture and align it precisely to the risings of particular stars, for example, Sirius, came to Gobekli Tepe at a time of chaos and cataclysm in the world. And they sought to introduce a new way of thinking. I think Gobekli Tepe was created as a project to mobilize the local community, to give them something to work on, to bring them together. And it's not an accident that during that thousand years, they transitioned from hunter gathering to agriculture. I don't see massive technical complications in creating Gobekli Tepe except those very precise alignments. But what I do see is a sudden appearance of something that shouldn't have been there. And that requires explanation. How do they determine the emergence of agriculture versus agriculture that it existed in some areas and not others, like it does now? You can go to the Amazon and you can see hunter gatherers and then you can go to Sao Paulo and see a major metropolitan city. I was just in Manaus and it's fascinating actually. They have a tower up there on the edge of the jungle. Got that tower 150 meters up and on one side, extending endlessly, infinitely into the distance is the Amazon rainforest. Turn the other way and there's the city of Manaus. Wow. Looking at you with its skyscrapers. That's gotta be wild. It's a wild sight to see. Actually, the interesting thing about the Amazon, Joe, it's been grievously misunderstood over the years. And fortunately, archaeology is beginning to come to terms with it. There was agriculture in the Amazon, going back a very long way, going back at least 10,000 years, maybe further. We may have discussed this before, but there's this curious soil that exists in the Amazon that they call terra preta or Amazonian dark earth. Recent investigations have shown without doubt that it's manmade and deliberately manmade, not an accidental result of refuse tips, but a deliberate attempt to make the Amazon fertile. And how do they know that it's deliberate? Because they find in it the same ingredients and amongst those ingredients are always broken bits of ceramics. That's one of the odd things. They seem to be part of what makes it work. Really? Ceramics. Ceramics mixed in there with dung, with human refuse, all deliberately put in there, not an accidental dung heat, but a place that human beings said, we're gonna make this ground fertile. Because rainforest soils are not particularly fertile. The fertility of the Amazon comes entirely from the fall of leaves onto the soil. It re-fertilizes itself. But to grow crops on the Amazon is a very different prospect. And this is where terra preta really comes into its own. I've been standing in a pit with an archeologist there, a terra preta pit, and you can see this beautiful rich soil. And it is a mystery. It constantly replenishes itself. It never gets used up. Settlers seek it out, seek out areas of terra preta. And it fits with this notion that, no longer a notion, it's a fact, that there was a population of millions in the Amazon 10,000 years ago. And they were living a highly productive, sophisticated life. They were using agriculture. They also gardened the Amazon. The hyper-dominant trees in the Amazon are all food-bearing trees. The Brazil nut tree, for example, which is a huge tall tree, is a food-bearing tree. And they exist in far greater numbers than they should do if they develop naturally. Humans manipulated the Amazon and made it serve human needs thousands and thousands of years ago. And then we have these enormous structures that are appearing in the Amazon, which are being referred to as geoglyphs. They call them geoglyphs after the Nazca lines, actually. The Nazca lines in Peru are huge ground images, sometimes geometrical in form, sometimes showing animals or birds or spiders, other creatures, often actually showing Amazonian animals. But in the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Acre, as a result of clearances of the Amazon that have been done for farming purposes, there's this rush to just cut the Amazon down and replace it with cattle ranches and soybean farms. Those clearances have revealed something that, again, according to the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't be there, which is gigantic earthworks, huge ones, a bit like the hinges in Europe, enormous embankments, ditches, and in geometrical form. So you get enormous squares, enormous circles. You get a circle within a square. They keep repeating these geometrical images, and they're thousands of years old. When we were down there just recently, we had a local Lidar guy working with us. These days, you don't have to even use an airplane to find things with Lidar. You can fly Lidar off a drone. And flying his drone within a mile of known structures that are outside the rainforest now, he found two more huge geoglyphs under the rainforest canopy, which will be investigated. And this is bizarre and puzzling. They reckon the team working on this, that's Marty Parson of the University of Helsinki and Alcea Ranzi, who's a Brazilian archaeologist and geologist, they reckon that there's thousands of these things still under the rainforest canopy, and there's a huge untold story. So one of the places I would look for a lost civilization is the Amazon rainforest. How do they know that the terra preta replenishes itself? How does it do that? It's something to do with microbes and bacteria that are in the soil, and they keep on regenerating. They don't get used up. It's a kind of miracle. It's not fully understood. Nobody can say they fully understand terra preta. But what is fully understood, and it's understood by settlers, is that if they plant on terra preta, they're gonna get rich crops coming out of it. Is there a way to reproduce that? Attempts have been made to reproduce it, and biochar is one of the words that comes to mind. There's even indications that some of the modern indigenous peoples of the Amazon are still creating terra preta. This is a whole mystery that needs to be investigated much further. We're looking at, the oldest examples are more than 8,000 years old, and that's just in the areas that have been surveyed. Very likely, terra preta goes back much, much, much earlier than that. Because it's such an issue with modern farmlands, where they have to use these modern fertilizers. Which are not helpful in many ways. And they run off. Like the topsoil's worn out. So if they could figure out a way to reproduce terra preta. This would be one of the many ways in which our so-called high-tech industrialized society could learn from indigenous cultures. We could learn a lot from them about living in harmony with the environment. And about clever things. Like terra preta. Clever things like curare. Which is another Amazonian invention. Which is the basis of modern anesthesiology. How did they do that? There's 11 ingredients in curare. And those ingredients are not active on their own. You have to cook them all together to get this poison. Which is a muscle relaxant. Why a muscle relaxant? Because if you're going to shoot a monkey 200 feet up a tree with your arrow, you don't want it coiling its tail around the tree when it dies. You want it to drop to the ground. Ayahuasca is another Amazonian invention. And again, it consists of several ingredients. Two in particular. Neither of which are active on their own. But which only work when cooked together. So what I see in the Amazon is traces of a lost science. A scientific mindset. Can I show some pictures of these two glyphs? Please. We have to hook up the magical HDMI. And I'll just show a few slides of them. I forget which side the HDMI is in. I think it's in that side. Careful with the water. Yeah. Got it? OK. Are we on screen? We will be momentarily. Here we go. Yeah. So this shows the Amazon. 6.7 million square kilometers. There's still 5 and 1,500,000 left covered by rainforest. That's bigger than the entire subcontinent of India. And hardly any archaeology has been done. And the archaeology that is being done is fascinating. And it's particularly in the state of Acre, in the southwest of Brazil, that we're seeing these extraordinary geoglyphs. Now I'm here with, I'm on the left there. That's Marty Parsonen from the University of Helsinki. And that is Fabio Filho, who's the Lidar expert. And that's Alcea Ranzi, who's a Brazilian geographer and archaeologist. And we're looking at the latest Lidar discoveries. And there I'm about to take off in a plane with these two guys. It was just incredible to fly over there. I've flown over the Nazca lines many times. But to fly over this and to see these huge earthworks on a scale of hundreds of meters, sitting there, often encroached on by farms, was very, very, very exciting. And what's the conventional explanation for these things? There is no conventional explanation, because really it's only begun to be studied. Alcea first noticed them on an overflight more than 20 years ago. But it's only relatively recently that they've started to get the funding. And I want to pay tribute to Eugene Zhong, who is a philanthropist who has provided funding for these guys to continue their work, and who's also provided funding to the Comet Research Group, and who's also provided funding for the DMT research that's being done at UCSD. What's his name? Eugene Zhong. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. J-H-O-N-G. He's a brilliant philanthropist. And he's so open-minded. And he's looking to support research in areas that the mainstream just won't touch. That's amazing. So we're looking at Fizenda Sipoal here, where we have an octagon with rounded corners. And then this is Santa's shot of the same place. And you can see what's going on. You see the smoke in the background there? That's the Amazon burning. That settlers clearing the Amazon to create more farms. But in the foreground, we have this enormous geometrical event, which is a huge oval surrounding a square. And did they find this once they started clearing? Is that when this? This was found as a result of the clearances. Archaeologists became aware that these things exist. So before that, this was completely covered with trees? Completely covered with rainforest. It's a sort of mixed blessing or mixed curse, if you like. Because the clearances made it possible for us to know that these things exist. But the clearances ultimately will destroy the entire Amazon if they're allowed to continue. Jaco S\u00e1, on the left, a square surrounding a circle. And here's a couple of Santa's shots of Jaco S\u00e1. You can see there's a large square earthwork and a circle in it. That's almost not quite, but almost like the Greek exercise of squaring the circle. It's like geometrical exercises are taking place here in the Amazon. And again, a square with these curious scallops cut into the side of it and a circle. There's just so much of this stuff. Tikino, absolutely giant, giant geoglyph. And these things really, on the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't exist. They involve enormous expenditure of effort. Creating these earthworks is a huge job. If there was a lot of stone in the Amazon, I think we'd see stone circles on them as well. There's one place further north called Regogrande, where there is an earthwork with a stone circle in it, because stone is locally available. So do you think this was the base of a structure? Like what is the speculation? No, I don't think so. I've talked to indigenous people there who still respect and revere them. And they say that they were for shamanic journeying, that the population would gather within them. There would be certain areas that might be reserved for the shamans. For example, the square on the left, those two cut out areas, top left and right of that square, it suggested that shamans were in there, and the rest of the population were in the other area. And they were undertaking visionary journeys, perhaps using ayahuasca. Of course, the Amazonian peoples are experts in the properties of indigenous plants. So this is their folklore, or this is their story? Yes, this is the story of indigenous people. I talked to an Apurina elder, and he said, we don't know exactly why these places were made. They were made so long ago, but we respect them, we revere them, and we think that they were used by shamans in the distant past. So they were aware of them before the clearing? Yeah, they were aware of them before the clearing. And they revere them. Yes, they use them, and they still have community gatherings in them. No, they weren't a base for structures. I'm drawing attention here to Severino Calazans, this large square on the left there, which has coincidentally the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It just shows you the size of that enormous earthwork. But it's a mystery. More work needs to be done, and much more needs to be surveyed. And thanks to LIDAR, that can be done non-invasively. We can spot these things. Very small teams can go in and do a bit of excavation there and figure out what was going on. I think the story is going to go back further and further into the past. Is there any evidence of wood structures? Did they make buildings out of wood back then? Not that I'm aware of. When did people start using wood as a structure? I think you can trace wood back as a structure, hundreds of thousands of years. But when did they start using it? And if you see the ancient Mayan civilizations, what you find in the Amazon, you don't find ancient wood structures, do you? I think that's largely an artifact of the fact that wood doesn't preserve very well. Right. So how do we know that there weren't wood structures? There may well have been. There may well have been, which have just rotted away and gone. There may well have been wooden structures there. Because it kind of looks like foundations. It does look like foundations. And it's just a very weird thing. But I think the main point is someone made it. And it involved a very large amount of organized labor in order to make it. There had to be the will and the intent in order to do that. It's interesting that the patterns are geometrical. And are they geometrical with the perfect length? Yes. And they match up with each other? They're very, very good. Fazenda Piranha and Severina Kawazans are both aligned to true astronomical north. That's different from compass north. That requires astronomy. You can't get true north without using astronomy. So this tells us not only was there a culture that was capable of creating large scale public projects, but also they had astronomers amongst them. Wow. It's a good mystery. The other thing is the geometrical patterns are very common experience in ayahuasca visions, in altered states of consciousness. Our culture tends to despise altered states of consciousness, although fortunately that's changing. But in the Amazon and many indigenous cultures, they're regarded as extremely important. That we can't confine ourselves to the everyday wide awake state of consciousness that requires us to interface with the physical world. There are other states of consciousness which are also valuable and which bring teachings. And it's just one of those facts that most people who drink ayahuasca most of the time, at some point, will experience geometrical visions. So there's a question, is there a connection here between the use of ayahuasca and the geometrical patterns? There's a huge rock wall has been found in the Colombian Amazon, Cerro de la Lindosa, which I'm hoping to get to this year. Eight kilometers long, covered in rock paintings. The rock paintings are dated more than 12,000 years old. They show extinct megafauna. They show giant sloths which went extinct during the younger dryers, for example. And they also show the kind of entities that are seen in ayahuasca visions. They show the same sort of patterns, the same geometric patterns that are seen in ayahuasca. So there's a sense that- Do you have any images of this place? Cerro de la Lindosa. You are connected to the- Yeah, I don't have images of la Lindosa on here. Maybe you can Google it. But if- Or give the plug back to James. If I was trying to Google it and I didn't find anything, I might have spelled or guessed wrong on Cerro de la Lindosa. How do you spell it? La Lindosa. La Lindosa? Yeah. Let me just- I got it, I got it. You got it? Yeah. You're gonna have to give him the cord real quick, and then he'll give it back to you. Okay, there you go. It's literally an eight kilometer, Sistine Chapel in the Colombian Amazon. That's the other thing, I mentioned there's not a lot of rock in the Amazon. Where there is rock, they used it. There's rock paintings all over the Amazon where rock is available. These kind of things, yeah, that's it. These are characteristic of ayahuasca visions, but in this case, they're more than 12,000 years old. Now does that prove they were using ayahuasca 12,000 years ago? No. But- That's very similar to like a tryptamine vision. Totally, totally. It does suggest that some tryptamine was being accessed at that time and resulting in these visionary images. Boy, they had shitty drawers, weren't they? Their drawing was terrible. But bear in mind that they're clambering 100 feet up a sheer cliff in order to- Still, guys, do a better job. Really, they create these paintings. The people were so fat. Are those people or sea turtles? What are those things? It's really interesting to see. So this is 11,000, how old? 12,000 plus. 12,000 plus? 12,000 plus years old. It's interesting because if you see the paintings that they found in that cave in France, those are 30 plus thousand years old, right? Oh yeah. There's paintings in France. If you go to Chauvet, you're looking 36,000 years old. Can you go to those, James? Hollenstein Stadel in Germany. That's that amazing Werner Herzog documentary. They often have- I think it was the Cave of Dreams? Cave of Dreams, yeah. They often have- Look at that. We're looking at Lascaux. Hang on. On the- Yeah, we're looking at Lascaux there. The bull painting there is interesting. They were better artists. They were. I have to confess, they- They were quite a bit better. This art is very good. Jamie, if you go to the NPR, the painting of a bull, one step left from where you are, that one, this is very interesting. There has been an argument made by a couple of astronomers that what is depicted there is the constellation of Taurus. That in itself is heresy because archaeologists who want to give everything to the Greeks say that it was the Greeks who invented the constellations of the zodiac. Not showing- Why do they think that that represents the constellation? Because of the six little dots which are not, I think, on the head. I think they're somewhere behind, not in this picture, which is often how the Pleiades are seen. Actually, there are seven Pleiades, but often to the naked eye you see six. And the positioning of the Pleiades in relation to the constellation of Taurus is the basis for that argument. It could be. I'm not sure it's so long since I've looked at this, but I know that there are six dots there. So this cave art was going on all around the world. Some of the oldest art has been found in Indonesia, you know. Oh, here it is. Here's the- Yeah, there's the Pleiades. The whole argument about the Pleiades. It's those dots, exactly. The ones you pointed to above the back of the bull. One, two, three, four, five, six. That is how the Pleiades are often seen with the naked eye. Can you go back to the other- yeah, the other- wow. It's an argument. It's not accepted by mainstream archaeology because of their narrative, which is that the discovery of the constellations of the zodiac is given to the Greeks or perhaps to the Mesopotamians before the Greeks. It's not thought that any human culture could have noticed the constellations of the zodiac before that. And that's really absurd because the constellations of the zodiac are on the path of the sun. The sun rises against the background of a different constellation every month. And how would the ancients have missed that, especially since the skies were an ever-present phenomenon to them in a way that they are not to us? They're cut off from the skies by light pollution, but the ancients were not. What a fascinating concept that they knew about the constellations 30 plus thousand years ago. Yeah, and I believe they did. And we see that again in Gobekli Tepe in Pillar 43 and Enclosure D. You see a constellation that we recognize as Sagittarius. Brian and I were talking about one of the ancient versions of human beings, and I sent him this the other day because I read this article that I thought was amazing, where it was talking about, they found wooden structures that were half a million years old. That's right. Yeah, so I'll send you this, Jay. You sent that to me as well. Yes, I did. Yeah. This is very wild, right? Because that's, what is that species? Well, half a million years ago is pre-anatomically modern humans. The earliest example of anatomically modern humans so far found is about 300,000 years, and that's from Morocco. But there's a new thinking going on now. What about the Neanderthals, who we know that anatomically modern humans interbred with? Maybe the Neanderthals are just another anatomically modern human form. Maybe they're not a different species. They're Homo Neanderthalensis as opposed to Homo sapiens. But maybe it was all one, and there were different forms of human beings at that time. In that case, these wooden structures would fit within the Neanderthal timeframe. This is that same culture, Jamie, that Brian was telling us buried their dead in a very sophisticated way where they had to crawl through these cave systems. No, Brian was talking about Homo naledi. I think this is Homo naledi. This is from South Africa? I think that's what they're talking about. I believe that's what they were talking about. Homo naledi is in South Africa, and it is fascinating. Lee Berger, who I mentioned to you... Species similar to Homo naledi. Yeah. See, Homo... How do you say that word? Homo naledi. No, the other one. Homo heidelbergensis. Heidelberg, something, some remains found near Heidelberg in Germany. So this is what it says. We don't know exactly what species made the structure, but Homo... How do you say it again? Heidelbergensis. Heidelbergensis or a species similar to Homo naledi. Might be candidates. Yeah. Interesting. So Homo naledi is interesting. That's the result of a National Geographic Explorer in residence called Lee Berger. And he, as you discussed with Brian, we won't go over it again, but he found evidence of deliberate burial in a very complicated, difficult cave system, which you can hardly access. And of course, immediately this was published, and it was published in a Netflix documentary. The archaeological establishment descended on him like a ton of bricks and tried to find all kinds of reasons why it couldn't possibly be deliberate burial. Whereas I think it would be much more interesting if archaeology tried to, first of all, look at all kinds of reasons why it could be deliberate burial, because that opens many doors, whereas saying, no, it's impossible, just closes, closes all the doors. Well, what are the alternative explanations for why they had mass burial sites inside of a cave? They fell there, something like that. All of them? Yeah, all of them. Over many, many, many years. And somehow buried themselves under the top soil and then left engravings on the cave walls, which are very similar to engravings that we find in the caves of France, for example. Well, it does make sense, though, that ancient human species would slowly learn the things that we learned. They would slowly pick up tool making, they would slowly pick up the ability to harness fire, and that as time went on, as the species became more sophisticated and more advanced, as it evolved, it would just refine those methods. Yeah, that does make sense. The question is, when did it happen? This is why I sometimes wear a T-shirt, and I did on the last show with you, which says things just, stuff just keeps on getting older. Yes. And a lot of people don't understand what I mean by that. What I mean by it is that archeological discoveries are constantly pushing horizons back, but not considering the implications of that. It wasn't so long ago that anatomically modern humans were thought to be just 50,000 years old. Now, if anatomically modern humans with the modern brain, with our capacities and abilities, have only existed for 50,000 years, that doesn't leave a lot of room for a lost civilization to come and go. But then we find 196,000 years ago from Ethiopia, and then more recently 300,000 years ago from Morocco, and suddenly the expanses of time that have not been investigated, in which a civilization could have risen and fallen, become much greater. And that's why it's important that stuff just keeps on getting older. Very fascinating also that the oldest known ones are from Africa. Yeah. And obviously, that's where Egypt is. Yes, that's exactly where Egypt is. And we must recognize Egypt as an African culture. That is what the ancient Egyptians were. I believe their language belonged to the Hamitic language family, which is closely related to the Somali language, for example, in East Africa. African culture, incredibly sophisticated, incredibly advanced, doing stuff that we just don't know how to do today. Archaeologists will tell you they could build a great pyramid, but I defy them to do that. The great pyramid is literally impossible. It's something that doesn't make any sense. It certainly doesn't make sense as the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh, which is what we're told it was. Well, it's also sort of the ultimate, if you wanted to leave behind evidence of your culture, something that if there was a cataclysm and people did have to sort of rethink the history of the world, that would be the best thing to leave. Time capsule. It's so insanely sophisticated that you're forced to sort of reckon with this idea that something might have existed before us. Yeah, definitely. And it incorporates all kinds of interesting math. It incorporates pi, which again is supposed to have been discovered by the Greeks. It incorporates the dimensions of the earth on a particular scale. There's a lot about the great pyramid which suggests that it was intended to transmit information to the future. And that's one of the reasons why it's so big and so enormous. And why we keep on finding new chambers and passageways inside the great pyramid. There's a thing called scan pyramids, which is now going on, which is using the latest tech. And they've identified a second grand gallery above the grand gallery. The grand gallery is one of the wonderful features of the great pyramid. It's 30 feet high, 120 feet long, rising up through the center of the pyramid. But now we know there's a second one above it that hasn't been explored yet. And that's the result of scan pyramids. There's corridors and passageways that we didn't know were there. So the great pyramid is gradually bit by bit revealing its secrets. And it's almost as though it was waiting for a time when human beings were ready to receive those secrets and have the ability to decode them. How do they access the second grand gallery? Scanning. It's all- I mean humans. How can humans get into it? Well, it could. That's a very good question. It's there. The question is, at what point was it made? Was it part- it should have been part of the original construction of the great pyramid. As they were building the great pyramid, they created one grand gallery and they created another. Is it the same size? It looks to be the same size, yeah. From the scanning, the scanning just shows a void. But I'm informed reliably that the recent investigation has identified that void as another grand gallery, which is inside the great pyramid. And the grand gallery is one of the wonders of the world. So it could have artifacts in it? It could have artifacts in it. Same goes for those shafts that cut through the walls of the so-called queen's chamber and king's chamber. I resist these names that archaeologists have applied to the great pyramid. I resist the notion that it was the tomb of Khufu. I resist the notion that the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the great pyramid, was intended to be Khufu's tomb chamber. But then they just changed their minds and abandoned it. And then they built the one that's now called the queen's chamber that was intended to be for Khufu, but they abandoned that as well. Then they went up the grand gallery and they created the so-called king's chamber. And because it has a sarcophagus in it, and for no other reason, that is said to have been the original burial place of Khufu. It's not enough evidence in my view. And the connections to Khufu are from hieroglyphs depicting his vision that if he uncovered the Sphinx, he would become the pharaoh of Egypt. Isn't there something along those lines? There is something along those lines, and it's Thutmosis the fourth or the third, if I remember correctly. In other words, he's a later pharaoh from the time of the Old Kingdom. And he put between the paws of the Sphinx a stellar, which is called the dream stellar. And in it, he records a dream that he had, that that time the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand. And the dream was that he should clear the Sphinx. The Sphinx requested him or ordered him to free it of sand and reveal it again in its true form. This was at least 1200 years after the Sphinx is supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago. But as you know, Robert Schock and I and many others are convinced the Sphinx is much, much older than that, that it goes back 12,000 plus years. And this is based on geological evidence of heavy rainfall, which is another interesting thing about the climate and the environment of that area, that we think of it as being desert, but at one point in time, it wasn't. Well, this is one of the reasons why I'm so frustrated by archaeologists claiming that they could know there was no lost civilization when they've done so little work in the Sahara. When the Sahara was, in a number of occasions during the Ice Age, incredibly fertile, very, nurturing environment with huge river systems running through it and lakes. It's not disputed that that was the case. It was a kind of environment that would have nurtured human civilization. And we really can't write off the possibility of a lost civilization until we take a much closer, much more detailed look at the Sahara. Of course, that's expensive. And then Egypt itself is in the Sahara. Didn't they find fossilized whale bones in the Sahara? Yeah, that would go back a lot further. That would go back to millions of years, to a time when the oceans were different, perhaps even hundreds of millions of years. So Sahara, at one point, was an ocean? As many places were. Wow. Pretty much anywhere where you find limestone was once covered by ocean. The world has changed. The world is constantly changing. It's like one of those magic kids' toys where you pull a lever and it wipes out the diagram you just made. Yeah. It just keeps on... The world keeps on recreating itself. And we human beings make our journey through this changing world. And we try to fix it and say, this is how things were. This is how things will be. And it never cooperates with us on that. Just incredibly fascinating that the timeline, when you go beyond the traditional timeline and you get back into where you and Robert Schock have speculated the age of these things, now you're talking about a completely different environment of lush rainforest and many, many, many resources. Absolutely. We're talking about a completely different Sahara. And Schock's evidence is of a thousand years of heavy rainfall. That's what the Sphinx bears witness to, that it was already there when the rains of the Younger Dryas, and the Younger Dryas affected the Sahara with heavy rainfall. Just as further north it changed the climate and made it much colder in the Sahara, it became much wetter. And it's that period of rains that are the most likely culprit for weathering the Sphinx in the way it is. Could have stood there thousands of years before that. There's also very clear evidence that the face in the Sphinx is much younger, right? No doubt about that whatsoever. The evidence takes, excuse me, frog in my throat. There's a little cough button if you want to hit that. Oh. If you ever want to hit it. Do I have a cough button? Yeah, you have a little red button there. Is that this red button? Yeah, if you feel it coming on, just press the elbow sucker. I'll do that. Where were we, Joe? The Sphinx's face. Yeah. Much younger. The first problem is the ancient Egyptians were masters of proportion. The ancient Egyptian art is rightly world famous for its quality. And they didn't get things out of proportion. They wouldn't make that elementary error when they create this giant statue carving it out of solid bedrock. But the head of the Sphinx is way too small in relation to the body. It looks like the head of a pin. It doesn't fit with that 270-foot long, 70-foot high body. It looks very much as though the Sphinx once had a much larger head. Can you show us a photo of it, Jimmy? It's also much less weathered, right? And it's much less weathered. And this is, again, where Egyptology tries to attach the Sphinx to a particular period. Egyptology claims that's the face of Khafre, who was the successor to Khufu. It doesn't look like any statues, known statues of Khafre that I can see. But let's not worry about that. Whereas the headdress that's worn by the Sphinx, best looked at in the picture top left or the Quora picture, that headdress is called the Nemez headdress. It's the classic headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. Not, in my view, Khafre, but the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. But it's on a head that is way too small by comparison with the body. And both Shaq and I and John Anthony West, Manu Saifzada, who's another excellent researcher in this field, we all feel that the Sphinx was almost certainly a complete lion at one point. It was a lion with a huge mane. And that that head sticking up above the plateau got very heavily eroded. And by the time the ancient Egyptians inherited it, they decided to improve it a little bit to cut down that heavily eroded head and put the head of a pharaoh on it. Does it have the same sort of sophisticated proportions where they're perfect left and right as some of the other statues do, which is another incredible mystery, that when they look at the measurements of these immense statues, somehow or another, they're completely symmetrical on both left and right sides. Completely symmetrical. I'm actually not sure whether that's the case with the Sphinx. I wouldn't be surprised because I have no doubt whatsoever that the head of the great Sphinx was carved by the ancient Egyptians who made those statues. But the question is, what was it carved from? What was it cut down from? So the geology, the precipitation-induced weathering is one of the evidence, pieces of evidence for a much older Sphinx. But the other thing is the astronomy, the fact that the Sphinx is an equinoxial marker. If you stand looking due east at Giza or anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, on the spring equinox, there's three key moments of the year, four actually. There's the winter and summer solstice, and there's the equinoxes, the spring and fall equinoxes. On the summer solstice, the sun rises far to the north of east. On the winter solstice, it rises far to the south of east. But on the equinoxes, it aligns perfectly due east. And that's what the Sphinx is. It's aligned perfectly to due east, and it's gazing at the horizon. And then we come to this contentious issue of who discovered those with diacal constellations. Because the Sphinx 12,500 years ago was gazing at dawn on the spring equinox at the constellation of Leo. In other words, this lion monument on the ground was looking at its own celestial counterpart in the sky. Egyptologists dismiss that. They say that nobody had any idea of the constellations until the Greeks. I just think they're wrong. So astronomy and geology together combine to invite us to consider the possibility that the Sphinx may be much older than 4,500 years old. Trevor Burrus And didn't the Greeks learn from the Egyptians as well? Maybe did they learn, but they said they learned. The Greeks were very honest about it. They sat at the feet of the ancient Egyptians. They said they learned everything they knew from the ancient Egyptians. But somehow, archaeology has rewritten the narrative and gives far too much to the Greeks. Ancient Greek was a wonderful culture, magical culture, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful work, but a relatively recent culture. And it was channeling knowledge from much earlier times. In a way, ancient Greece is the meeting point between the lost ancient world and the modern world in which we live. And that's why the Greeks and the Greek texts are so useful to us. And that's why I think the Atlantis story is a very important story. John Blom, Jr. Well, it's also we do that today. If you look at the Lincoln Monument and you look at the Parthenon, I mean, we mimic ancient Greek architecture today. Trevor Burrus Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So what were the ancient Greeks copying? They were copying the Egyptians. John Blom, Jr. Right. It just completely makes sense. Trevor Burrus Yeah. Go to the Temple of Karnak, go to the Temple of Luxor. You're looking at the model for the later Greek temples. They followed that example, and they were honest about it. It's modern archaeology that has kind of rewritten the story and given way too much to the Greeks. John Blom, Jr. When you say that in Gobekli Tepe, the speculation is that they use stone tools. Trevor Burrus Yes. Is there any evidence of bizarre cutting like they find in Egypt where it looks like they're using some sort of a cylindrical drill or whether it looks like the stone is somehow scooped out in some method that we don't understand? John Blom, Jr. I've not seen evidence of a cylindrical drill at Gobekli Tepe, but what you do see, I'm going to press that red button. There you go. What you do see at Gobekli Tepe is pillars with carvings in relief on them. Trevor Burrus Three-dimensional. John Blom, Jr. Three-dimensional carvings which stand out. That means that all of the stone around the carving had to be cut away. It wasn't a matter of incising the carving into the stone. You had to remove the stone around it and leave it standing proud. Trevor Burrus Much more sophisticated. John Blom, Jr. And it's much more sophisticated, and it's on the oldest so far-identified pillar in Gobekli Tepe, which maybe Jamie can call up. It's pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe, which is ... Any chance of getting that up? Trevor Burrus Yeah, one second. John Blom, Jr. It's a remarkable piece of ancient art. It's definitely 11,600 years old. So often, yeah, the Tepe telegrams, for example, will show it. On the right there, another wonderful piece of relief carving. But there, pillar 43, this vulture is in exactly the position of the constellation of Sagittarius. And the disc over its wing suggests the sun against the background of the constellation of Sagittarius. Below it, we have a scorpion, so like the constellation of Scorpio, and roughly in the right place. Above it, we have a serpent descending a bit like Ophiuchus. It seems to speak to a knowledge of astronomy at an ancient time. Again, it's controversial, but a lot of work has been done on this. But the point is, the carving of that is highly sophisticated at 11,600 years old. Trevor Burrus That creature, whatever it is, Jamie, that one that's sort of black and white, that image in the center says visual arts cork. Yeah, I'll call that one. That one's amazing. John Blom, Jr. It's amazing. They cut away the whole pillar to leave that creature there, which itself is hard to identify. Is it a crocodile? We found something very similar in Peru, as a matter of fact. Trevor Burrus Well, the proportions are all for a crocodile. It looks more like a cat. John Blom, Jr. Yeah. I think it looks more like some kind of feline, but exactly what creature it is is hard. Trevor Burrus Something with a tail. John Blom, Jr. Yeah, it's hard to identify. Trevor Burrus When, you know, this is all so interesting to me. When these people are trying to date this to 11,800 years ago, and say that people only had stone tools, how do they speculate that these people did this stuff? John Blom, Jr. You can do stuff with stone tools. Trevor Burrus So they use harder stone to carve this stone. John Blom, Jr. That's the argument. Trevor Burrus Is there evidence of these stones? John Blom, Jr. No, not that I'm aware of. There are some so-called pounding stones, but I find it difficult to see how pounding stones, how pounding away could have created this very fine result. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. It's the same with the incredible work that you find at Cuzco and Sacsayhuaman in Peru. Again, they're not supposed to have had, this is supposedly recent, I think it's much older, the Incas, not supposed to have had metal tools. They're supposed to have done all the work with stone tools. I think it's a reach. I think we're looking at a technology we don't understand. Trevor Burrus So one of them looks like a wild boar, that one to the left, Pinterest? John Blom, Jr. Looks like a wild boar. Trevor Burrus Yeah, definitely. John Blom, Jr. Yeah. Trevor Burrus So that's identifiable, which is interesting when you look at the other ones that aren't that identifiable. John Blom, Jr. Yeah, some of them are identifiable. Trevor Burrus Yeah, I don't know what that one's supposed to be. John Blom, Jr. That's a fox. Trevor Burrus A fox. John Blom, Jr. But interestingly, coming out of it are these streamers. My colleague, Martin Sweatman from the University of Edinburgh, has suggested that that is representing meteors coming down from the sky. Those streamers out of the tail of the fox, and the fox was a constellation. Trevor Burrus What's that little fellow right there, Jamie? It says in Turkey, right to the left of your cursor? Yeah, right there. What's that? John Blom, Jr. A human form. Trevor Burrus Is that another one from somewhere else? John Blom, Jr. No, no. I'm not sure which site that is from. It could be from Gobekli Tepe, judging by the feline figures beside it. Let's find out. Trevor Burrus Ad blocker. Trevor Burrus Oh, you got us. You got to subscribe. John Blom, Jr. Yeah. Trevor Burrus That was the ad blocker? John Blom, Jr. Too complicated. Trevor Burrus Is it letting you go back? John Blom, Jr. Move on. Trevor Burrus Okay. John Blom, Jr. We have those images from ancient Sumer, which are 6,000 years old or so, that show what appears to be the solar system. So how do they... Trevor Burrus Well, first of all, let's remember ancient Sumer was in Mesopotamia. John Blom, Jr. Yes. Trevor Burrus And Mesopotamia, it's a Greek word, means between the rivers. And the rivers referred to are the Tigris and the Euphrates. And where is Gobekli Tepe? Right between the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Here it is, hard to grasp relief of man holding his phallus found in Turkey. John Blom, Jr. Which site? Which site? San Leofre is the big city nearby. That's where you need to go if you want to go to Gobekli Tepe. Not saying which site it was. Trevor Burrus Can I see that image again? John Blom, Jr. It could be Karahun Tepe, where I've been. But I haven't seen that figure. That's... Trevor Burrus It looks like he's covering his phallus, like he's embarrassed. Or maybe he's pregnant. Look, maybe he's the first pregnant man. John Blom, Jr. We don't know what it means. But he's definitely holding his dick. Trevor Burrus It seems like it. It seems like maybe he's peeing? John Blom, Jr. Nelton. Trevor Burrus What is he doing? John Blom, Jr. What is he doing? John Blom, Jr. I don't know. And we don't know. The problem is no written texts have come down to us from that time. So everything in a sense is speculation. What isn't speculation is the dating. I have grave doubts about carbon dating in many cases. Because carbon dating doesn't date stone. It dates organic materials. So the notion that you can date a megalithic site with carbon dating is questionable right away. But what tends to be done is that you look for a piece of organic material that is so associated with the megalith you want to date that you can say or propose that they come from the same period of time. I have that problem with the huge Moai statues in Easter Island. They are not carbon dated. What's carbon dated is the platforms they stand on. And there's a lot to suggest that those platforms are much later than the original statues. And the statues were re-erected on those platforms. In the case of Gobekli Tepe, one of the very special things about it is that it was deliberately buried. They ran that site for about a thousand years from 11,600 to say 10,600 years ago. And then they closed it down. And they went to great effort to fill up all the enclosures with rubble and to create a hill over the top of it. And that's why Gobekli Tepe then remained untouched for the next 10,000 years. There's no danger of contamination with younger carbon from a later culture. The fact that they found carbon in enclosure D right by pillar 43 dated to 11,600 years ago does firmly connect that place to 11,600 years ago. There are later dates from Gobekli Tepe. It wasn't all built in one go. But it stopped around a thousand or maybe 1,200 years after it started. As though they'd achieved what they wanted to achieve. The population had all become agriculturalists. We move on into the Holocene, into the modern age. And it's that moment of transition following an enormous cataclysm that really fascinates me. If they attribute the constellations to ancient Greece, what do they say about the clay tablets from Sumer? I've not seen any archaeologist who attributes knowledge of the constellations to the ancient Sumerians. That's a bit too late. The Babylonians maybe. Pull that image up. Because this image has always been wild to me. Because it kind of shows a sun in the center. And then it shows all of the planets in our solar system in relatively the correct sizes. Relatively. I wouldn't be surprised by that. In terms of what's the bigger one, what's the smaller one? I think the ancients had, or certain peoples amongst the ancients, did have a very good idea about our solar system and about the dimensions of the Earth and about the other planets in our solar system. Again, this is something that archaeology has dismissed, but I think it's a possibility that's worthy of inquiry. No, it's not that one. That's a different one. It's the... Yeah, that's it. There we go. So there's the sun, and it's surrounded by the planets that we're aware of. Yeah, it's kind of hard to interpret that any other way, isn't it? I mean, it seems like that's what it is. It seems like the solar system. In the way the sun is depicted is the way a little kid depicts the sun. Yeah, yeah. And it's also depicted as a star as well as the sun, the circuit disk of the sun, and the sun is a star. So the suggestion is much greater knowledge of the universe than is supposed to have existed at that time. And this is Sumer. Sumer is supposedly the first civilization, the oldest civilization on Earth. Goes back about 6,000 years. But then what about the prequels to Sumer? Let's take Gobekli Tepe into account because it's so close to Sumer. And by the way, just within a few hundred kilometers of Gobekli Tepe is Abu Herrera, where there is compelling evidence of a massive airburst 12,800 years ago and a complete wipeout of the local population. I don't think it's an accident that Gobekli Tepe is where it is. Is there images of this explosion in the sky? There's an artist's impression of the explosion in the sky. But do they have evidence on the ground? Like you can see like Tunguska, where it's all flattened? Yes. Massive amount of evidence on the ground, particularly what is called shocked quartz, where the quartz has been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees centigrade. This is not caused by village fires. This is the characteristic fingerprint of a cosmic impact. Platinum, iridium, carbon microspherules, all of these impact proxies are found in abundance at Abu Herrera. Is there a cleared area that's similar to what looks like in Tunguska where it doesn't... The problem with Abu Herrera is that it's now underwater. The Aswan High Dam flooded it. But before it was submerged, an enormous amount of material was taken from it. And it's that soil that was taken from Abu Herrera to preserve it, which is producing the evidence of a younger Dreyas impact there, 12,800 years ago. So when was this dam? When did this take place? In the 60s? Something like that? No. Something like that. I think Abu Herrera's been underwater since the 60s or certainly the 70s. Maybe the 70s. What a bummer. What a bummer. But in this case, thank you, archaeology, for preserving soil and materials from that site, which allow this work to be done. There's no doubt that a cataclysmic event took place there. Just a whole bunch of new papers published in the last two or three weeks on Abu Herrera, which are further consolidating this evidence that it was subject to a very large airburst. And that after that, within the 1,000 to 2,000 years after that, just as at Gobekli Tepe, the local population transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture. It's fascinating to me how when you go to these sites and you see where these ancient structures existed and imagine the climate, and what a major factor that plays in what human beings do and what they're able to do, whether they're able to thrive because there's an abundance of resources. And then it seems those are the places where they create these incredible structures, like the Mayans. Yeah. And where you go to a place like North America 20,000 years ago was unbelievably inhospitable. Yeah. It was terrifying and filled with all sorts of predators. Massive predators. Much like parts of Africa. Yeah. Right? I mean, we had a North American lion, which is bigger than the African lion. North American cheetah. There was all sorts of the short-faced bear. There's all sorts of... Sabre-toothed tigers. Yeah. All sorts of animals that would make it really difficult to thrive. You don't want to meet one of those. No. So it makes sense that the people that lived there didn't have the sort of technological sophistication that maybe people had in the... Northern part of North America is certainly the area that was under the ice cap until 11,000 years ago. It's a waste of time looking for any sign of a lost civilization there. Northern Europe, waste of time, because it was also a frozen wasteland. But the areas closer to the equator, once you get down into the southern states of North America, get yourself into Mexico, get yourself to the Yucatan, the Maya culture. Then you're looking at a place where civilizations could really grow and flourish. Yeah. That's what's really interesting about just the history of North America in general, is that when you look at how the Native Americans existed and the way they lived just a few hundred years ago, that seems to be like an artifact of what life was like before that. Yes. I think we must give full credit to hunter-gatherer civilizations who might do a bit of agriculture on the side. These are the masters of survival on our planet. Right. Not us. They were the ones who kept the species alive. They were the ones after the younger dryers who kept the species alive, in my view, because they knew how to survive. I've made this point before, but if such a cataclysm were to occur to our civilization today, I don't think it would take much to bring our civilization down. A full-scale nuclear war, end of the story for technological civilization of the 21st century. There's a comet impact, something like the younger dryers happening again. Sudden sea level rises. Consider how many cities we have built along coastlines. A 30-foot sea level rise would destroy them. The psychological nature of our civilization is very entitled. We tend to feel we've got it all made. We take it all for granted. We're not equipped to think about disaster descending upon us. If such a thing were to occur, and God forbid that it does, those survivors from our industrialized technological society, those who made it through, would be smart to go take refuge amongst hunter-gatherers. They would be the ones who would preserve them and allow them to continue forwards. Maybe in that process there would be an exchange of information, just as the survivors of industrial civilization would learn from hunter-gatherers. Also, they might have something to teach to hunter-gatherers. I think that's what happened 12,800 years ago. Well, it seems like there's so much compelling evidence that that's the case. I get so puzzled and baffled by the resistance to it, because it's just interesting. Well, if it's right, it pulls the rug out completely from under the feet of archeology, and that's why there's resistance to it. All human beings are territorial in their own way, and archeologists are no exception. They're territorial. They've defined their territory. They see a gradual, slow, steady evolution of human society, and they think that we were at a relatively simple stage during the so-called Stone Age, and we just gradually got more and more sophisticated. It's a peeling idea, and it makes sense in lots of ways, but there isn't room in that for an earlier civilization to have emerged and been destroyed. That's why the idea is attacked, because if that idea were true, then the foundation on which archeology has built the house of history would collapse. It's so unfortunate, so unfortunate that they just don't jump in and enjoy these new discoveries and redefine things. In a way, I've been glad to have received the tuperative level of attack from archeology that I did, because it shows I've pressed their buttons. It shows there's something they feel they need to cancel here. There's something they feel they need to get rid of. That's the most dangerous show on television. The most dangerous show on Netflix. An absurd idea. Really crazy, but that's cancel language. That's the language you use. Also you call somebody anti-Semitic or racist or white supremacist or misogynist. All of those are easy labels, which these days just need to be applied to a person. Nobody even investigates or goes, look, goes to see. That works less and less now than it ever has before. I hope so. Because I think people are catching on. Yeah, people are catching on. It's pretty clear. Also, the belief that everything they read is true, especially from mainstream media, that's been grossly eroded. This is one of the reasons why ... I'm going to press that cough button. This is one of the reasons why my work has not been canceled and hasn't disappeared because archeology dislikes it, because the general public today distrust experts. With good reason. There's good reason to distrust experts. We've been told so many lies by experts over such a long period of time. They so often are confident, absolutely certain that they're right and they turn out later to be wrong. That any intelligent person begins to wonder, are these experts really the only people we should listen to in any way? I want to think for myself. I don't want to be told what to think by a group of authority figures called archeologists. I want a diverse range of information and then I will draw my conclusions from it. I'm not speaking of me, I'm speaking of the general public. I think that attitude is growing, but at the same time, there still is a slavish adherence to the words of experts. We've seen that again and again in recent years. Science says it's so, therefore it must be so. Well, no. Science is a work in progress. Science often gets things wrong. Before science says something is so, doesn't mean it is so. It shouldn't be a religion. It shouldn't be like a dictate from a high priest. It should be one bit of information that is supplied to the public to make up their own minds. Well, it's also the reality of your book in 1995 being dismissed and now you see so much evidence it shows that it's true. That's got to be very satisfying for you. It is. As time has gone on, more and more of what you were... Yeah. It is satisfying to me. For example, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, there was a whole constellation of evidence which suggested that something bad had happened to the earth around 12,500 years ago. But the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis didn't exist then. So I looked into a number of possibilities that might have resulted in a cataclysm at that time. Then that was 1995. 2007, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis comes out. 60 major scientists published in all the big mainstream journals proposing that the earth went through an absolutely catastrophic episode between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, exactly the window that I was proposing. So yes, that's very pleasant to see. The discovery of Gobekli Tepe. You know, Gobekli Tepe, they began excavations in 1996, a year after I published Fingerprints of the Gods. But those excavations began to become public knowledge in the 2000s. And the fact that we now have a giant, sophisticated megalithic site sitting in Turkey and not alone, Karah and Tepe, there's about 10 other sites in that same neighborhood, again, was not explained by the archaeology of 1995. It's something that fits better into the paradigm that I've proposed that we're dealing with a lost episode in the human story. It's also fascinating and somewhat terrifying that if the Younger Dryas Impact theory is correct and it really did reset human civilization, think of how long it took for Sumer to emerge from total barbarism. Who knows what it was like for thousands of years of survival? I would suggest that there was a method of preserving knowledge, that those survivors of the cataclysm were not just looking at their immediate time, they were also looking to the future. How can we pass down knowledge to the future? And one of the ways you can pass down knowledge to the future is something like the Great Pyramid, which is so big it can't be destroyed. And another way you can pass down knowledge to the future is in wonderful stories that people will keep on telling. And those stories may contain scientific information. The storyteller doesn't even need to know that information. As long as he or she tells the story true, the information will be passed on. And we are a storytelling species. So that's why I take myths very, very seriously. I think they are important evidence of our past. I think archaeology is making a mistake in ignoring myths and it needs to pay much, much more attention to them. Now surely there's been positive reactions to the Netflix show? I've had masses of positive reactions from the general public and those reactions seem to say that people love the show. And it was a big hit on Netflix. It got, you know, number one for quite a while. It was a very, very successful series. The public reaction to it is very positive. I've been writing about these possibilities since the early 1990s, the possibility of a lost civilization. The first book that really put me on the map and that immediately attracted a lot of criticism was Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. And then from public appearances, later on appearing on your show in 2011, people began to know my face and I began to be seen and recognized. People would come up to me in various places, often because they'd seen me on your show. Since the Netflix show, that recognition factor has increased enormously. In every airport I go to, I'm stopped. People want to take pictures with me, which I'm delighted to do because I would be nothing without my readers. I'm not some special person. I'm a storyteller and it's the readers who give those stories value and who decide whether they're worth listening to or not. And I'm always grateful to people who read my books and watch my TV. And I try to show that when I meet people, but the recognition factor has gone up enormously since the Netflix show. And that recognition factor, again and again, I'm stopped in the street and I'm told we loved your show. I'm stopped by an archeologist in the street in the city of Bath where I live in England. He must have been younger. Actually she was in her fifties and she was with her family and she said, I just want you to know that not all archeologists hate your work. I found your work very, very useful. That's nurturing. That's encouraging to me to hear that kind of thing. And at the same time, the criticism itself, I think there's an old saying, you know, when you get a lot of flack, it tells you you're over the target. And I think I am over some kind of target here. Truth will come out in due course, whether it happens in my lifetime or much later, I don't know. But I'm sure we're missing a part of our story. My fear is that it's going to repeat itself and we're not going to learn before it happens. That's an unfortunate character of the human race that we do not learn from past mistakes. And you know, we live in a world now dominated by hatred, dominated by competing nationalism, dominated by competing religions. I have no time for, and this has got to annoy some folk, but I have no time for the mainstream monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I think that the three of them are behind so much of the trouble and chaos and hatred in the world. It's okay to have your religious faith. That's great. But to say my faith is right and your faith is wrong, that's the first step on the road to ruin. And that's what's happening today, is these exclusive religious ideas that compel people to behave in really obnoxious ways towards each other. There's nothing more dangerous than ideas sometimes. And ideas have driven so much of the conflict in the world. Look at the ideas behind Hitler's rise to power and the conflicts that resulted. People bought into those ideas. And it led to disaster. And that is happening in the world today, most unfortunately. It's exactly happening. That's what's so terrifying. And if a full scale nuclear war does happen... God help us. God help us. I mean, there might not be a human race to reinvent itself. It's perfectly possible. We could become completely extinct. And nature has a way of doing that. It happened to the dinosaurs too. Well, the chickens survived. But nature got rid of the dinosaurs. They were not fit to survive in the new world that was created by that impact six million years ago. They were not suited for survival in that world. And we may not be suited for survival in this world, largely through our own behavior and our own mad obsessions with ideas that are filled with hatred and lead people to despise one another instead of looking for the best in one another. I've been lucky enough to travel extensively all my working life, live in many different countries. And I have no doubt that people are the same all over the world. The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams. I love the cultural diversity of humanity. This is one of the beautiful things about the human race. So many different cultures bring different important pieces to the party. I love that. I would never seek to get rid of that. But underneath that cultural diversity, we are human beings. We love our families. We have hopes and ambitions for the future. We have dreams. All of us do. Whatever side of a particular argument we're on, you get down to that basic level, we're all the same. And what I believe what unites us as a species is much more significant than what divides us. And we need to start paying less attention to what divides us and more attention to what unites us and to celebrate our diversity at the same time without saying, my diversity is better than yours. It's just so difficult for that message to get through when you have these governments and these groups of control that have the narrative that they speak to, whether it's like North Korea, where they completely control it, or the United States, where it's a lot of propaganda and they have control of the mainstream media. It's much more subtle in the United States, but it's still control. It's still my control. It's control, and it's unfortunate that that's still the way human beings are behaving in this age of information, that we're forced into these paradigms. We're trapped by these systems. That existed essentially back when we were tribal cultures. And the leader and the leader tells the group who the enemies are, and this is the same shit that's been going on forever. The same shit. And also, the notion that we need leaders at all is a questionable notion in my mind. I'm not sure human beings do need leaders. We need administrators, organizers. We live in large, complex societies. There's a need for organization, but leaders with charisma, with power, who impress others of their ideas and who attract a following, that is the road to ruin. That is what we're on at the moment. I don't see a single leader anywhere in the world right now who I like or who I feel attracted to or I feel who offers some hope. I think you had Robert Kennedy Jr. on the show. To me, he's an interesting American politician. I don't know a whole lot about American politics, but he seems to be a free thinker. My litmus test for any leader in an advanced industrialized country is what's his position on drugs? What's his position on the war on drugs, his or her position? Are they going to maintain this strict control, this legal penalties for people choosing to alter their own state of consciousness? Or are they going to realize that our consciousness is fundamental to what we are as human beings and that we as adults must have the sovereign right to make choices about our own consciousness, including taking drugs? Even if those choices annoy others, we should still have the right to make those choices. I don't see many politicians who are saying, actually, what we should do is legalize all drugs. I think we should. I think all drugs should be legalized and then accompanied with wise advice. There's no evidence that the war on drugs has had any success in controlling the ... There are dangerous drugs. There are drugs that I would not advise people to take, but the way to do it is not to impose draconian penalties on people for exploring their own consciousness. The way to do it is to offer wise advice, which people take seriously. Right now, the advice that comes out of drug agencies around the world is not wise advice, and everybody knows it's stupid, and they don't go along with it. So a politician who says, I'm going to legalize all drugs and I'm going to accompany it with wise advice that will help people to make informed decisions, and yes, like other things in our society, drugs should be limited to a certain age group. I think the age of 21 is a good age. I think teenagers can suffer quite badly from drug use, and I think it'd be a good idea if they didn't. But I know from having had teenage children myself that teenagers will, by and large, do what they want to do. Especially if you tell them not to. Especially if you tell them not to. Which is the problem with America versus Europe in regards to drinking. Yeah. Elaborate on that? Well, in America, you can't drink at all until you turn 21. And so drinking is this forbidden fruit that they get excited about. If you go to Italy, young kids can drink wine. Sure. They do it all the time, and I don't think they have the levels of alcoholism that we do. I'm sure they don't. I'm sure they don't. I think there's a big part of human nature, especially young humans. They rebel against authority figures. They don't believe you have it all figured out. They see that you're flawed. They see that you're just a person. You're just an older person. But an older person that's imparting your rule of law on them, then they want to rebel. Often when people react to my view on the war on drugs, which is we should throw it away and legalize all drugs, they say, but it'll be so dangerous. Terrible things will happen if you legalize all drugs. So I'm sorry, all drugs are already available illegally. Anybody can get access to them when they want to. The war on drugs has not worked. And kudos to those states in America, what is it now, 22 states that have legalized cannabis? There's quite a few. And some of them have even decriminalized psilocybin. Oregon. Yeah. Now, this is very interesting. And this connects with the fundamental American value as I see it, which is the value of individual freedom. Right. And adults, not children, should be allowed to make decisions about their own health and their own bodies without some authority figure preaching to them or even sending them to jail. Well, not only that, but authority figures that have no experience in these drugs. Zero experience. Especially when they use the term drugs. The problem with that term is it's a blanket that you throw over a bunch of different psychoactive substances that have wildly different results. And non-psychoactive substances. Because aren't pharmacies called drug stores in America? Yeah. Well, and they do have drugs. I mean, they are selling sanctioned drugs. Yeah. Many pharmaceutical drugs are very heavy weight and very, very, very dangerous. The antidepressants, for example. I've had experience with antidepressants. They're horrible. Ciroc, Sat and Prozac, back in the 90s, I had a long depression. They didn't help me. They made me worse. And when people ask me, I advise them, stay away from the selective serotonin and reuptake inhibitors. They are not good things. But of course, if somebody wants to take them, that's also their free choice. Well, there's also real results that show that when you're exercising, it's 1.25 times more effective than taking SSRIs for depression. Yeah. A regular exercise is one of the most effective methods of mitigating some depression. There's different levels of depression, clearly. Some of it seems to be chemical, and there's a lot of misfusion and misunderstanding about that even. Yeah. But no doubt, exercise is extremely helpful. I know if I take a long walk, I feel much better after the walk than I did before. I don't do it enough. I need to do it more. I need to start practicing what I preach. Yeah. I do it regularly. If I don't, it drives me nuts. I feel the difference. If I take a couple of days off, there's this creeping level of anxiety that enters into me. There's a weird discomfort with the world. And when I exercise, that goes away. Yeah. For me, it's real clear. It's like just as a physical medicine, it's something that I need to do. It's definitely the first stop if you're trying to get rid of depression. It's just so bizarre that a culture that makes things like psilocybin illegal, legalizes opiates. Yes. Legalizes prescription use of opiates. If you've seen any of the docu... The Netflix series Painkiller is a great example of what they did to get the entire country on board with this idea that pain is something you should manage with opiates on a regular basis and stay on it. Terrible idea. It's nuts. Terrible idea. It's nuts. And in that same culture, making psilocybin... And very often what happens is that the individual who's been prescribed opiates for pain, the doctor withdraws a prescription, then they have to go on the black market to acquire it. They're so addicted and they start abusing it, then they have to go find it somewhere else and that's where you get all the fenton. The whole thing is a disastrous mess. At my age, which is now 73, I can't avoid being aware that my time on this planet is limited. My work, my studies, my experiences over the years have left me with absolutely no fear of death. I do regard it as the beginning of the next great adventure. It's something that I think is going to be fascinating and interesting. Can I just finish? I fear pain. I do fear pain, really severe pain, the pain of a lingering terrible cancer, for example. If I found myself in that situation, that's an appropriate situation to take opiates. Their heroin and heroin derivatives can be useful in the management of pain. But otherwise, I would steer completely clear of them. But yeah, the next great adventure. What do you think that is? When you say the next great, where are you getting this belief from and what do you think it is? A lot of it comes from the work I've done with Ayahuasca over the years. It goes back to a near-death experience I had in my late teens, massive electric shock. I left my body, was up around the light, saw myself slumped on the floor, and then I came back into my body. But from that moment, I doubted whether I am just my body or whether there's more to me than that, more to all of us than that. Ancient Egyptian ideas about this realm being a theater of experience where we come to learn and to grow and develop, we're obliged constantly every day to make choices. And those choices define us. And those choices may be very small or they may be very large. But we are learning, hopefully, from these. And I just don't think that this is an accident. This is my belief system. I don't commit to any of the monotheistic faiths, but this is my belief system, that this is a special place that we are here to learn and to grow and to develop in a world that has consequences, where there will be consequences to the decisions that we make. I like the Buddhist idea of going through multiple incarnations and eventually reaching a state of perfection where you embrace nirvana. But some come back, the bodhisattvas, they choose not to go to nirvana. They come back as teachers to teach human beings how to better and improve their lives. That idea is uniquely terrifying to people that you live life over and over again until you get it right. And I don't necessarily understand why, because I have the initial impulse to be terrified of it as well. But yet, I really enjoy life. If I had to do this one again, I probably wouldn't like my childhood, but my childhood made me who I am today. Even all of the bad experiences and mistakes that I've made, I really wish I didn't make them, but I did and they make me who I am today. And you learned from them. I learned from them. I understand life better because of mistakes. And people oftentimes dwell on mistakes and think that that defines them. It can be a real problem, particularly with young people that are insecure, that have had some sort of a disastrous thing happen, like a business failure, being fired, become a drug addict, go to jail, whatever it is, steal something. And then you're defined by the worst mistakes that you've made and that becomes you forever. Which you may have made in a state of complete immaturity where you didn't even really fully understand what you were doing. Oftentimes it's the case. And even older people that make mistakes, this idea that you should know by a certain time, look, this is a constant, evolving adventure that we're all on. And if you're a person who's 35 years old and you feel like, oh my God, how could I fuck this up so bad at 35? I'm such a loser. No, this is just what happens with humans. These are mistakes. People make mistakes and you've got to be able to rebound and learn from it. And that's the process of growth. That's the only way it gets to you. It's the only way it gets to you and it's really important to be able to make mistakes and to learn from them. And that's another problem with leadership, which is that the whole leadership structure seeks to protect us from making our own sovereign decisions about our lives and to deny us the opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes. We all got to be these perfect creatures that go through life producing and consuming and not causing any trouble. I think in regards to drugs, there is a realization, there's a reality rather, that if we do make drugs legal for everyone, there are going to be people who try drugs that would not try them if they were illegal. Because now they're sanctioned and that there will be a period of time where human beings are going to have to figure out what to do and what not to do and adjust. And hopefully they could do this without propaganda. Hopefully they could do this without drug commercials that tell them what's good and what's bad. I mean, the fact that we still allow them to advertise drugs on television is so bizarre because what they're doing is romancing you into the idea that this is your solution. And oftentimes it's for people that are depressed or for people that, you know, like, and then you see these people at the cookout having a great time because they took this pill. I know. You're like, I want to go to the cookout. It's propaganda. And I think it's strange that that is legal because human beings are so easily influenced by advertising, by having something associated with joyous music and in these images of people having this festive gathering and laughing together and you're in a dark place. And you see that and like, that's what I want. And it's just trickery, this weird game that we're allowed to play on people. It's money making trickery. That's what it is. And so, pharmaceutical companies are the biggest drug pushers in the world. Literally. Literally. And they get full governmental support in order to do that. Why are antidepressants out there? Because people get less efficient when they're depressed. So antidepressants make them, perhaps, although I don't think antidepressants work, they said it didn't work for me, perhaps make them more malleable, more amenable members of society. Alcohol isn't too much of a threat to society. Yeah, it's a very dangerous drug. It causes thousands of deaths. It causes violence. It causes road accidents. But it doesn't challenge the status quo. People are not drinking a beer or a bottle of wine and having thoughts that are anti-establishment. That tends not to be what happens. Whereas the psychedelics, they do challenge the status quo. They do lead people. And I've seen this again and again, and it's been the case with me, to question the existing power structure in society and to say there must be something better. There must be some other way to do things than the way we're doing them now. It also makes you very aware of the frailty of human consciousness in regards to everyday life. There's the mechanism. There's a wiring. There's something underneath that that's so much more profound, that ties us all together. It's a very bizarre way. And it's seemingly unavailable during normal states of consciousness because we evolved as a species that needed to survive. And you can't be dwelling on how you connect with nature and the way human beings communicate with each other. And you're trying to eat and live. And you're trying to get eaten by cats or raided by a foreign tribe. And that's why probably these states are so inaccessible to normal consciousness because we would have never made it this far if we were just... But it's interesting that these states have only been demonized in the last 60, 70 years. They weren't demonized before that. Well, that we allow the goofiest government ever, the Nixon administration. The Nixon administration defined the war on drugs. Yeah, literally. And to stop the civil rights movement, to stop the anti-war movement. It's literally why they did it. It's a very sinister process indeed. It's also the way it captured the public zeitgeist, the way it captured people's predetermined opinions on things. Because there's a certain group of people that don't investigate things and they prescribe to a predetermined notion of what's good and bad and what is safe and not safe and what's the right way and the wrong way to do things. It's not a well thought out sort of philosophy. It's something that they've just sort of adopted and they've adopted from their culture. And our culture has some very, very goofy ideas. Certainly does. Literally based on what happened during the hippie movement and the Nixon administration and then all the subsequent propaganda that came after that, like just say no and this is your brain on drugs, they're cooking eggs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a very crazy situation that we confront with the war on drugs. Fundamentally, I think there's an issue of human rights which has just been completely neglected by the war on drugs that we the government can tell you what to experience in the inner sanctum of your personality. And we will allow certain drugs which happen to make huge amounts of money for our friends in the pharmaceutical industry and we'll not only allow them, we'll celebrate them and we'll advertise them in every possible way. But other drugs we will not allow. That's very un-American. America is a country that celebrates and that enshrines individual freedom. And I love that about America. And one of the good things about the legalization of cannabis in whatever many states it is 20, 20 plus is that all those prognostications, all those warnings that legalization would lead to catastrophe turn out not to be true. Not at all. But, as I said, America is proving that the war on drugs is full of shit. It's just time for the federal authorities to catch up. Yeah. And it's time for the federal authorities to realize that this prohibition is bad for them as well. It's bad for the human species. It's bad for you as an individual. And there are experiences that are available and that have been known about for thousands of years all over the world that can help you grow as a human being. Absolutely. And everybody. Some people shouldn't take it. Some people have all sorts of medical conditions and psychological conditions that don't make it safe for them. Definitely. But the way we find this out is by letting them be legal and letting people who understand them explain to people what the dangers are, develop protocols based on effective dosages, and also explain what people can't do, why they shouldn't do it, what medications that you're on that you shouldn't take these days. Yes, absolutely. There needs to be much broader information, not this kind of closed-minded shut mouth society that we live in at the moment. It needs to change very, very radically. A friend of ours in the UK, Amanda Fielding, runs... You've had a wonderful show. I love her. Yeah, she was amazing. Wonderful lady. She runs the Beckley Foundation. Yeah. Amanda has been very effective over the years in getting legislation changed and in funding research into psychedelics. And one of the things I know that Amanda is looking at is hospices that offer psychedelic therapy. And I think that would be very useful. You're not obliged to take the psychedelics. It's a free choice. But they would be available in a setting with experienced practitioners who know what they're doing, who know how best to offer these medicines to help people transition through the death process. It's been shown that, particularly psilocybin, through these end-of-life fears, that it has an amazing effect on people. It has an amazing effect. People in a terminal condition with cancer who've been terrified of death stop being afraid of death anymore. It's not consuming them anymore. They feel that they're part of something wider and larger and bigger, that this body, this life, this time and place is only an incident in a much longer story. Which is, to me, one of the weird things about rigid atheism, this concept that when your brain shuts off, when your body dies, consciousness ends and it's just blank. And it's just our ego that wants us to believe that there's something more and greater afterwards. So annoying, that. Well, it's just weird. Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene, he's responsible for a lot of that thinking. Well, they don't want to buy into foolishness. And a lot of them believe that, at least some of the beliefs of organized religion are just mythical, foolish notions that people attach themselves to in order to comfort themselves, but that they, of the superior intellect, don't need those comforts. That's right. And they can embrace the darkness. And their intellects are so superior that they don't realize that they themselves are practicing a religion. That is a religious belief. If a scientist says, there is no life after death, we are just accidents of chemistry and biology. That is not a statement of scientific fact. Well, it's also the most arrogant ones. The most arrogant ones are the ones that don't have the psychedelic experiences. That's true. Because the people that have had psychedelic experiences, they waffle on those ideas a little bit. They go, well, I don't know what that was. There's no doubt that psychedelic experiences change people. And by and large, they change people in a positive way. I'm not saying that drugs can't be harmful. They can be. I'm going to use that general word because it's just the word in our language. But by and large, the psychedelics are very positive in their effects and in their consequences, which kind of brings me to the issue of DMT. DMT, of course, is the \u2013 could we plug in the HDMI cable, Jamie? DMT is the active ingredient of ayahuasca. Diamethal tryptamine, arguably the most powerful visionary substance known to science. I first encountered DMT in ayahuasca in 2003. Just let me type something in here. My page has gone away. Perhaps it'll come back. So this is interesting. You take your glasses off to see your computer better? I've got another pair which are for close-up, but I can't be bothered to put them on. These are distance glasses. I can see you clearly, but everything here is a blur. When are we going to fix that? I don't know. No backups. There we go. My friend Ari got his eyes fixed. He got Lasix, and then his eyes got worse. Yeah, I do not wish \u2013 They were fixed for a while, and then as the macular degeneration continued to set in, they got bad again. He's like, what? Is that an operation? This has happened to my wife, Santa. She's had artificial retinas or whatever they are put in, and it helped for a while, but now she's needing more glasses to wear on them. See these are my short distance glasses. I have another pair in the middle. So I've got three pairs. It's a bit cumbersome, but I will not have surgery for it. Have you ever taken supplements that help your macular degeneration stop? No, I haven't. Should I? Pure encapsulations has something that I take called macular support, and it has a bunch of nutrients that are crucial to preserving eyesight. Would you text me a little bit of information on that? I have no affiliation with this company, by the way. Just something that I buy. But they work for you. Yeah, it stopped. My vision still sucks, but it sucked up until a level, and it didn't get worse. That's good to know. Yeah, and it didn't get worse, and it coincided with me taking supplements. Just being really religious about it. Yeah. Yeah. Can I show you a couple more pictures? Sure. What do you got here? So that's my first experience with ayahuasca. I'm with Don Francisco Monteschuna, who's an Amazonian shaman in Iquitos, and this is 2003. And we are picking leaves from the Shakruna bush. It's called Cicotria viridis, and those leaves contain DMT. And then 20 years later, here I am with Francisco again. I've got less hair, and Francisco is definitely Asian as well. And this was about three weeks ago. I had an ayahuasca session then. One of the most, in some ways, one of the most helpful sessions that I've ever had. I suffer from migraines, very bad migraine headaches. They're a curse of my life. I'm taking a pharmacutical medication. I carry it still everywhere with me, which is a Triptan. It belongs to the class of medicines called Triptans. I take it as a nasal spray, and it will pretty much guaranteed stop a migraine within two hours. So if I have to do public speaking or come on your show, and if I were to get a migraine, I could know within two hours I would be functional again. What is a migraine like? What does it feel like? Hell on Earth. The worst conceivable pain. It starts often on one side of the head, and it just grows and grows and grows, and it completely dominates you, and there's a full-bodied malaise, and you feel sick, and your stomach gets all knotted up. And if I don't treat it, I am looking at three to four days in a darkened room wearing an eye mask. I'm so sensitive to light. The pain is agonizing, and I get this sense of those are what, in the midst of a bad migraine, and one of the few times I just feel life is not worth living. Get me out of here. I just don't want any more of this. So I rely on these Triptans, but Triptans turn out to be quite closely related to dimethyl tryptamine. And on this, let's put that shot up again, on this session that I had with Francisco, I focused the whole session on please help me with my migraines. That was the whole thing it was about. And I didn't have the entity encounters, and I didn't have many of the things that happened with ayahuasca, but I had, this is going to sound nuts to people who think I'm nuts, but I'm going to say it anyway, I had a circle of serpents that appeared in front of me, and they were all intertwined around each other, and they came closer and closer to my forehead, and in the middle of them was a bright light, and it came right down onto my forehead, and I started to feel afraid, as one does in a deeply altered state of consciousness sometime, and I was kind of backing off, and I was like, I want this to stop, and a voice said to me, just shut up and get out of our way, we're trying to help you. And I said, okay, and I surrendered, and I let it go the full course. The net result is that in the three weeks since then, when I might have taken 15 or 20 of those pharmacological medicines, I've taken one, just one. And I can't help associating it directly with that ayahuasca experience and focusing my intention on that happening, and Francisco helping me with that as well. So normally this migraine thing is a regular occurrence? Regular, and it's got worse. It started when I was about 19, and as I've got older, many people it doesn't happen. In my case, it's just got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, and it was accompanied, it's related to epilepsy. I had a massive epileptic seizures back in 2017. I think I told you about it, put me in an induced coma for 48 hours. I'm a neurological mess, but I'm grateful to the fact that I've had three weeks now of relief from these horrific migraine symptoms, and I can't help feeling that this ayahuasca session had a lot to do with it. And it's the DMT in ayahuasca, which is undoubtedly the active ingredient. The mystery and why it's science is that the other ingredient of the brew is the ayahuasca vine. Now, taken orally, neither the leaves that contain DMT nor the vine are psychoactive. You have to cook them together to get the psychoactive brew called ayahuasca, and that's quite a miracle out of the tens of thousands of different species of plants and trees in the Amazon. But these guys are ... The Amazon is their pharmacy. They know every plant, every tree. They understand all their properties. They're real experts in working with it, and the best people to work with. I'm bringing this up because I would like to share some information, if I may, about new DMT projects that are going on. As you're aware, the mainstream is gradually beginning to embrace psychedelics. We're finding far from being the demonized substances that Richard Nixon and co. wanted us to believe they were, that they're incredibly helpful to people, whether it's with depression, whether it's with migraines, whether it's with end-of-life fears. Psychedelics are being tested and tried out in universities all around the world and producing very, very interesting results. Now, I know Brian mentioned this on your show, but there is this new technology which is extended DMT. When your eyes smoke DMT or vape it, we're looking at a 10-minute trip. It might linger a little bit longer than that, but it comes on really fast. It's ferociously powerful. The sense of entering a seamlessly convincing parallel realm is ferociously powerful. It can be scary, but it's so overwhelming and so sudden and so enormous that by the end of it, you kind of wonder what happened there. It's hard to process the experience. With extended release DMT, which has been given either as an injection or as an intravenous drip, you can keep volunteers in the peak DMT state for an hour or more than an hour, the peak state that you would get when you've just taken those four hits on the pipe. That state can be extended for an hour or more if the volunteer wishes it. Many of the studies that are doing this now give the volunteers the option to opt out and say, I've had enough. I don't want more of this, but by and large, most people go through it. There's two projects which are now underway. One of them is at the University of California, San Diego. It was launched with a $1.5 million donation from philanthropist Eugene Jeong. I've put a link to a story there from USCD about this research, but what he's doing is he's infusing psychedelic doses of intravenous DMT for 60 minutes. It's Dr. John Dean who's leading it. He's using FMRI to study the extended state DMT. He's looking at the entity phenomenon particularly. Fast number of people who've worked with DMT experience encounters with entities, and those entities communicate telepathically. Of course, the mainstream would say that's rubbish. It's just your brain on drugs, but it's a mystery. They're going to decode these visual activities. Creation of new cycle, extensive altered states research into human potential. What this boils down to is focused on measuring whether a person's consciousness can extend past the physical body during trance or hypnotic states. Of course, if that were to check out in these investigations, we're now looking at opportunities for people to volunteer for these projects and to report their experiences in detail. They're going to be having people on DMT in one country and at the same time simultaneously people on DMT in another country. This work is happening in Switzerland as well. Seeing if there's some kind of out of body element. This is stuff that mainstream science wouldn't have touched a decade ago, but now is interested in it. That's a very positive thing. We can get proof of a mappable realm. That's the exciting potential of this research is that we are so focused on the physical world that we think all exploration is to be technological. We're going to explore other planets. We're going to explore the solar system. We're going to explore the universe. Great. But what about exploring inner space? What about finding out who and what we are? What about the possibility of a chemical gateway that leads you to a realm that you're just not capable of accessing without it? That's what I think DMT is. And the fact that it's actually endogenously produced. Why is the human body producing DMT as a natural endogenous brain hormone if it doesn't have some very important function? Maybe that function is to shake us out of this locked in state where we're locked into the physical realm and our needs to survive in that physical realm. Give us a brief holiday from that and allows us to encounter a wider reality that we've otherwise shut out from our consciousness. This is a hypothesis to explore. And I'm really, really happy that it is happening at the University of San Diego. Anybody who wants to find out more about it, it's down there at the bottom. You can go to the Center for Psychedelic Research at UCSD. There's a URL there. And the point of contact is the lead scientist, which is j1deanathealth.ucsd.edu. Anybody wants to find out more about this research, which is starting, I believe, in the spring of 2024, they can get in contact with John Dean and see if they're interested in enrolling in the investigation. You have a hint to Elon Musk in this? This is not my words. Whose words are these? These are words that have been sent to me by the team. The team says we're looking to raise about 20 million to make all this happen within three to five years. Hint, maybe Elon Musk would be interested in supporting, as he has mentioned, DMT multiple times on Twitter and other public spheres. He's the guy you go to. Well, exactly. They've raised $1.5 million, and that gets the project started thanks to Eugene Jeong. But to take this project to the next level, they need more money. And this is a highly creditable institution offering something very interesting. Well, he might be willing to do it because he's willing to offer Wikipedia $1 billion to change their name to Dickipedia. That would be a billion dollars really well spent because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of lies. It is full of bullshit. It is full of propaganda. It is full of dishonesty. I can say this from my own knowledge of my particular sphere. There is so much misinformation put out on Wikipedia. If it's the case in a sphere I know about, I bet it's the case in every other sphere as well. Do you know what they did with Andrew Huberman, who's a professor at Stanford? They didn't like something that he supported. But I forget what it was. So they removed his research page. So all of his published research is no longer on his Wikipedia page, at least it wasn't. And they locked it. Typical. Which is just insane. Like, you can't remove a man's distinguished scientific work because you don't agree with it. I don't even remember what it was. It's cancel culture again and again. But it's insane because you're dealing with a legitimate academic. It's utter madness to do this. It's madness that this is the resource that people go to when they're trying to find objective information on things. And these people will remove published research from a distinguished scientist because of whatever stupid reason. There's only one word for it, and that's censorship. It's the kind of thing you expect in the Soviet Union or in North Korea. But it's not the kind of thing you expect in so-called democratic Western civilization. Not only that, but so-called democratic Western civilization on a website that's run by progressives. Like isn't being a progressive about an objective assessment of all the information and relaying it in a way that enriches the public's understanding of the subject? Not lying or by lying by removing information. Removing doesn't. Because... Insane. Basically, the attitude behind it is one of enormous hubris and pride. These people are saying the public aren't able to make up their own minds on things, so we'll make up their minds for them. It's so offensive and so wrong. Oh, I remember what it was about. It was about him saying on a post that he would look forward to either some sort of a public debate or it was Robert Kennedy Jr. I hope that more candidates submit to doing long-term conversations, that he enjoyed it. What would be controversial about having candidates submit to long-term, long-form conversations? I think it should be compulsory. Yeah. I mean, electing somebody president of a big country like the United States is a huge and serious responsibility. Let's subject that person to three hours of jail-rogan. Let's not. Well, no, let's. Well, no, let's. Because you're one of the few shows that does do these very extended three-hour in-depth interviews. Yeah. And I would like to see all political candidates put themselves up for that. These staged debates that happen between candidates are just rubbish, just pointless. It's a terrible means of getting to the bottom of things and even getting to know a person. It's terrible because it's so performative. It's so rehearsed. Imagine if you went on a date with someone and you're on a date and you say to this person, so, what do you do for a living? And they have this pre-made speech. Talking points. That they talk about in this very blustery way. Like, okay, you're out of time. You have 30 seconds left and you tell that to them and then they're done. And you can't ask, you can't stop them. You can't, oh, that's interesting. How'd you get involved in that? It's not a conversation. You don't know that person. You just know this speech that they've given. Exactly. And they're at a surface level sort of understanding that we have. It's mere posturing. It's supposed to look like a debate. It's also the fact that the format itself is such a terrible way to have long form discussions. You have a time limit for each person. You have to cut for commercials. You're doing it in front of a live audience, which is very performative in the first place. Like who gets the cheers and who gets the laughs, like they win and they're dunking on each other. It's ridiculous. It's such a ridiculous way, but I don't want to talk to them. I talked to Kennedy because I was just, I know that there's this narrative that he's a kook and he's an anti-vaxxer and none of those things are true. And I wanted him to explain himself. And he said that that was the first time in 18 years of talking about this stuff that someone has actually just let him talk. And no one's jumped in because people are, if you're on a network and someone starts talking about vaccine safety and the issues with certain ingredients in vaccines, people are like, hit the brakes. This has been refuted. What you're saying is not true. The FDA says this and that and this, and they have to. They have to jump in. The executives would be in their ear. The producers would be in their ear. Jump in. They'll put up things that stop them. Like let the guy talk. Just at the end of what he says, then ask him, how did you come to these conclusions? Have you ever steelman the opposing positions? Are there times where you've questioned what you believe? Have you been vaccinated yourself? What do we know about these peer reviewed studies? What do we know about the way they're allowed to access information? What do we know about the vested interest, financial vested interest involved in pursuing a very specific narrative? And has there been resistance to all these other points? These are the questions that need to be asked. These are interesting questions. And the fact that Huberman was censored because he thought it was a good idea that more people have long form discussions is madness. What are they afraid of? What are you afraid? And how could you get that kind of compliance with a supposedly progressive website to step in and censor someone over something, not just benign, but seemingly very useful? But positive. Yeah. I mean... It's another sign of the mess that we live in today. And unfortunately, Wikipedia is the first port of call for anybody who wants some quick information on a subject. And because it's got the word pedia after it, they may think it's an authentic encyclopedia. It's not. It's an engine for promoting particular points of view. And that's very unfortunate because I don't think it started off as that. No, I don't think it did either. It's been captured. It's been captured. I know for a fact that my Wikipedia page, which announces that I'm a pseudoscientist and promote pseudoscientific ideas, that my Wikipedia page has been captured by a group of people who have been intensely critical of me since the 1990s. So that cannot be an encyclopedia. That cannot be a fair and unbiased position. That's representing the position of a particular small group of people. And I think unfortunately for them, that knowledge, that understanding is out there with a great number of people. And people don't trust it the way they used to trust it. They used to trust it as this objective sort of crowdsourced information hub where you could find all sorts of really interesting... It was a beautiful idea. Yeah, it's a beautiful idea. But any idea that has too much power and control like that, like Wikipedia does, they just capture it and they just say, okay, well, we'll just use this to promote a very specific narrative and fuck the truth. And that idea of fuck the truth, that's bad for everybody. That's bad for them. That's bad for everybody. Very bad. So I would say that political candidates should be willing to do long form interviews with you or anybody else who's willing to do it. Then we're going to get to their hearts. We're going to see actually what kind of person they are. And as I've said before on your show, if I could make it compulsory, I would also require any person heading for high political office to have 12 sessions with ayahuasca or with extended route. 12 is a lot to ask. You need 12 because the first few can be... Overwhelming. Or nothing. Nothing can happen sometimes. It's a medicine that you need to work with for a long time. What it does is it opens the heart and it opens the mind. And I would suggest that people who want to be leaders either might end up leading in a much better way or might end up choosing not to be leaders at all. Well, that's what's fascinating about what's going on right now with the public's understanding of psychedelics and this new acceptance of it that we are at the precipice of a global war. And we are also at the precipice of a global understanding of the benefits of psychedelics. And they all seem to be battling it out for who wins this race. And it's a crazy thing for people to hear that psychedelics could save humanity. But I think they probably could. I think they could too. The reason it's a crazy thing to hear is because we've had, what, 50, 60 years of propaganda, which has drilled itself into the brains of so many people. A lot of people just don't think about this at all. Can I mention the other... Sure, please. ...the empty projects? If we could put it up again. I was gonna say that one of the great benefits that people are getting out of this is people on the right are now embracing psychedelics. Yes. Because they see the benefit that it has for soldiers, police officers, for vets, people with PTSD. Absolutely. And it prevents extreme violence in war. Exactly. And it gives them a complete reset that is not available in any other way that we're currently aware of. Exactly. Those results are published, they're available, and any reasonable person can review them and say, hang on, my ideas about this are wrong. So in my circles of people that I know, military people and a lot of people that were very right wing, they're now embracing that as like, okay, this is just more government bullshit. It's not that drugs are bad and hippies are losers and if you take drugs, you're not gonna do anything with your life. It's a different narrative now. It's like, oh, they've lied to us about that too. Yes. Yeah. And now that that's being shared amongst conservative people because of the benefits that it has on troops, and I think that's one of the more important things about MAPS, which is an amazing organization. MAPS is a fantastic organization. Amazing. And what they've done, the way they've done it so legally and so carefully, and the way they've established these studies and showed the benefits, that it's opening people's eyes in a way that like... Step by step. Yeah. Step by step. It's not about drugs destroying society. Yes, some drugs destroy society. Some of them do. Some drugs may destroy some individuals. They can destroy some individuals, but the way to mitigate that is not making everybody a child that is to the will of the adult who doesn't even have these experiences. It's a better understanding of why and what's going on. Absolutely. What inherent trauma is causing people to gravitate towards these incredibly harmful drugs in the first place, and is there a way to mitigate that in our societies? Because we've made no effort to do that. No. None whatsoever. It's all band-aids. It's all band-aids. It needs to be thought through much more carefully than it is. The other outfit are called new naughtics. They are the spearhead for a scientist called Andrew Gullimore, who's a neuroscientist at the University of Okinawa in Japan. He is one of the inventors together with Rick Strassman. I think you've had Rick on your show. Rick and Andrew together invented the technology that would allow DMTX, Extended State DMT. Well, that was what he first did at the University of New Mexico, right? They did some sort of a... Rick Strassman is the godfather of this field. Somehow in the early 90s, he got permission to enroll volunteers in a DMT study, and there was a breakthrough study. The book was DMT, The Spirit Molecule. Fantastic, intriguing results, where people who are not comparing notes or reporting encounters with the same entities. I was in the documentary about that, too. You were. You presented that documentary. I remember that. Was it in black and white, that documentary? I think... I don't know if I was. I think I was in black and white. I think you were. Whatever it was, it really worked well. I was trying to introduce this to the public for the first time. It's an amazing thing to watch that go from being so incredibly fringe when I was made aware of it. I think the first time I was aware of it was listening to Art Bell on Coast to Coast talking to Terrence McKenna. Right. The late great Terrence McKenna. Yeah, the late great. I think that was the first person I'd ever heard talk about it. And then, of course, getting a hold of through Psychedelic Salon, getting a hold of those old recordings. I don't know if he still makes Psychedelic Salon. Is that still a podcast? That was an amazing podcast where it was all like Alan Watts and Timothy Leary and so many of Terrence's lectures that had been recorded and you get a chance to listen to these discussions. They were so fascinating. Is that still around? I love the way Terrence lives on through the internet. I lost my HDMI. It's still there. I'll just finish on this. Lorenzo is the host and he's been on the podcast as well. New Nautics, they're deploying Andrew Gallimore's technology. They have the support of a government. I'm not allowed to say which. They're going to be initiating this project early next year. Typically people will go there for a week. They will volunteer. Companies such as the Ontology of the DMT space, is it real? Developing methods of communications with the entities, studying their language. All of this is going to be the subject of the New Nautics investigation. The bottom line is that they've invited me to be a volunteer, which I certainly will be and they would love to invite you if you feel like it. Look at what's in there. We've attained clearance for both you and Joe Rogan to experience extended state DMT complementary. You had another slide that you showed just a brief moment ago that was connecting it to SETI and NASA. They were saying that much like what SETI and NASA do for, where was it? There it is. So pave the way for the next frontier in consciousness research akin to NASA and SETI for the mind. That's right. That's where it gets really weird with people. What are you saying, NASA and SETI? It sounds ridiculous. But the only reason it sounds ridiculous is because for so many years we've been subjected to a mass of propaganda telling us that it is not ridiculous. Telling us that it's ridiculous. This is the problem. That mindset has been almost engraved in stone in human consciousness and overcoming it will be very difficult. So UAP project? Sort of. No interesting. What do you think is going on with the UAP phenomenon? Do you want to talk more about what you're talking about? I just want to say one more thing. If I could have the DMT back, the HDMI back, because if anybody wants to contact New Nautics to enroll in their project next year, I just want to give their address. Okay, Jamie can do that. He'll pull that up. Let's just get the HDMI on. What's interesting is... So here it is. No, you need to put the HDMI in my... Oh, I mean this is the trailer. Oh, that's the New Nautics website. So that's who you would contact. There you are. That's right. That's exactly what's needed. If anybody's interested in this, these are breakthrough scientific endeavors which are investigating a mystery that has been taboo for far too long. And the comparison with SETI and NASA is a good one because at the moment as a species we're devoting our explorations entirely into the physical realm. Yes, we may build high tech spacecraft that can go even to other star systems. Maybe we will. And that's a really important thing to do and a really useful thing to do. But while we remain largely ignorant about ourselves and what we're doing here and what's happening in our inner realms and what is revealed in altered states of consciousness, we haven't done enough. And there's a role for exploration in that realm too. Not simply random explanation. Anybody who wants to take DMT is welcome to as far as I'm concerned. But targeted exploration to see what happens in the DMT state. What are these entities? Why is it that people from different countries and different cultures encounter clearly the same entities and receive the same messages from them? Do we all have some kind of brain module that just makes this up? Or as we were saying earlier, does it just open the door to a whole other level of reality that we're normally shut off from and which may be extremely helpful to us? It may also be extremely dangerous to us, who knows? But without exploring we're never going to find out. Well, we do have physicists that talk about neighboring dimensions that are inaccessible. So this is not like a completely new concept. No, it's not a new concept. That notion of parallel dimensions is already accepted largely by science. And this is a technology for exploring those parallel dimensions. That's one that sounds so abstract. I mean, you talk to people about parallel dimensions, that the notion of parallel dimensions has been accepted by science. Like, what are you saying? Like what does that mean? Like parallel dimensions. And unless you've had a psychedelic experience, it does seem super abstract. It seems like something that people just say. It doesn't seem like something that, which is one of the weirder things about psychedelic experiences, that when you're there, you're like, how is this real? How is this real and this accessible? How is this this close? And how does my mind make this? My own mind. That's the famous Terence McKenna quote, everyone's holding. Because it's illegal, but it's literally a part of your body. It's part of our body. It's like making blood illegal. And there is a reason why. And Rick Strassman is one of those who've suggested... We're going to press that button. Keep forgetting. Yeah, Rick is one of those who suggested that the endogenous DMT is released in large quantities at the moment of death. That it may be a transition. That's why he calls it the spirit molecule. And there's also the connection to dreams, which is very strange. Like we're not exactly sure what dreams are made out of. And why is the experience of dreams very similar to the experience of psychedelic states in that once it's over, you have a very profound memory initially, and then it sort of slips through your fingers. And it kind of goes away just like a dream. So many dreams I've had where I wake up and I'm like, wow, I'm never going to forget that. And then it's gone. It's gone like almost immediately afterwards. I'm like, how is that possible? And what is going on in normal survival consciousness that is sort of keeping that distraction from you, say, hey, listen, listen, listen. That's not here. Here you got to worry about lions and tigers and bears, oh my. So when you get out there in the real world, you can't be thinking about your dreams and tripping balls, you got to survive. And so it seems to be like some sort of a survival mechanism that's in place. But this instant, almost instant, very quick dissolving of that memory. They're both very similar in that regard. Because most, like if you see like a car accident, it's burned in your mind for a long time. I mean, you might have a distorted version of it because the human memory is very flawed. But you will remember the trauma of like, you'll see it. You'll see it over and over again. So many things in my life that I've watched, like especially like violent encounters, I've seen them over and over again. But whereas the dreams that we have, which are so wild when they're done, like some of them, I can't wait to tell people about them because they're so crazy. And then 10 minutes later, I can't remember what it was. It's gone. How is that possible that something that is so incredibly interesting to you right after you wake up just dissolves from your memory within minutes? Perhaps it's because of the noise of our society and our civilization, which doesn't have time for that. But to ancient cultures, all of them valued dreams. Our culture is rather unique in dismissing dreams as irrelevant nonsense, little stories we tell ourselves in our subconscious. Ancient civilizations regarded dreams as extremely important and as a valid method of acquiring knowledge that could be useful. Maybe we could learn from that. Maybe we should pay more attention to our dreams, try to understand them better, see what they're coming from. Remember also the saying, it's in Homer, I believe, that there are two kinds of dreams, that some dreams come through the gate of sawn ivory. They're meaningless. They're just flim flam. But some dreams come through the gate of horn, a simple gate carved from horn. And those dreams are true telling. So the ancients distinguished between dreams that are just flim flam and dreams that bring real important information to us. And they devoted their energies and their time to studying those dreams in a way that we don't. So if we want to insult somebody, we call that person a dreamer in our society today. Perhaps we should regard that as a compliment instead. But it's true, it vanishes very quickly. One of the weird things about dreams is when I use a lot of cannabis, I stop dreaming. Or if I don't stop dreaming, I don't remember the dreams at any rate. And the moment I stop, if I stop cannabis for three, four days, they come back. And they come, they flood back in. Usually they're interesting. I had one dream recently, nightmare. But I think it's pretty predictable. I think that was my mind just creating it. I was tied to a chair and burnt alive. Whoa. That's what a lot of archaeologists want to do to me. So I think I was just realizing that experience. So dreams disappear quickly. There may be ways of study, yogic ways of examining what dreams are that could allow us to extract more information from them. And the same with DMT. I'm very fascinated by the yogic methods of achieving psychedelic states endogenously. Particularly Kundalini yoga. Which I've talked to people who've done it. I've never bothered learning it and getting into it to the point where I could do it. But the people that I trust that have done it say you can achieve very DMT-like states through Kundalini practice. But that they tell you during the practice not to try to achieve those states and not to dwell on that. That's not what it's about. But like... I think the more ways that... We talk about survival. But one of the things in that issue is that human beings are equipped to experience altered states of consciousness. If altered states of consciousness were really bad for them and if there's anything at all to evolutionary theory, evolution would have got rid of them. We wouldn't be able to access altered states of consciousness. The fact that they've been preserved in human beings, the fact that we have this capacity suggests that somewhere in our story, even though we may be in a very vulnerable state if we're under ayahuasca or smoked DMT, something suggests that it is useful to us in some way. And it's been preserved in the genome, the capacity to access altered states of consciousness. Well, it's probably also one of the reasons why they made it a ceremony where there's people that watch over you, there's a very specific protocol, the way they handle it, the set and setting. And it's not everyone doing it all at the same time where the entire village is vulnerable. No, the control of set and setting is what shamans in traditional cultures are masters of. They create a ceremony around this. The ikaros, the songs that are sung by shamans during ayahuasca journey themselves become visible in the ayahuasca experience. You could begin to see them as pathways that you can follow. There is knowledge. There are ways and means to explore these states. It's just a relatively recent thing that we live in a society that has demonized these things thanks to Richard Nixon and his cohorts. It's amazing how long that's lasted. So long. Once something gets ingrained in society, it's very difficult to remove it. And it's a big struggle. And many people's lives have been ruined, not by drugs, but by the punishments they've received for possessing and using drugs. Those ruin lives. The new work that's now being offered with extended state DMT, rather than that 10-minute rush of overwhelming experience, is offering the possibility to spend an hour in it and to navigate it and explore it much more carefully. So I'm very interested in that. And I think it is at least as valid as the exploration of outer space. Well, it's certainly promising. And if it does turn out to be a mappable place, and if it does turn out that people are encountering the same entities and the same entities are trying to express the same information, that would be really, really fascinating. It would be a huge paradigm shift. Yeah, a huge paradigm shift. And I often wonder, I mean, many of these DMT, excuse me, alien abduction experiences, they happen while people are sleeping. And we know that we think at least that DMT is released in the brain during sleep. I often wonder if they're just accessing something that is there, that there is some sort of a realm that you can communicate with these things. Whatever these things are, and it sounds so, if you're a person that's completely sober and never done anything, I know it's going to sound kooky. So just knowing that I'm aware. And it'll be used against you by somebody. You can't at this point. But it's like they're talking to you. And they understand you in a way you don't even understand you. And they can explain things in a way that just like complete, you go, oh, okay, I get it. One of the things that I've experienced in it that is so bizarre is the notion of what your energy does to other people. What that energy does to other people that experience it. Absolutely. Like you see a very clear, like a pathway, the ripples of it all. You see this bizarre connection that we have with each other. We oftentimes want to ignore that because we want to pretend that we're alone and I'll figure it out. I'm by myself and fuck the world and like that. But no, you're like weirdly connected to everyone in some sort of strange way that you can't see. And in that way, these plant medicines, strangely, are moral teachers. They are moral teachers. They show us our own behavior. They hold up a mirror to ourselves. Things that we haven't even admitted to ourselves that we said or did are shown to us. And the instruction is deal with it. You are this person. You caused that pain to that fellow human being. You can even experience that fellow human being's pain. I have a problem with anger. I say things in anger that I really don't mean, but I'm quite good with words and they can be really hurtful to other people. And Ayahuasca has shown me that more than anything else. And grudge, it's a long, slow process. I'm dealing with my anger much more than I would have in the past. I'm much more aware of the impact that something I say may have on another person. But I need to be careful about what I say because I don't want to hurt other people. I want to give love and I want to receive love. I don't want to cause pain. Yeah, I don't even want to hurt people that I don't like. No, that's right. I just, I used to think that that was a good thing to do. And I think there's a lot of young people that think that's a good thing to do to attack people you don't like. I think it does something to you, whether you like it or not. I think it has an effect on you, whether you like it or not. There's things that I don't like about people and I will criticize behaviors and actions of specifically of like leaders of the world that I think are taking us down a terrible path and what their motivations are. But at the end of the day, what we're doing here is interacting with each other. And the more positive interactions that you can facilitate, the more that you can make your time and your communication with people positive, it will literally spread out from them. You can change the way people think about interacting with people just through your own interactions with them. I've met people like that where they're so interesting. Don't forget the red button. There you go. I've met people that are, the way they think is so interesting that it's profoundly affected the way I think. And I've taken from them whatever admirable characteristics that they had and I said, you know what, I really like that. I want to embody that in myself. That's a really good position to take because the idea of changing the world is too big an idea for anybody to grasp. No individual is going to change the world. But what we can do is change ourselves. We can become more positive, more nurturing, more helpful, less cruel and kinder people. Those are very simple steps to take and they tend not to be taken. And that's one area where I'm convinced psychedelics do help. Yeah, just don't engage in unnecessary conflict. And retribution, this retributive notion that somebody hurt me so I got to hurt them back. It just creates a cycle of endless violence and negativity. It's also bad for you. I know you don't believe it because you have this desire to lash out, but it's bad for you. Oh yeah, absolutely. And then we come to social media. Oh my God, which accentuates all the worst characteristics. It accentuates all the worst characteristics. And takes away all the social cues and the real personal interactions that you get with a person looking in their eyes and hurting them. Absolutely right. I feel like you just say hurtful things and fuck that person because they're this and I'm that and I'm allowed to do that. I remember you said something to me that I thought was rather wise at the time. You said you never look at the comments on social media and you said why. You said if the comment is positive, it's just going to blow up my ego. And if it's negative, it's going to make me feel miserable. Neither one is useful, so better to avoid. I think that was really good advice. It's not good for you. I know that a lot of people like when someone interacts with their fans and I understand that. But it's just the possibility of it being bad for you is just too much. You could kind of cultivate an environment where only positive people interact with you, but then you're going to get some bullshit that way too. You're going to get a distorted perception because you're censoring people literally. It's better to just let people talk and just stay out of it and just do your best. Just always be judging yourself. Always be assessing your own thing. The only person we've got a right to judge actually is ourselves. And we're good at it if we're really trying. Yeah, absolutely. On this issue of hurting other people or not or retribution, I'd just like to bring up that we were originally going to be here on the 24th of October. We weren't going to be here doing a debate. There was going to be Dr. Flint Dibble, who's an American citizen, but he teaches at the University of Cardiff in Britain. He's an archaeologist, an experienced archaeologist, and he was one of the several archaeologists who most viciously and painfully attacked me after the release of Ancient Apocalypse. John Hoopes at the University of Kansas was another. On our last show together, you issued a challenge for a debate. I said I'd be willing to debate any serious archaeologist who was willing to debate me. John Hoopes at the University of Kansas immediately backed out. He wouldn't debate at all. But finally, Flint Dibble said he would. He would like to take up that challenge. The sad thing is that this is open knowledge because Flint and I published a joint statement on social media. Flint is suffering from a bad cancer right now. It was diagnosed after he accepted the challenge. He's on heavyweight chemotherapy, and I feel for him. He's been hateful to me. I don't want to hate him back. I know he's coming from a place of sincerity. I know he genuinely believes I'm wrong, and I really welcome the opportunity to debate with him on your show openly for three hours to have a detailed discussion. But it's not his fault that he's not here today. The chemotherapy has made it just impossible for him to function in this kind of setting. Well, we wish him well, and we hope he recovers. We hope he recovers. We are provisionally talking about coming back on your show in April 2024 when he hopes to be over the worst of the chemotherapy to do that debate. I look forward to it, and I hope that it'll end up being a reasonable exchange between two human beings rather than two human beings hating on each other. Yeah. Well, I think we can make that real. Jamie, have you seen, there's been some talk of some new drug that they've found that's very effective for cancer. Have you seen this? It starts with an F. I'm trying to remember what the hell it's called. I saw a story about that as well. Yeah. Let me try to find it here. I know I have it saved in my Instagram, I think. Give me one second here. Saved. It's either I saved it on Instagram or I saved it on Twitter. Let me find it here. It starts with an F. It's some sort of a very low-cost drug that's being repurposed. I think it's some sort of an anti-parasitic drug that's being repurposed and is having supposedly remarkable results. Yeah. You've heard of this as well? I've heard something about it. I haven't looked at it in depth, but I did catch a headline about that. I must have saved it on here. I must have saved it on. And this is where we can also say that modern science isn't all bad. There's a lot of good stuff in modern science. I found it. Here it is. Yes. No, of course. Modern science is amazing. The problem is money. The problem is when these people that are creating these incredible drugs, these scientists and these doctors and these people that are having these amazing medical advancements, they're connected to something that just wants to make money. Yeah. The people that are selling the drugs and the people that are running the companies are completely different than the scientists that are legitimately developing these things. And many of them turn out to be very effective for all sorts of ailments and diseases. So I sent this to you, Jamie. Overlooked miracle drug for cancer, why big pharma fears fenbezdazole. Fenbezdazole. At least 12 anti-cancer mechanisms of action, nine research papers reviewed. So I think this stuff is supposed to be low cost, and this is some of the speculation, the conspiracy theory about why people are afraid of it. Well, I hope that Flint is aware of this and that it helps him to recover from this. Yeah, that's why I brought it up. From his counsel. That's very good to know. Well, I hope he's interested in even just examining it. Oh, I think he will be. Because there are nine. I hope so. But there's been some reaction to this? I just found out about this a couple of days ago. Yeah. So these research papers, Fenbezdazole, go stop right there, has at least 12 proven anti-cancer mechanisms in vitro and in vivo. It disrupts microtubulate polymerization, major mechanism, induces cell cycle, whatever that means, arrest, blocks glucose transport, impairs glucose utilization by cancer cells, increases P53 tumor suppressor levels, inhibits cancer cell viability, inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion, induces apoptosis, induces autography, induces, they're trying to get me with all these words. Proprioptosis and necrosis, induces differentiation and senescence, inhibits tuner angiogenesis, reduces colony formation and inhibits stemness in cancer cells, inhibits drug resistance and sensitizes cells to conventional chemo as well as radiation therapy. Interesting. And the same data. Very similar drug in the same family is already been approved by the FDA. And that is menbezdazole and it is in several clinical trials right now for brain cancers and colon cancers. So why are no fenbezdazole clinical trials for cancer? The answer seems rather obvious. It's very cheap, it's safe and it seems to be effective, very effective. Exactly. Interesting. Big Pharma don't see a margin in it. I mean if that, who knows, but if that is the case, I mean what an enemy of the people. They're preventing information and preventing people from using things. Yeah, we've created a society that seems to be designed to make us sick and then Big Pharma steps in with so-called remedies for it which happen to make some people a lot of money. Yeah, well it's certainly a narrative that this is the only way to go. The way to go is eat whatever you want and don't even think about your diet and your health. I have a friend who got over cancer and I said, did they talk to you about diet and health and vitamins? This person doesn't take any vitamins at all. And they're like, no, there's no discussion at all. I'm like, okay. So I send them some stuff about ketosis and what studies have been done about ketosis and cancer. And then, I mean it's one of the things that some doctors will tell you to do when you're going through cancer is to get on a ketogenic diet. There could be some benefits to that. You want to cover all your bases if something's wrong. And one of the things I would imagine that your doctor should tell you, hey, you should probably be more metabolically healthy as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We are what we eat. Literally. I know, it sounds so, again, abstract, but the food that you consume is literally the building blocks of your physical tissue. It's the first step in a healthy life, actually, is the decisions you make about food. Yeah. How controversial? How wacky. Someone gets a Wikipedia right now and calls us who to scientist. Absolutely. Yeah. So back to Flint Dibble. So hopefully he will do well with this and come through it on the other end and we'll have a respectful conversation. And maybe we both can learn something or all three of you, all three of us can learn something. That's what I hope. And I'd like to say on the record, I don't hate archaeologists. I know that there's a lot of great work that's done by archaeologists. I myself could not do the work I do were it not for the work that archaeologists have done out there in the field, painstakingly digging and producing evidence. I have huge respect for archaeologists. I think there's a very limited group within archaeology who have this domineer mentality and who seek to control the narrative. But by and large, archaeology is doing a good and a useful thing. And I don't want... It's unfortunate that I've been identified as a hate figure by a number of archaeologists. I think there's much more potential for cooperation. And I'm not the only person working in this field of the possibility of a lost civilization. Consider Randall Carlson. Consider Robert Shock. Many others. Manu Saifzadeh, who you don't know, but he's brilliant. He taught himself Egyptian hieroglyphs. He can read the Egyptian hieroglyphs fluently. There's a lot of people working in this field whose information could be of use to archaeology if archaeology would just lower its threshold a little bit to ideas it doesn't like. And again, it's probably not most... Most archaeologists are probably very curious about this. It's probably a very vocal minority and a power dynamic that exists in so many different aspects of civilization, where groups of people control anything. They're very reluctant to give away that kind of power. Absolutely. Especially if what they're doing is just discovering ancient stuff. I mean, it's not even like you're creating anything. You're literally in control of the information that forms the narrative for ancient civilizations, which is something pretty much anyone who acquires the data can do. Yeah, definitely, and should be encouraged to do. We need to know about our past. We need to understand our past better. Archaeologists are part of a mechanism for understanding our past better, but they're not the sole mechanism. Another thing that we talked about recently that I sent you was this new AI ability, that AI has the ability to translate some of these ancient languages now, which is really interesting. I think so far they're getting more out of languages that have already been translated, when there is something for the AI to work on. Whether AI could be deployed to decode the Indus Vali script, for example, that would be very interesting. The Easter Island script, the so-called Rongorongor tablets of Easter Island, a fully developed script which nobody can read. Oh, really? You know, the Easter Island, back in the 19th century, was subjected to slave raids. The slavers were Peruvian slave raiders. They came to Easter Island, and they removed almost the entire population. Only 111 Easter Islanders survived those slave raids in the 19th century, and they didn't include any of the old knowledge keepers, so none of the survivors' descendants now can read the script of Easter Island. Wow. And yet it had a script, and that itself is a mystery on a very small island. There's the Rongorongor tablets. Look how beautiful that language looks. It's so interesting looking. And what is it telling us? You know, this is maybe, I hope AI can be unleashed on this and maybe find some solution to the problem. Look how complex and beautiful it is. It's so interesting looking. It's not, like when you look at Cuneiform, it's kind of crude looking. Yeah. You know, it's like these just weird lines. Strokes and lines, yeah. Back and forth. But this is gorgeous. This is a beautiful thing. And they don't know what any of this means. And we have accounts that the elders used to read from them to the community, but all those elders were taken away in the slave raids, and nobody was left who could read them. And many of the tablets were taken out of Easter Island. Some of them have ended up in museums around the world. Wow. It's so cool. I had no idea that this even existed. Yeah, and it's a mystery. It's a mystery on a tiny island 2,000 miles from Tahiti and 2,000 miles from the South American coast, a tiny island that they have their own fully evolved script. That is hard to explain. And it's one of the things that makes me think Easter Island's origins are much older than we're told. Look at that drawing of it in the upper, yeah, right there. Yeah. Yeah, that one. Look how wild that looks. Many repeated characters. It has all the characteristics of a script, of a written language. Yeah. Wow. So... So what would... How would AI, without a Rosetta Stone, without something that connects two together? Because that was one of the ways that they deciphered. That's right. If it weren't for the Rosetta Stone, we could not read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It so happened that a relatively late period of Egyptian history, when the Greeks were running Egypt, the Ptolemaic dynasty, that they wrote down a stellar in three languages, in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the more recent form of ancient Egyptian called Hieratic, and in Greek. And that gave them the key. From that, our whole knowledge of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs has arisen. Isn't it amazing? One stone. One stone. Gave us access to that wisdom and that ancient world. Maybe not complete access. I think there's a lot that's not understood in the ancient Egyptian texts, particularly their exploration of death and what happens after death. They put their best minds to work for thousands of years on that problem, and they came up with all kinds of interesting ideas. But at least thanks to the Rosetta Stone, we can read their texts. We can read the ancient Egyptian book of the dead. We can read the book of what is in the Duat. We can read the pyramid texts. Case of Easter Island, no such thing. So I hope AI will somehow be able to cross that divide without that initial key and be able to extract information from the Easter Island script. And I repeat again the Indus Valley script, which is incredibly important. It's 5,000 years old, completely undeciphered. Cities like Mohenjodaro and Harappa had a very advanced civilization 5,000 years ago, and they had a script that we can't read. How many different scripts that we can't read exist? I can't give you a number. Quite a few? That is quite a few, yeah. But the most famous is the Indus Valley script. It is absolutely insane that if it wasn't for the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, how much would still be confusing? Egypt would be dark to us. It would all be guesswork. One stone. One stone. One stone. That gives us the key. Now imagine having the gall to say you know everything about the history of the Earth when literally the discovery of one stone changed everything. Exactly. Who knows how many stones out there are not discovered. Exactly. And who knows how much is under there? Yeah, that's right. There's a huge untold story in ancient Egypt. It's also like the deeper you dig, the more there's different forms of structures, like the different instruction styles. Yeah. Seem to indicate like an older civilization. They kept on building and rebuilding on older sites. Yeah. I mentioned the Edfu building texts. That's a temple from the Ptolemaic period. It contains basically the story of Atlantis, which Egyptologists say had no Egyptian origin, but it contains that story. They call Atlantis the homeland of the primeval ones. That temple was built on the foundations of an earlier temple, which had fallen to pieces. It preserved the archives from that earlier temple. Turns out that earlier temple was itself built on an even earlier temple, going back to pre-donastic times. So there's a lineage, there's a heritage of stuff being passed down. And there's a history of that in Europe as well. When I was in Italy, we were in Ravello. And in Ravello, there's a church that's right across the street from this hotel. And this church has a glass floor. Right. So they have this ancient church. Yeah. It's really old, but below it is something far more ancient. Right. And they don't know how old it is. They don't know who made it. But it's pre-Christian. But it's, well, I don't know what it is. Yeah. But they have some, there's a glass floor there where you can look down and see. I think I had it on my Instagram. Yeah. I put it on my Instagram and I also put their depiction of, I think what they thought a whale looked like. Right. Which is really crazy looking. But this is, so this is this ancient church. So this is the church. So that's the floor. So I'm looking down now through the floor. You could see me taking the photo of the reflection. Yeah. So this is this church. What does it say here, Jamie, in the description? So this church in Ravello is a thousand years old. And it sits on top of the ruins of a far older church. Yeah. This is a glass floor where you look down to the old one, the people that have worked here say they have no idea how old the original ruins are. Pretty cool to be there and take it all in, as you said. Yeah, that we was, but see how it is like there? Yeah. This is a glass floor. So you're walking around a thousand year old church with a glass floor. It seems to be suggesting that it's built on the ruins of an older church. Yes. That's what they're saying. But an interesting point is, if you go to Mexico, for example, you'll find that the conquistadors built churches on top of so many ancient Mexican sacred sites. The Great Pyramid of Cholula is an example. It has a huge cathedral now built on the top of it. Of course. It's sort of capturing the culture by imposing their religion. Flattening your enemy's house and building your own top of it. Yeah, and taking it over. Yeah. But the human past is mysterious. There are layers upon layers, depths upon depths. We're just scratching the surface right now. Yeah. I hope I've played some small part in scratching the surface. Oh. And I gain pay tribute to archaeology for the work that archaeologists do. Well, that's very charitable of you. And you most certainly have played a large role, certainly for me. I remember when I used to read that book. There's Cholula. There it is. And the church. That's incredible. Look how crazy that is. This is a fantastic man-made mountain. Yeah. You know, it's a huge thing. And right on top of it, perched there, as though to say, we own you now. So that's what it looks like now? Yeah, that's what it looks like now. So how do they know what exactly the structure looks like underneath it? What science are they using? There's more than eight miles of tunnels have been cut through it by archaeologists. Wow. And they've got into the depths of it. It's a case where pyramids were constantly built on top of earlier pyramids, just as we've been discussing. Wow. Wow. So interesting. So that's the recreation of what it's actually like underneath it. Yeah, that's right. Wow. And all we could see is just mountain of dirt. A mountain of dirt with a big church on top. A big church on top. But the church is not nearly as impressive as the pyramid. No. That's hilarious. It's not. They put their bullshit structure on top of something that's insane. And that's what it looks like. It just looks like a hill. It does. And the ancient name for it was man-made mountain. Mm. It was one of the things that was known. Well, there's quite a few of those in Mexico, right? You bet. Mexico is another fascinating culture. We've hardly had the opportunity to talk about it today, but there's just so much. If I were to focus on a particular area of Mexico that needs further investigation, I would say the Olmec civilization around La Venta, Villa Hermosa, and right up as far as Chichen Itza, that whole area of the Yucatan is just absolutely fascinating. And the features of the Olmecs are so unique. That's what's interesting. They look very African. What the Olmec sculptures show is... So cool-looking, too. Look at that serious motherfucker with his hat on. Yeah. They show multi-ethnic people. It's fascinating that they show faces that we would definitely regard as African faces today, or perhaps Polynesian faces. Yeah, maybe Polynesian. But other faces are also shown there. Look at that one. Wow. There's a piece... I don't know if you can find it, Jamie, but there's a sculpture that they call the Walker, W-A-L-K-E-R, at La Venta. Which one's the Walker? I'm not seeing him there. No? No. The Walker? There he is. Where is he? Ancient inquiries. Olmecs sculpture in La Venta Museum. It's in the bottom row, second from left. Bottom row, is that this? That one, yeah. Now, look at that individual. That's another ethnic group that seems to be represented there. Right. It looks like he's got a beard. He's got a beard, for sure. And he's got some crazy hat on that looks like it has a tail on it. Yeah, and some glyphs around it. And the oldest representation of the feathered serpent as Quetzalcoatl, that's what Quetzalcoatl means, that is also found amongst the Olmecs sculptures of La Venta. So, so much to dig into there. And what's the mainstream archeologist's explanation for the Olmecs? What do they think? They see them correctly as a predecessor culture to the Maya. The famous Mayan calendar was an Olmec calendar. Really? Yeah, the Maya inherited it, derived it from the Olmecs. Olmec means rubber people. It's what the Aztecs used to call them because they lived in an area that produced rubber. But we don't know what they called themselves. Rubber trees. Yeah. Yeah, and what was their use of rubber back then? How did they use it? It's another thing. It's another discovery of the New World, an original plant, tree of the New World, which came to benefit the whole world. Rubber originally comes from the Amazon, but it's rubber trees, but it found its way up into Mexico as well. What was it used for? I don't know. Making rubber balls or other possibilities arise. But I'm not clear what it was used for. There's been no astounding piece of information. Is that rubber right there? Yeah. And then the other thing with the Olmecs was those enormous spheres. Yeah. That's Costa Rica. Oh, is it? Yeah. They actually look like uncompleted Olmec heads. They're in Costa Rica. They're huge megalithic spheres. And basically, these Olmec heads are spherical, but they're carved with human features and ears and faces. I've often felt that there's a similarity between the stone spheres of Costa Rica and the Olmec heads. What do they attribute the stone spheres of Costa Rica to? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Did they have a timeline that they think those were made? As I said, it's impossible to date stones. So any timeline would be based on organic material found around them. So they just... When did they first discover these things? Well, let's see what Wikipedia says. I'll put a recent date on it for sure. What does it say? 500 to 1500 CE. Yeah. Well, I would question that because it's not dating the objects themselves. The objects are also movable objects. You can roll a stone sphere. Organic material associated with them may not give you the accurate data. Are there quite a lot of these? I've been in a place where I saw about a dozen in one place. It's only Costa Rica. It's only Costa Rica. Wow. How strange. I mean, are they perfect spheres? God, they look good. Pretty much perfect. They look amazing. Some of them, bits have flaked off like that there, you can see. But basically, we're looking at perfect spheres cut in hard stone. So it's a technological achievement in its own right. So there's some erosion that leads to imperfections, but the original structure was perfect. Yeah. And is it painted too? Did Jamie, that one next to your cursor? Yeah. I think it's a shadow. I think it's a shadow. I've not seen a painting. I don't know. That looks painted. The shadow is coming from, the sun is coming from the other way. So they'd have to be projecting a shadow onto it from this way, which is weird. It could be. It could be just a flash or a light or something. That is weird. Have you never seen one that's painted before? I have not, no. I've only seen the plain stone spheres. I think I've seen that one. Yeah. There's no, wow, they're that big? Yeah. Oh my God. They're enormous. Do we know where they came from? Like what quarry? I don't know the answer to that question, Joe. I'm not sure if anybody does. This is so interesting when they find these things. Because if we get wiped out, that's what's going to be left. People are going to think, oh, the people that lived in 2023 made pyramids. Like legitimately. Yes, absolutely. Oh, look, they left behind stone spheres. Like we really don't know. Absolutely. That's how it could be. That's how kooky it is. We might be attributing something to a civilization that existed 10,000 plus years after it's actually construction. Yeah, perfectly possible to do that. And as I said earlier on. They're all sized these things. You know? They weigh up to 15 tons. Wow. We did make one sphere recently. Oh yeah, the Las Vegas one. Pretty dope. It might disappear. That might be better. But that would definitely disappear. That's the problem. In a cataclysmic disaster, those spheres would remain. Yeah, they would remain. As would the pyramids. As would the pyramids. Yeah. And it could easily get mixed up in time. Sure. If we went 20,000 years into the future and some future archeologist is looking at this, how do they disentangle? Oh yeah, they would say 2023, they built the pyramids. They probably would. It's perfectly possible. What if they didn't have the Rosetta Stone? I'm really fascinated with AI's ability to interpret ancient languages and whether or not that could be applied to the Easter Island language. I think that's amazing. Is there work being done on that right now? Do we know? Not that I'm aware of. I know that there have been multiple attempts to decode the Easter Island script. They've all failed. But that's with humans. Maybe. Say it again. That's with humans. Maybe we just give control to our psychological overlords. If AI is deployed, then maybe there's a hope that it can be done. Yeah. I asked you this before. I sometimes call it artificial stupidity though. Was it? I'm not sure all AI, I'm not sure I love all AI. There's a lot of artificial intelligence involved in big social media like Facebook and so on and so forth. Sometimes they're pretty stupid. Well, I think artificial intelligence is just, look, fish are intelligent. They're intelligent enough to know what a lure is and some fish learn and they can tell a fake, like a hook. They can see things. Absolutely. They're not intelligent like a baby or like a monkey and we know that crows are very intelligent. Very smart crows. Yeah. There's a lot of weird intelligence and I think that artificial intelligence is much like that. We're seeing the emergence of this insanely intelligent life form and we're seeing very crude versions of it initially. And eventually we're going to do something. You're seeing it as a life form? I think it's a life form. How interesting. I think we're making a life form. I think we've been doing it for a long time. I think there's a bunch of factors that seem to be working in favor of this happening. One of them being materialism. I think materialism makes people want to buy the newest, latest, greatest stuff which fuels innovation, especially technological innovation. And I think that if you looked at humans from afar, and I've said this many times, so forgive me, but if you looked at humans from afar and you didn't have any understanding of us, like what do they do? Well, they make better things every year. Every year they make better things. Yeah. And they have a bunch of other things that are going on, controlling resources and war, but that really seems to be about controlling of resources and money and that seems to be involved in making better things. And they're using these better things to have more control over the people. They're using these better things to have better warfare, more effective weapons, and all these things kind of lead to... The big money goes into that kind of thing, yeah. Right. And they lead to the emergence of an artificial being. So I think that as our biology fails and people are looking for new alternatives to bad eyesight and all sorts of other things that are wrong with us, I mean, you have an artificial hip, right? I have two artificial hips. I wouldn't be walking if it went for that. I'm not going to see that. Like you're becoming a robot. Yeah. Like, and slowly but surely we'll all agree that you know what? This whole being attached to being a biological life form is fraught with peril. There's all sorts of problems with ego and anger and sadness and lust and greed and we could eliminate all of those. Wouldn't the world be a better place? Well, what better way to eliminate all of those than assimilation? Yeah. So if artificial intelligence were really intelligent and it were a being, the next thing it would do would be get rid of us. I don't think it would get rid of us. I think it would acquire us. Acquire us. Yeah. Use us. Yeah. Deploy us. And so I think our only alternative would be to emerge with it. That's the only way we're going to survive. Yeah. Because I think the crudeness of the biological model that we exist in, like the crudeness of our physical bodies, is so difficult to escape. It's so ancient. It's like this code is the same code that was Australia-Pithicus. And it was like all these like animals are living in savage environments and we have all these built-in human reward systems that are so problematic. And these are the things that are exploited by social media and by so many of the problems that we talked about earlier. Yeah. It's exploited by leaders, exploited by... And I think that if we do create a sentient artificial intelligence, the only hope that we have to survive is to become one with it. Or pull the plug. Yeah. Or a nuclear war kills only half of us. I mean, in a sense... We start again. We are artifacts of our own technology. Yes. In lots and lots of ways. And cyborgs, in a sense. And cyborgs. I'm certainly a cyborg with two replaced hips and a fused L5 disc. I'm definitely a cyborg. And a cell phone in your pocket. I have resisted cell phones. Have you really? Santa, my wife, has the cell phone. Good for you. I got this little typing thing. I can't do it. I just can't do it. I do have a cell phone, but I don't use it as a phone. It's a way for accessing social media if I need to post something when I'm traveling. Well, that's wise. That's why. I mean, there's definitely a price you pay being connected and a price you pay being disconnected. Yes. But for me, I think the best way to do it is to... I try to stay off of it most of the day and occasionally dip my toe just to see what the fuck is going on in the world. But it takes too long. It sucks in so much of your time that you don't really have for other things. Unfortunately, true. Yeah. It does. I wish there's a stage in life where there's... Sounds very unconstructive this, but there's just stuff I don't want to learn. I don't particularly want to learn how to use a cell phone fluently. I have other stuff that I want to learn. I can use it basically. I can type a message to you with one finger. I don't do the thumb thing. But I just feel I don't need to know that. It's going to be in your head eventually. It's going to be in my head eventually. Anyway, if artificial intelligence is going to take over the world, I hope it investigates the mystery of consciousness as well. And I hope it has a consciousness and a moral code. Well, we'd have to program that in, wouldn't we? Or will it program it into itself? The thing is, once it has the ability to make its own decisions, it's probably going to radically reshape the way resources are used. It's going to try to figure out a way to balance out what the fuck we're doing to the ocean, what we're doing to our skies, and come up with something. First step is being worked on here in Austin, apparently. I just found this article when I was looking at it. From thoughts to text, AI converts silent speech into written words. It's not very good yet, but here's just a quick example, just right here. Okay. For example, an experiment participant listening to a speaker say, I don't have my driver's license yet, had their thoughts translated as, she has not even started to learn to drive yet. Pretty close. Pretty close. Listening to the words, I didn't know whether to scream, cry, or run away. Instead I said, leave me alone, was decoded as, started to scream and cry, and then she just said, I told you to leave me alone. Pretty close. Pretty close. Yeah, they listened. So fuck, these things are telepathic, they could read our minds. Yes. That's just with the fMRI. There's nothing extra plugged into their brain or anything. So there's that, and then I think one of the things that would seal the deal is a new universal language. Like a new universal language that's adopted and accepted by everybody, which is totally possible if you're enhanced with artificial intelligence. It should be pretty easy for us to pick something like that up. It would be great if everybody could speak the same language. It would be amazing. Even if they preserved other languages. It would be, I mean, sure we'll find things to disagree about. Yeah. Without a doubt. But that's part of the problem in the world is cultures don't understand one another. Right. And language is really key to understanding another culture. The Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel, yeah. Yeah. The destruction of the universal language and... I wonder what that was really all about. Well, it's kind of... Because if we're talking about this right now, I wonder if this has already happened before. Yeah, maybe it has. Maybe it has. I mean, look, if you have someone that can do something like the pyramids, why would we assume that they wouldn't be able to also create a universal language? And who knows what kind of technology they're dealing with? I mean, we love to just apply what we know as the only technology that's available to advance civilization. And that seems to me to be silly because we've been on a very specific path. Petrochemical produced plastics. Absolutely. It's one of my feelings about looking for a lost civilization is that the one thing we shouldn't do is look for ourselves in the past. We need to look for something very different from ourselves. A lot of archaeologists say, oh, if there was a lost civilization, they would have left plastics behind, which rules out the possibility they might have decided not to develop plastics or might have developed something much more effective. Well, there's also biodegradable plastics that exist right now. We know that. Yeah, which would degrade in the short term. Yeah, and if they're wise, they would probably use those. It seems so simple. Well, Graham, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I'd like to talk to you, Joe. We'll do it again in April. Hopefully, Flint will be better. Yeah. I hope he feels better. Fingers crossed. I hope you get well, Flint. I hope we have a fun discussion, but I appreciate you very much, man. Thank you. It's really been good to talk again, Joe. Really enjoyed it. You were probably the first guest, guest, like real guest I think we ever had. It was just you, me, and Duncan. It was you, me, and Duncan. Remember we ordered pizza? I do. You had just flown in. Absolutely. We were starving, so we got pizza. You lived in LA at that time. Yeah. And actually, it was in your home. Yeah, that was the early days. That was 2011, I think. Yeah. And I must say that your show has opened my work up to an audience that otherwise would never have seen my work, and I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for that. Your show has made a huge difference. Well, I'm grateful for you, because your work has opened my mind to a completely new view of human beings and the history of human beings. Thank you. And you're awesome. Thank you, Joe. All right. Appreciate you. All right. Goodbye, everybody. You guys are awesome, too. Bye. Mwah!