[Stephen]: This could be the last time I speak about myself, my work, because there's a chance that I might not make it off the operating table this month. And a journalist who has very bad blood towards me has been trying to publish a story on me for more than 2 years now, and it will come out in the next month or two. And I didn't want that to be the last word on my life.

[Stephen]: What do you want the last word of your life to be?

[Graeme Hancock]: I'm here to communicate about the possibility of a major forgotten episode in Human Story. I'm talking about a lost civilization.

[Stephen]: So, most people think civilization started 6,000 years ago.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yes.

[Stephen]: But you believe there's strong evidence that there could have been a previous civilization?

[Graeme Hancock]: 20,000 years ago. And I'm going to present the evidence for that here, Stephen. And it suggests a golden age where there was no violence, no cruelty, where great healers and sages were at work. They're extremely sophisticated. However, if you follow the myths further, as I've done, you find something odd happens. We find that they stepped away from the original purity and become a culture that begins to impose its power on others around the world. And then sewn into those myths is scientific information which record a gigantic cataclysm all but wiping out the human race.

[Stephen]: If what you're saying is true, what does that mean for our lives? I guess also our future.

[Graeme Hancock]: Well, there's always this feeling in the myth that we brought this upon ourselves. And when I look at our civilization today, I see a civilization that ticks all the mythological boxes for the next lost civilization. And that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. Unless we wake up.

[Stephen]: Most of all, this is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. And some of you have told us according to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of this show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the D of Sio, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show.

[Stephen]: Bram Hancock, I guess the first question I wanted to ask you is what is it you've committed the last more than 30 years of your life to understanding?

[Graeme Hancock]: What it is is a puzzle. I'm puzzled by aspects of the human past. There could be, and I think there's a lot to suggest there was, a major forgotten episode in the human story. That's why I refer to us as a species with amnesia. When I use that phrase, I need to give credit to Emanuel Velikovski who wrote a book called mankind in Amnesia. I think we are a species with amnesia. I think we have forgotten something very important in our own past. And when I turn to the experts, I find much of what they say very interesting and very useful. but some of what they say extremely unsatisfactory and and not responding to the problems that that I have in the past. And that's led me to to take my own approach to the past to look at that and and to offer uh readers because I'm mainly an author occasionally make TV shows to offer them an alternative point of view which is rational and and and solidly based but which is contrary to key aspects of the mainstream narrative. We only have decipherable written scripts from the last 5 and a half thousand years maximum. Before that, we don't have any any writing that we can at any rate read. Go back 10, 12, 15, 20,000 years. All you can base it on from an archaeological point of view is what they can dig out of the ground. And I think what they're missing, the ancients did leave us memories of what they went through. We have myths and traditions and scriptures from all around the world which record a gigantic cataclysm affecting the human race and all but wiping out the human race. Everybody knows the story of the flood of Noah. Of course, the flood of Noah is just an one example of hundreds like that of stories from around the world. Uh archaeologists pour scorn on Plato's story of Atlantis. Uh but Atlantis is another of those stories that remembers a global flood that wiped out a former era of existence, leaving only a few survivors. And the archaeological response to them is there was a local river flood. They exaggerated it. It was a big deal for them. So they said it happened to the whole world. And I'm sick of archaeologists saying that. This is the memory banks of our species. This is the record, the only record we have of a period before 6,000 years ago. And we shouldn't despise it and scorn it as primitive superstition. We should say, what can we find in here that we can coordinate with scientific facts that we're aware of? Let's see if there's something to this rather than just dismissing it. Many of these myths contain imagery and a series of numbers. A very important academic study published in the 1960s a book called Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santilana, professor of the history of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hera Vondes, professor of history of science. This is not me speaking. This is major major historians of science in the 1960s. They found encoded in those myths numbers and imagery that could only relate to one thing and that's an obscure astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. I'm not going to go into the technical details, but to observe it and to record it and to predict it, to predict its effects in the future involves very precise astronomical observations maintained over a very long period of time, hundreds and hundreds of years at least. So here we have myths of a global cataclysm. There is just so much else. There are ancient maps that show the world as it looked during the ice age, again dismissed as just total coincidence and not significant by archaeology. I feel that archaeology has failed miserably in providing a nurturing satisfying answer to the questions we all have.

[Stephen]: So when you say global cataclysm, what does that mean? Means that some something hit the planet there was we were wiped out.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. There there there are a number of options and again I need to stress this because because there's so much propaganda in this business I'll be immediately accused of lunatic fringe. The solid science that's been done on this uh is twofold. One aspect of it, the one that I think I find most persuasive is called the younger drius impact hypothesis. And this is a mainstream hypothesis, but it is severely criticized within academia. The hypothesis is that about 20,000 years ago, a very large comet came in from deep space and went into orbit around the sun. This would be a comet of a diameter of 100 kilometers, maybe 200. Comes in, gets captured by the sun's gravity, goes into an orbit. That orbit crosses the orbit of the Earth. While you're dealing with one large object, the chances of getting hit are extremely low. It would be very bad if you did, but very low. Trouble is, nobody disputes this. Once comets are caught by the gravitational field of a very large planet or of a sun, they start to break up into multiple parts. And this is what happened to the younger dryass comet. Instead of being a single bullet, it became a shotgun blast. It became thousands and thousands of objects of which we've cataloged quite a lot. Numbers of them, comet Enki is the best known bit of that former comet. Many of the academics who look at this think that comet Enki which is about six kilometers in diameter and which does cross the orbit of the earth they think that that was the source comet but whereas the other team are saying no that's a bit of the source comet there were many other bits as well and 12,800 years ago 12,860 approximately the earth went into a storm of these fragments none of them big enough to compare with the object that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago but all over the world. The earth is turning. This stuff comes in. They found it in the west coast of North America. They found it in Belgium. And they found it as far east as Syria. So, it's like the earth turns and this stuff is just coming in. Most of it is blowing up in the air. It isn't even hitting the ground. But an air burst from an object that might be 100 meters in diameter is equivalent to a very substantial nuclear blast. So, their argument is the Earth was hit by a comet storm. And this they then argue, and I think they're right, uh, explains what happened then because 12,800 years ago, we were still in the ice age. Uh, but the earth was coming out of the ice age. In fact, for about a,00 maybe 2,000 years before that, the earth had been getting warmer, getting quite nice. And you would normally expect that to continue. But then suddenly, 12,800 years ago, give or take, 60 years, there's a huge interruption. There's a radical change. The earth instead of warming, it suddenly goes back into a massive deep freeze. And this is the time when all the famous big animals of the ice age, the megapora are wiped out. The the woolly mammoths, the mastadons, the giant sloths, these things like 14 ft tall, you know, they're all they're all wiped out in that window around about 12,800 years ago. And most important of all, there's a very mysterious sea level rise that occurs then. This you would not expect when the earth is entering a cold phase. Normally when earth enters a cold phase, ice accumulates on the existing ice caps. It doesn't melt and go into the sea. So the next thing is how do we explain this sudden rise in sea levels at the beginning of younger drives? It shouldn't have happened. The comet theory explains it perfectly. the the the mass, the impact, the heat, the air bursts, that would have been enough to send the ice sheets into meltdown and to cause this pulse of melt water. Then the freeze sets in, you have about 1,200 years of freezing, desperately cold conditions. And then again, 11,600 years ago, womph, it suddenly warms up. I mean, these are radical climate changes. They're beyond anything that's happening now. And uh I I think explanations are needed for them. And because 12,800 years ago may sound a long time ago, but it's really yesterday in the human story. Uh, so something very big happened to the Earth and happened to our ancestors 12,800 years ago. If it wasn't a comet, another theory that's been put forward is a radical change in solar activity. This might have been involved with it as well. I don't find that as persuasive as the younger dus impact hypothesis. And you know maybe some other explanation will come up but what nobody disputes is that the younger dus was a catastrophe. Uh it was global uh and and it had huge effects.

[Stephen]: You um you chose intentionally to come and have this conversation today. Why today?

[Graeme Hancock]: Well I've been quite unwell really noticeably unwell since uh January February uh this year particularly very very short of breath. It's it's because the one of the failed valves in my my heart is um causing blood to regurgitate inside the heart rather than pumping it through the body. And that means that oxygenated blood is not getting to my lungs. I probably would live another two or three years without the surgery, maybe maybe even five, but the quality of life would be very low. I I can't even walk up three stairs without being being exhausted at the moment. So, I've definitely decided to to have the surgery. Why am I doing this interview now rather than postponing it until after the surgery and I've recovered? Well, there's a tiny chance, absolutely minuscule chance that I might not make it off the operating table.

[Stephen]: this month.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah, this month. And if that were the case, uh this would be the last time I've spoken about myself, my work, my life, challenges I faced, uh in an open forum like this. And and and I I I choose to do that. And I'm going to say specifically why without giving without mentioning names. I choose to do that because a journalist uh who has very bad blood towards me has been trying to publish a story on me for more than two years now. Uh and it will come out in the next in the next month or two. And I didn't want that to be the last word of my life. That's why I'm here. Stephen, what do you want the last word of your life to be? I would I would hope that people will come to understand that I'm not the person that a very small minority of archaeologists have mobilized social media to present me as. I'm not a grifter. I'm not a hoaxer. I'm not a con man. I'm deeply committed to this. I've devoted my life to it for more than for more than 30 years. I'm passionate about it. It matters to me. And I think again I'll be laughed at for saying this, but I feel called to do this. I feel I I feel it's my obligation and my responsibility to do this.

[Stephen]: How is that disputed? Because I I guess I need to understand human history to understand why the the the fundamental belief that you have that there was a civilization that we aren't talking about.

[Graeme Hancock]: I'd like to be clear. It's not a belief. Um this is another is a mistake that my that my critics of often make. They they think that I'm dealing with some sort of belief system or some sort of cult here. No, I'm not. I'm I'm just puzzled. I'm just puzzled by the past and I'm puzzled by the memories that have been passed down to us and I'm puzzled that those memories concur all around the world on a serious cataclysmic event.

[Stephen]: What is it that the your people that aren't puzzled and are certain belief?

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. They think that glacial lakes in North America gradually grew in size and overspilled the ice dams that held them in place and that the water from those lakes, some of it went into the Atlantic Ocean and cut the Gulf Stream. I don't dispute that glacial lakes were involved, but those lakes were filled up at a massive speed. Nobody disputes that the Younger Dryus was a cataclysmic event. It's just the the degree of the cataclysm that's disputed and what caused it that's disputed.

[Stephen]: But everyone agrees that humans are 300 15,000 years.

[Graeme Hancock]: I mean at present when I started on this quest back back in the late 80s early 90s it was felt that anatomically modern human beings had not existed for more than 50,000 years. Very recent really. But this turned out to be complete rubbish because anatomically modern humans are much older than 50,000 years ago. We have 196,000y old anatomically modern human remains from Ethiopia. And then finally 315,000 years ago a recent find in um Gibir Hood in Morocco again anatomically modern humans. So we can say that if we define ourselves by our anatomy, uh, brain size, capacity of the skull, if we define ourselves in those ways, we've been around for at least 315,000 years and probably much longer. That's that's just an accident of discovery. And that's one of the things that puzzles me. If we're anatomically modern, if we've got all the modern kit, if we've got the same brains, we've got the same neurology, everything is there. Why do we wait more than 300,000 years to establish something recognizable as a human civilization? Why do we wait so long? We got all the kit. There's evidence that that our ancestors were aware of agriculture, just chose not to use it much, much much earlier than that. the complex of events that leads to a city-based civilization, which is the kind of civilization we have now all over the world that you can only really trace that back to 6,000 years ago. Yes, you can say that before 6,000 years ago there was buildup to what became the high civilizations. But my question is why not much earlier? Why why did we wait until that moment? And and I don't find a satisfactory answer to that question, except perhaps we didn't wait. Perhaps we're missing part of our story. And when I say a lost civilization, I do not mean a civilization like ours. I do not mean an industrial civilization. I don't mean they had cell phones or flew to the moon or any of that I think they were very different civilization from ours. But they had conquered a number of peaks and one of those peaks was navigation and ocean seafaring. Hence the survival of maps which show the world as it looked during the ice age. And another was astronomy. Uh and another really important breakthrough evidenced by by the ancient maps particularly a category of maps called the portalanos um is accurate relative longitudes. This is the Arantius Phineas map. It shows Antarctica uh right there. Uh and and um this is interesting because this map was drawn in 1531. Uh the problem is that our civilization didn't discover Antarctica until 1820. So its appearance on a map drawn in 1521, particularly when we know that the map was based on older source maps. And the map maker tells us in his own legend that he has uncovered material previously hidden in darkness. When we find that uh we have to begin to wonder what is what is going on here. Had somebody found Antarctica long before long before we did uh and mapped it with extremely accurate relative longitudes. And that's important because our civilization didn't crack the longitude problem until the mid- 18th century. What that meant was that if you're on a vessel sailing west or east, uh you might be 300 miles closer to a coastline than you think you are and suddenly you're on it in the night and you're dead. Once you've got longitude work out, you know exactly where you are. We didn't get that until 1750, 1760 thereabouts with Harrison's chronometer. So finding good longitudes on very ancient maps is another puzzle that I don't think archaeology solved.

[Stephen]: So, you think there could have been a civilization 20,000 years ago which was before this young dryest moment where um I mean I've got this photo here which I'll throw up on the screen. I think you say it's evidence that something took place.

[Graeme Hancock]: It is that's that's the younger dry boundary. Uh and I'm with Alan West who's one of the scientists from the from the comet research group who are working on the younger dry hypothesis. And our hands are on that black stripe running through the middle of the drawer. And that is soot. That is evidence of wildfires burning. Uh it's full of nano diamonds, tiny little diamonds microscopic size which are a classic product of comet impacts. Uh microspherules, some platinum, some iridium. All signatures of a cometry impact. And there it is. It's about 5 in thick. That layer is the younger dus boundary layer. It dates to 12,800 years ago.

[Stephen]: So for anyone that can't see, it's just like a slice of earth. And there's this black line going through through the earth. We're in a draw here where a river has cut a channel and it's exposed the sides of the channel and on the sides of the channel we can see this black stripe running through and that is precisely the younger driest boundary and the current hypothesis is from a lot of archaeologists is there wasn't a human civilization before this point 12,000 years ago but you believe there's strong evidence that there could have been.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yes.

[Stephen]: So civilization then in your definition of the word how do you define that? a group of people gathering and working together.

[Graeme Hancock]: Fundamentally, it involves it involves the willing organization or the unwilling organization of labor. If you look at a site like Gobeci in Turkey, we have it on our timeline here somewhere. It's 11,600 years old. Uh this is really an extraordinary site. It's a it's a very sophisticated site. It's very large. It consists of large T-shaped megaliths that can weigh up to 20 tons. There are precise astronomical alignments in it. Uh this was not done by two or three people working together. This was well that's the gobeci today covered by a a modern canopy to keep uh fair enough to keep the the weather off it because it was previously deliberately buried by its builders. Um but of course there's much more around. Hundreds and hundreds more pillars are still underground. We know they're there because of ground penetrating radar, but they've not been excavated yet. So, so this was a major project and interestingly the people who built Gobeclet at that at the time Gobeclet began there was no agriculture happening there. They were all hunter gatherers. Nevertheless, they did something that archaeologists used to say hunter gatherers couldn't do. They organized themselves. They made a huge project. They implemented it and they delivered it. And Gobecletep is not alone. It's one of dozens of sites like that all over Anatolia in in in Turkey. This was a highly organized, sophisticated huntergatherer civilization that was involved in making this place.

[Stephen]: I'm I'm a little bit confused. So, if the ice age ended 11,700 years ago, and Gbecki is 11,600 years ago, that means there's a 100redyear gap between the end of the ice age and something as sophisticated as Gabbecki.

[Graeme Hancock]: Not exactly. Because because dates in this frame, they're not spot-on accurate dates. Some will say the ice age ended 11,600. Some will say it ended 11,700 years ago. But the fact is that in this window, the world was warming up again. It was getting better. And that's when this project was was created. And the mystery is mystery for for archaeologists anyway is that it was hunter gatherers. And archaeologists are now having to come to terms with that. You see the idea was you had to have an agricultural community first in order to create projects like this because that allows people to become specialists. What if you generate a food surplus that you can rely on then you can take people with certain skills and say focus on that become an astronomer become an architect become an engineer we'll support you in doing that. That was the idea and that was why it was felt that something like Gobeclet couldn't be built until about 6,000 years ago when there was widespread agriculture. But that turned out not to be true. Uh it was built by hunter gatherers, but within a thousand years of it being built, agriculture becomes present in that whole area.

[Stephen]: H origins of agriculture are definitely earlier than we've than we've been taught.

[Graeme Hancock]: So it's funny because I don't know a lot about the ice age, but humans survived the ice age.

[Graeme Hancock]: Oh god, yes, we we we did. It's just it's just um where do you want to be during an ice age? That's the question.

[Stephen]: What are my options?

[Graeme Hancock]: If you were a rational being, which most human beings are, you would immediately exclude Northern Europe. Absolutely no point in being in that frozen, miserable wilderness. You'd immediately exclude the northern part of North America, too. No point in being there. It's just horrible at that time. Siberia, pretty rough. No, you'd look for the tropics. You'd go you'd go down close to the equator. you'd go to the places that weren't affected by the ice age, that were actually the best real estate on Earth. That's where you'd go. That's why uh if we are looking for a missing episode in the human story, we're wasting our time looking for it in Northern Europe or North America. Uh we should be looking for it in Mexico. We should be looking for it in India. We should be looking for it in Indonesia. we should be looking for it uh around Papu Nu Guinea. All of these areas that were that were really great places to live during the ice age. That's that's the kind of place that the sort of civilization I'm talking about could have thrived.

[Stephen]: What is the difference? You know, cuz on here it says the earliest known humans were 300,000 odd years ago. What is the difference between these humans 300,000 years ago and the civilization you're describing 20,000 years ago that you believe existed? Apart from what is perhaps wrongly described as a slight refinement in human features, natural selection operating on what humans perceive as beauty, I don't know. But otherwise, the same.

[Graeme Hancock]: the same. Yeah. Yeah. And again, that's not that not disputed. Nobody's saying that Jebel Hood human beings were somehow different from us. They're anatomically modern humans.

[Stephen]: But how did they live um versus your definition of ai civilization?

[Graeme Hancock]: They lived a simple hunter gatherer life.

[Stephen]: Okay. in small groups.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. But somehow around 11,600 years ago, people started accumulating monuments that can only be made with large groups and organized organized labor. You've got to you you have to have a system. You have to can't build something like Gobeci without planning out in advance. You got to draw it out somehow. There has to be a plan. It's not something you just wing. Uh so so there has to there's a missing background to all of that which bothers me. And again, so most people think civilization started what 6,000 years ago.

[Stephen]: Yes. That that would be when civilizations become archaeologically visible. So you have uh ancient Sumemer, Mesopotamia, uh which roughly 3,500 I'm going to use BC because everybody's familiar with that. Roughly 3,500 BC, which is 5,500 years ago approximately. We start seeing cities being built. We start seeing the beginnings of writing taking place around about the same time. The same thing is happening in Egypt. Maybe a couple of hundred years later, but the new work that's being done in Egypt is pushing Egypt much closer to to Sumer narrowing that that window. Effectively, you can say that these two civilizations become archaeologically visible at the same time. And uh they're not alone because on the other side of the world in Peru uh there's a civilization now recognized called the Karal Supoupe civilization which built pyramids uh which also goes back 5,500 years. Uh and and this is one of the mysteries I'm I'm looking at now is is why we have these apparently coincidental emergence of high civilizations in the same window uh all around the world. Indis Valley civilization roughly the same 5,000 years old. Yeah. We're looking at Karal here I think. Yeah. Yeah. These classic these the feature is these circular plazas in front of them and then the pyramid with a and and uh you know these were not and not expected in Peru. When archaeologists think of Peru they tend to think of Machu Picchu the Inca civilization. That's what gets all the coverage. And that's 600 years ago. That's 600 years ago. yesterday. Whereas these Kal Supoupe pyramids, Karal, Asparro, Bandura, Pineo, these ones are much older, thousands of years older. They're extremely sophisticated. They built with an earthquake proof technology. They instead of using blocks, they put small stones in in textile bags and those allow a certain amount of shifting so the thing doesn't collapse in an earthquake. And this is 5,500 years old getting on. So again, not an agricultural civilization at the at that time. They're a huntergatherer civilization. So So archaeologists are having to confront a reversal of their model at the moment. And I think there's room in that reversal of the model for a forgotten episode in the human story.

[Stephen]: Tell me about this forgotten episode in the human story.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah, it's uh it's remembered it's remembered all around the world as a golden age where there was no violence, no cruelty. Um where great healers and sages were at work. where powers that are scorned in our society today such as telepathy and telekinesis which are regarded as completely non-existent by our scientists uh were regarded as a matter of fact of life in in in this ancient world. That's uh a civilization that emerged out of shamanism uh and made something good. But then if you follow the myths further as I've done, you find something odd happens, you find that they've stepped away from the original purity. That they've become a culture that begins to impose its power on others around the world. And that's always given as the reason for the cataclysm in the myths that that we angered the gods. It might have been with our noise. It might have been with our irreverence. We angered the gods and they sent a flood. They weren't happy with their creation. They wanted to start again, wipe the slate clean. And so there's this there's always this feeling in the myths and it's and I can't explain it. I don't know what what it comes from, but it's always there is that in some way we ourselves brought this upon ourselves. Is this those people not understanding the forces of mother nature and trying to sort of justify it as or perhaps a deeper understanding of the forces of mother nature? Maybe perhaps the way that human beings are operating in the world today um should be included amongst the forces of nature. We we are a geological force. Uh and worse than that, we're a psychic force which is full of anger and hatred and suspicion and and and mutual destruction. That's not going to be good for nature. That that's that's going to be disturbing. We're an integrated system in my view. We we're not separate. Human beings are part of all of this and what we do affects all of that. And that's what the ancient myths seem to testify to. So, if I may finish on that, when I look at our civilization today, I I don't want to go off on a rant, but when I look at our civilization today, I see a civilization that ticks all the mythological boxes. every single one for the next lost civilization. And I envision a situation 10 or 15,000 years from now when we will be a myth, a fantasy that our our ancestors actually could speak to one another on opposite sides of the planet, that our ancestors they could fly to the moon, uh you know, they could go to the depths of the ocean. The archaeologists of that time will say complete fantasy, just made up, never happened, but it did. We're that lost civilization and we don't need a comet and we don't need solar activity because if we're so psychically messed up as a species, we'll probably end up doing it to ourselves. That's what nuclear weapons are about. mass species suicide and the mental processes that drive that very dangerous very effective of the world we live in. Hatred is a psychic force and uh the way it's being generated around the world at the moment and mobilized and focused is um it's got to be bad for all of us especially when we have such powers to self-destruct. It's terrible. This This is what drives me nuts is is looking at the low consciousness level of the so-called leaders on this planet. When I look around the whole bunch of them, I just see very low consciousness individuals who define everything in material terms. uh who who are who are who are focused on this also gets me into trouble but I I think nationalism is something that humanity needs to grow out of we need to grow out of nationalism it's just an extension of tribalism we need to grow out of it soon and let me be clear I am not talking about world government I don't want anything like I don't want any government I'm an anarchist basically and that's what anarchy means it means without government I don't not any government at all. But we have to get past this notion that by accident I was born with this particular skin. You know, the notion is that this these accidents of birth define us. That we must somehow massively respect and love people who look like us and and and kind of hate and fear people who don't look like us. We have to get past that. We have to get past that as a species. It's really important. All human beings everywhere all the same fundamentally. Of course, we're vastly diverse. We have we have incredible different gifts. I value and appreciate the differences in different cultures all around the world. This is wonderful. But it doesn't have to come with and we are better than you. Uh and we're going to kill you because you don't share our ideas. This is insane. It's crazy. We're not a mature species. We're we're a childish species. And leading our species are leaders who have the mentality of um deranged teenagers.

[Stephen]: We elected them.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah, we did. Very unfortunately, which shows how easy it is to manipulate uh the narrative in the world today. Today, who wins in elections isn't the best person, isn't the good person, isn't the person who's going to do good, it's the best communicator who wins. So this um ancient civilization that we could have theoretically forgotten, you were somewhat implying that maybe they were right that their own actions caused the great flood as they say they they talk about in mythology. I floated that notion. Yeah. Yeah. They might they might have been, but it's enough to say that that's what they believed because that's what all the myths say. The Noah story is prefigured in ancient Sumer um with um an almost identical flood myth. The gods are angry. A great flood is going to be sent. The intention is to wipe out humanity. But this this god who's called Enki says to Atraasis, "I'm going to save you. Build a boat. Build it now. A big one. Put into it the seeds of all things that you will need. Bring each animal of every kind into your boat." This is this is a kind of survival arc which is exactly the same as Noah. Noah's arc is just copied on that. It's just borrowed from that. And to people that say, "Well, these are just stories. These are fictions that someone wrote and then they pass them down and there's no truth in these things at all." They're welcome to say that. Uh I I I just happen to think they're not. And and my job has been to make that case. I do not claim that I have proved there was a lost civilization. Any archaeologist who says Hanok claims he's proved that is lying. I don't claim that. I claim I'm puzzled and mystified. And I'm going to I'm going to complete that journey as long as I can. I'm going to carry on investigating and looking into all aspects of this because that's what I'm here to do.

[Stephen]: And that lost civilization, you said they were seabbearing potentially.

[Graeme Hancock]: Seafaring. Yeah. Yeah.

[Stephen]: Which means they had boats.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. Yeah. So we know, for example, that anatomically modern uh human beings reached Australia 60,000 years ago. That those involve significant sea journeys. They reached Cyprus in the Mediterranean 14,000 years ago. Again, they involve sea journeys, not engine boats, not metal boats. You can do it on quite simple craft. Look at look at the Polynesians. Look at the vast distances that they explored on outrigger canoes. Uh so yeah, boats, but not our kind of boats.

[Stephen]: H I just don't understand how if they're traveling the seas and boats, how they're they aren't classified as a civilization. Well, because according to the mainstream model which I am trying to provide an alternative to, they never existed. There was no such people. They never did these things. The maps are just coincidences, irrelevance, just odd. They put Antarctica, they put a a land mass in Antarctica because they felt it would balance the world. That's the theory that's given. And it's just to me it's not it's not satisfactory. Doesn't it just doesn't add up. These things need to be explained. And it's why it's why in every society which wishes to make progress, uh, mavericks, people who go against the grain, no matter how much they have to take, are needed. They're needed in our society to provide a balance to this overwhelming mass that science now occupies. Science has now come to occupy the space that religion occupied in many people's minds. And again, I need to emphasize I'm not against science. Science. Science is about to save my life. I have major heart surgery coming up in two weeks time. I'm not against it at all, but I think it should be one weapon in our armory, not the only weapon.

[Stephen]: One of the um things I was super curious about, cuz I was actually there last last week, is this place, Giza. Pyramids of Giza.

[Graeme Hancock]: The great pyramid of Giza. Here we look at it. Attributed to the pharaoh Kufu, who was a pharaoh of the fourth dynasty.

[Stephen]: What is the mystery here? So again, pyramids are this big stack of like concrete blocks in Egypt. What is the Why is it so mysterious?

[Graeme Hancock]: Well, first of all, they're not concrete. They're they're human limestone um and granite. Uh first of all, it's mysterious for the sheer size of it. Look. So you got roughly 750 ft along each side. Okay? And they vary in length by only fractions of an inch. they've got it just about spot-on exact on the side length. And you want that in a pyramid because if you get it wrong, you're going to end up with a corkcrew rather than a pyramid. If you get it wrong at the bottom, those errors are going to magnify and they're going to get worse and worse and it's not going to be a pyramid at the end of the day. Secondly, weight calculated at about 6 million tons, more than 2 million individual blocks of stone. I've climbed the pyramid five times. Once I climbed it, when there was an event taking place on the Giza Plateau, picnics basically, and and a lot of Kyne just decided to climb the pyramid. As I say, I've climbed it four other times without other people there, but this time there were hundreds of people on the pyramid. That's when I realized how difficult this thing is to make because the biggest danger was the other people. Once you're up two or three courses, you fall, you're dead. It's uh it's a 52° slope. there's no way you're going to stop. You're going to come down and still every year people die on the Great Pyramid. That's why they've made it illegal to climb it now. So, there's that. Then there's the almost perfect alignment of the Great Pyramid to true north. Not to compass North, which is about 10 or 11 degrees off true north, but to astronomical north, real north. The Great Pyramid is aligned within 3 60ths of a single degree. I put it that way because degrees are divided into 60 minutes. So, 3 minutes of arc. The Great Pyramid is aligned to that level of precision, 360ths of a single degree to true north. And they've done that on a 6 million ton monument which is 481 ft high if you take account of its original height which has a 52° slope which is filled with internal corridors and spaces, Grand Gallery, the ascending, the descending corridors. All of this is extremely difficult to do. It is it's not impossible to do because we see it there. Uh, could our civilization do it? Yeah, I think we could. Uh, but would we do it? No, I don't think we would. Uh, the motive wouldn't be there. People say, "What the why? I mean, why do you want to align it perfectly to true north? It's enough to ask me to build a 6 million ton monument, but you want it aligned to true north as well. Come on. I mean, that's a really difficult specification. We'd find that hard." um a kind of artistry was put to work on the Great Pyramid as well as skill. Let's get rid of any notion that slaves were involved. They were not there. There wasn't slavery in the Old Kingdom anyway, but this is a work of love from the first to the last stone. It's a work done with great skill and care. It's a beautiful and extraordinary thing both inside and out. It sits almost exactly on latitude 30 which is 1/ird of the way between the north pole and the equator. And uh it incorporates the dimensions of the earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200 in its own dimensions. So if you take the height of the great pyramid and multiply it by 43,200. I'll explain why that number matters. Multiply it by that number, you get the polar radius of the earth. Measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid. multiply it by the same factor, 43,200, and you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth. Archaeologists know this. They say it's a coincidence, total coincidence, just by chance. However, I I could agree with them actually if the scale was not 1 to 43,200. But the fact that it's 1 to 43,200 changes everything because that belongs to a sequence of numbers that is found in ancient mythology all around the world. And those numbers are all multiples of the number 72. And I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion the book by the great historian of science Giorgio de Santiliano professor of the history of science at MIT. He was the first to identify that these numbers and the imagery that go with them derive from a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. I better explain that a little bit. The procession of the equinoxes. Everybody's heard the song We live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. I'm sure you've heard that.

[Stephen]: Uh no comment.

[Graeme Hancock]: We live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. That's astrology at the moment. And for the last 2,000 years on the spring equinox, the sun has risen against the background of the constellation of Pisces. That's the age of Pisces. We live in the age of Pisces. It's not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. The next constellation on the zodiac when you go backwards around it is Aquarius. And the procession is actually caused by a wobble on the axis of the Earth. I'm going to pretend that this is the Earth. And instead of just doing this, while it's doing that, it's also doing that. It's wobbling. And that affects the rising time and season at which particular stars rise. It affects two things noticeably. One thing it affects is the pole star. At the moment, the pole star is Polaris. The pole star, this is astron astronomical north. It's the star towards which the extended north pole pole of the earth points most directly. At present, it's Polaris. It hasn't always been Polaris. 4,000 years ago, it was Thuban in the constellation of Draco. That's because the Earth's axis is doing this. At the horizon, it does the same thing with the zodiacal constellations. We shift gradually through each constellation lasts about 2,000 years in each constellation. The great year where we come back to square one is just under 26,000 years. 25,920 years is the convention that's applied in ancient mythology. So, the fact that one of those numbers is the scale used to encode the dimensions of the earth in the Great Pyramid cannot be accidental in my view. It's a deliberate choice. If it was 1 to 57,000, I wouldn't pay attention to it. If it was 1 to 21,000, I wouldn't pay attention to it. But 1 to 43,200, that's the number of syllables in the Rigveda, for example. You find this all over the world, everywhere.

[Stephen]: So, what does that imply or suggest? Uh what it suggests is that incorporated into the building of the great pyramid was knowledge that was not supposed to have existed 4 and a half thousand years ago. In fact, knowledge that was not supposed to have existed until 2,000 years ago. Hypocus of Alexandria is the Greek who was supposed to have discovered procession. Uh but the incorporation of procession in the structure of the Great Pyramid says to me that that knowledge is much older. It was already old then. I really want to make sure I'm clear on this procession thing because I'm not not super clear. Yeah. Um, what does it what does it mean procession? It means that there's a certain star pattern that we see once every 20,000 years.

[Graeme Hancock]: It it it precesses. It goes backwards. The direction through the through the zodiac is is forwards in the normal year, but in the long term year because of the wobble, the sun rise against the background of the spring equinox. The sun rises perfectly due east. It always does. It also rises perfectly due east on the autumn equinox. On the summer solstice, the sun rises in the northern hemisphere north of east and south of east on the on the winter solstice. The key moment for the ancients was the equinox. It was considered to define the character of the year. And what defined it was the constellation that housed the sun that was the house of the sun.

[Stephen]: Okay. So the star pattern.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. The a zodiacal constellation. These the constellations of the zodiac lie along what is called the ecliptic, the path of the sun. The earth, the moon, we're all on the ecliptic within a few degrees above or below it. And and therefore, these are constellations that we can see the sun against the background of. Constellation like Orion, you'll never see the sun against the background of it. You're only going to see it against the background of the zodiacal constellations that lie on the so-called path of the sun. And those are the 12 familiar constellations of the zodiac. And as I say, we're living in the age of Pisces right now. And uh according to ancient astrology, we're going to be making the transition into Aquarius within about the next 150 years. The sun will have left Pisces and will be rising in Aquarius. So actually, the song is true. We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. The only question is whether that means anything or not. The ancients thought it did. Uh we think it doesn't. Uh, I'm not sure who's right.

[Stephen]: So, I'm going to repeat this back to you to check if I'm I've got it correctly, but I suspect I might not have. Within the design of the pyramids, there was a number which you said was 43,000.

[Graeme Hancock]: It's a scale.

[Stephen]: It's a scale.

[Graeme Hancock]: It's a scale that's used for the height and the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid. Base perimeter, measure, four sides, add it together. Height, the actual height of the Great Pyramid. It's true original height. It lost about 30 feet in an earthquake in 131. But you can calculate the true original height from the angle of the of the sides. Um and when you take that height and multiply it by 43,200 you get the polar radius of the earth. You get the radius of the earth. That's from the center of the earth to the edge of the earth. It's not the diameter of the earth. The diameter is twice the radius. It's the it's the polar radius. Okay. A key dimension of the earth. measure the sides and you get on the same scale 1 to 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth, what the Earth measures at its equator, its largest its largest measure. Um, and and that uh is either a coincidence or it's deliberate. And because of the number chosen and because that number is all over ancient mythology, I think it's deliberate.

[Stephen]: That means that they must have known the circumference of the Earth.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. It means they they knew the circumference of the earth and it means they chose a place to put the great pyramid which also was relevant. Uh this isn't latitude 23 or latitude 37. This is just a fraction off latitude 30° north. So therefore 1/3 of the way between the equator and the north pole. It's a it's a re it's a significant relevant. What it's telling us is this monument speaks to the earth. This monument is locked into the true north of this planet. This monument gives you the dimensions of this planet. This monument is speaking to this planet.

[Stephen]: How could they possibly know the circumference of the Earth 4,500 years ago?

[Graeme Hancock]: Because they're a lost civilization because the the knowledge comes down from a former time. I don't think the Egyptians knew it. I think it came down I think it was inherited knowledge from what I'm here to advocate for and to speak for the possibility of a major forgotten episode in the human story which could be 20,000 years ago and they've passed it down in in myths and stories.

[Stephen]: Yes, passed it down but not only in myths and stories. Um, this is something else that I will I'll just hint at here that I intend to get into in the new book is that there appear to have been organizations in each of these civilizations. In Egypt, they were called the followers of Horus. In Sumer, they were called the Akcaloo. They served as advisers to kings. They were called sages. There's a reference to them. Many cultures refer to them as the seven sages. They provided advice to kings in the historical period. And I'm wondering whether we're looking at some kind of longived organization here which is carrying down information looking for the right time to switch the engine of civilization back on again. I know it's sounds extreme but uh that's what I do. I explore I explore extreme ideas and see whether and see whether they fit or not. And I'm beginning to find this idea does fit it. It fit it fits with a whole range of information which will be in the next book.

[Stephen]: A sage that reports to the king. And it not only reports to the king but advises the king on what? On everything on what to do. Oh okay. Yeah. The abcalu in the ancient traditions of Sumer they existed in the pre-deluvian world. They were there in the world before the flood. Then there and and they taught mankind knowledge then. But the flood came, the cataclysm came, they were wiped out. But some of the abcalu survived and they appear after the flood as advisers to the earliest historical kings of Sumer. And I'm just wondering whether you know there are there are religions in the world which have maintained traditions and maintained offices, priesthoods for example for thousands of years. I don't see why the same shouldn't be true here. Why there shouldn't have been some driving motive at the end of the ice age to preserve in a way what they knew and to find mechanisms to pass it down. One mechanism is to embed it in wonderful stories that will go on being told. And another mechanism is to set up some kind of secret society which is operating behind the scenes to guide and steer society. I'm not going to present the evidence for that here, but it's an avenue I'm pursuing. If I if I don't find it a satisfactory avenue, I'll abandon it. But at the moment, it's looking very interesting.

[Stephen]: Then where did all this information go? You know, because if the people who built the pyramids of Giza had this information, where did the sages go and with their information?

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah, it's very it's very odd actually what what happens after Giza is fascinating. Um because once you once you leave the fourth dynasty period, get into the fifth and sixth dynasties, pyramid building collapses. The stuff they're making in the fifth dynasty, like the pyramid of Unas, fifth dynasty pyramid in Sakara. Inside it's stunningly beautiful. Beautiful tomb chamber, stars on the ceiling, incredible hieroglyphs on the side. It's magical. But outside it's just a pile of dust. It's a mess. It doesn't even you could hardly recognize it as a pyramid. And it's true of all those. So this is odd in itself. Normally when human cultures create something they continue to work on it and it tends to get better and better not worse and worse. So it's odd what happens to the pyramids that they get worse and worse in Egypt. It's like job done that move on and that's there and that's going to speak to human beings not just for a generation, not just for a hundred years. It's going to be there speaking to us for thousands of years. It's going to be sitting there on the Giza plateau like an enormous question mark calling towards it those who don't see it just as a heap of stones but actually see it as something wonderful and magnificent and mysterious calling them to and saying learn about me figure me out and in the process of learning about me you're going to learn so much else well in learning about the great pyramid I find that it is encoded with astronomical information that should not be there if the current model of the history of science is correct. I think the current model of the history of science is wrong. I think this information was known much earlier and it's encoded in the great pyramid. Once I know that, then I have to start thinking what else does that mean? And what else it means to me is a big forgotten episode in our story again. Why? Because they had intelligence that they're not credited with having at that time. Yes. Because it's there. Because there should not be a monument of this scale which incorporates into it information that was not supposed to be available to human beings for another 2 and a half thousand years.

[Stephen]: So they must have got it from somewhere.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yes, they must have got it from somewhere. And and uh the fact that it's there is is just a fact. All that's left for us to say is either it's a coincidence, complete coincidence, or it's the result of a deliberate decision. And if it's the result of a deliberate decision, that weighs much more towards a deliberate decision because of the scale chosen because the scale is part of a system that is found all over the ancient world. It's not a random number. It's a very specific number. uh and it's a number that is derived from a motion of the earth itself from the precession of the earth's axis. It is derived from that. So I'm situated at a significant latitude. I'm oriented to true north and I incorporate the measurements of your planet on a scale derived from your planet itself. That's what the Great Pyramid is saying to us. And it's saying figure that out.

[Stephen]: Do you think there's something underneath it?

[Graeme Hancock]: Oh, there's definitely something underneath it. Because we think of it as a sort of like building with the with tunnels inside it. But yeah, when you go into the great pyramid now, you go in through what is what is called the robber's tunnel or Mammoon's hole. The Khalifa Mammoon had a notion that there would be a entrance to the Great Pyramid in its northern face. Other pyramids had been found with entrances in their northern face, but at that time the Great Pyramid was completely covered with perfectly smooth limestone facing stones and nobody could see the entrance. They came off later in that earthquake in 13001, but when he broke in in the 9th century, they didn't know where the door was. Apparently, there was a place you could almost literally press a switch and open that door, but they couldn't find it. So, they broke in with sledgehammers and chisels and they smashed their way into the Great Pyramid. And then at a certain moment when they're about 60 or 70 ft into the Great Pyramid, they hear something dropping in a hollow space. a big something has fallen in a hollow space. They head towards that sound and then they enter the original corridor system of the Great Pyramid. And that's the way we all go in now. We go in through that robber's tunnel and then we go up the Grand Gallery, but we can also go down. We can go down to the subterranean chamber, which is 100 ft vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid, deep in the bedrock. I actually think that was the original sacred site on that monument is that subterranean chamber. I don't advise anybody with claustrophobia to go down there. You're very conscious that you got a 6 million ton monument sitting right above you and it place that has earthquakes. Um it can be quite oppressive, but that's just a hint of what's under the Giza plateau. That's just that's an accessible bit. Uh but it's it's it's already obvious that there that there is so much more. Some of it's being picked up with ground penetrating radar. And I'll take this opportunity to say that the hysterical reaction of mainstream scientists to the announcement by Filippo Beyond uh what is he saying? He's saying that there are enormous structures under the second pyramid that not the great pyramid under the pyramid attributed to Kafrey Kufu's successor. the the structures that go hundreds of feet deep under there, structures that involve spiral kind of stairways. The reaction has been overwhelmingly dismissing this. Archaeologists have not they won't look further. They say it's impossible and they won't look at it. And I think that's shameful for people who imagine they're scientists. They should be looking further. I'd like to see the technology trial in Turkey. There are underground cities in Turkey, Kaimaki, for example. we know every room in those underground cities. Run this technology on them. If they accurately reproduce what we already know is there, then we can be pretty sure they're accurately reproducing what's under the Giza pyramids. We need to do a lot more work before dismissing this. So, I'm I remain open to the notion that a huge underworld awaits discovery under Giza. And the ancient Egyptians themselves felt that way. They felt that Giza, the ancient name for it was Rosttow. It was an entrance to the underworld. They saw it as an entrance to the afterlife realm. It makes sense that there would be much much underground structures there.

[Stephen]: And you've been alone in the pyramids.

[Graeme Hancock]: Being with large groups in the pyramid is difficult in the sense that the pyramid to me feels like a personality. When I'm in there with a large group, I I feel the pyramid withdrawing. It it it's like it doesn't want to speak to you anymore. It's the place becomes a dead space. But but if you can be in there with a very small group or be there alone and just be still, let the silence descend. Sit in that silence in the very low lighting that's in there. Just pause and remind yourself that you're in the last surviving wonder of the ancient world and it's an incredible privilege to be there. And just let it speak to you. And it does. This is of course my critics will say another proof that Hanok's a lunatic. Uh but uh I'm just telling you what what what what happens to me. It's a I I think it's a monument that communicates.

[Stephen]: What did it say to you?

[Graeme Hancock]: It said to me go further very much so. I I I I feel in a weird way validated by the Great Pyramid. I think it's um not only me, others as well who've devoted big chunks of their lives to the great pyramid like Robert Baval who is a great man by the way. The Orion correlation, the recognition that the three pyramids on the ground are laid out in the pattern of the belt stars of the constellation of Orion makes radical and important changes to our understanding of ancient Egypt. Again, that's another thing that's been leapt upon by the archaeological mafia, uh, because they want to destroy every new idea, uh, rather than spend a bit of time thinking about it.

[Stephen]: If what you're saying is true around the, you know, the first civilizations being 20 plus thousand years ago, what does that mean for us, for our lives?

[Graeme Hancock]: Oh, it's really important meaning for us because because it will finally remind us and tell us once and for all that we're not what it's all about. It's not all about us. The whole human story is not about us. It's not inevitable that it comes to this and that we are temporary like every other civilization. We're so filled with arrogance and pride right now in our technological achievements, our great abilities, our great powers and uh the arrogance that comes with that. The Greeks used to call that hubris. It's ultimately ends in nemesis. Ultimately brings you down. Arrogance arrogance is not a good thing. It's not a good thing in an individual and it's a terrible thing in a civilization.

[Stephen]: It also means that a lot of the things that we've dismissed as you know conspiracy or you know hocus pocus whatever might not be. I mean you talk a lot about like astrology and stuff like that and

[Graeme Hancock]: yeah I think we should keep open to to systems that the ancients used which we've dismissed like which might be very astrology is one of them. What does astrology ultimately say? It it ultimately says that we these beings these humans aren't isolated but are connected to the universe and are affected by everything that happens in the universe and it's and it's recognizing that there may be patterns in that and instead of instead of just rubbishing that or doing a few investigations I think it may be worth looking further into that worth looking further into telepathy too my friend Rbert Sheldrich a serious scientist one of the very few who's doing serious scientist ific work on issues like telepathy and like telekinesis, being able to move things with your mind. Mainstream scientists, most of them will just laugh at that. Absolute rubbish. Yeah, go away. You're a lunatic. But why are we lunatics to look into those things? It's really interesting and it's really worth investigating. We re should realize that we have a heritage of hundreds of thousands of years and I believe it's even older than 315,000 years. We do not have a heritage of a hundred years, which is the heritage of modern science. Well, let's let's be generous. Let's put modern science even back to the Greeks in a way. But it doesn't become what we would recognize as science until the 19th century really. So, it's a very young thing on if you take the human being as the as the heart of this and and and you were to find a little pimple on the nose of that human being, that would be science. It's a pimple on the nose of hundreds of thousands of years of human experience. Why should we be so arrogant to dismiss those hundreds of thousands of years of human experience in the favor of 150 years maximum of so-called science?

[Stephen]: I mean, one of the interesting things is I actually did go to the Amazon rainforest in Peru. Um, and they've discovered these like big square things underground.

[Graeme Hancock]: I've been involved in that. What is What is that? Well, the the name that's being given to them is uh is geoglyphs.

[Stephen]: Geoglyphs. I think I know this one. Nobody knew they existed at all until about 40 years ago.

[Graeme Hancock]: really. And uh because the Amazon rainforest is a rainforest and and densely covered with uh canopy. However, it's constantly being settled. This is a problem in itself. It's constantly being settled. The Amazon is being cleared and it's being turned into farms. It's the clearance of bits of the Amazon initially that exposed these huge geometric structures. Under the rainforest, no longer under because they cleared the rainforest. Now with LiDAR, I've been involved with Marty Parsonan. In fact, he was on my Netflix show. He's a archaeologist from Finland and and with Alteo Ramanzi, a Brazilian geographer. Um what they're doing is a dense lidar survey of the whole of Ara province in Brazil. This is in our Cray province as well. The areas that are still under canopy rainforest and lidar can see through the canopy and it can see raised objects underneath and it can actually give you the shape of that object. Then they can go in low u you know low impact just a few of them go in check it out see what's there and then begin the archaeology on the site.

[Stephen]: I mean this is a prime example. I've got um I've got a list here of things that we used to believe and things that how those beliefs have changed. And one of them was that we used to believe that the Amazon was an untouched wilderness.

[Graeme Hancock]: That's right.

[Stephen]: But in the 1970s, we discovered what, a thousand of these structures?

[Graeme Hancock]: at least. Uh they're confident now from the LAR work that they're you're talking of thousands, 3, five, 6 thousand. There are also roadways that run for 100 km plus. Uh there's absolutely no doubt that the Amazon once supported a population of millions with um extraordinary clever management of rainforest. soils by creating a man-made soil that they call terrapa. It's still used in Brazil today. We are having to completely reconceive the Amazon. It was thought of as a pristine rainforest which a few human beings wandered around aimlessly in hunting whatever. Now we know that it was the homeland of a very large population who lived in city-sized communities. um who joined those communities with long straight roadways. It's it's as though the veil is being pulled back and we're beginning to see a completely untold story in the Amazon. And these geoglyphs, very precise rectangles, triangles, circles, squares, all of these it's geometry. It's geometry. What what's it what's it doing there in the Amazon? And and when I when I talked to a local shaman about this, and I did on on camera in the in the in the Netflix show, um he talked to me about how important these places still are to him, that these places were made by their ancestors, that they're places for shamanic gatherings, places for shamans to use specifically to contact the world beyond. Let's be clear about this. All civilizations, including ours, although we may deny it, all of them emerged from shamanism. Shamanism is the essence uh of the human adventure uh and and all civilizations emerge from shamanism. And this one was shamanism. Yes. Shamanism being the system of using altered states of consciousness to gain direct access to other levels of reality

[Stephen]: like psychedelics.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah, psychedelics or you can fast for a month. Uh that will give you some visions too. Uh there there are there are other ways but but psychedelics are the most efficient way to enter the altered state of consciousness and shamans are masters of the use of plant medicines everywhere in the world but particularly in the Amazon rainforest. This is this is where you you see it most strongly and DMT the active ingredient of awaska is very fast acting in the way that it's normally consumed. Okay. It's normally vaped or smoked. Uh it produces a 10-minute journey literally to the other side of reality. Uh and there's not much you can do about it once you're in there. But then you're out again. Iaska is a very clever technology. The Iaska brew contains DMT. DMT is not orally active. So you can drink a tea made of with loads of DMT in it and it's not going to do anything to you because there's an enzyme in the gut that destroys it. The iawaska vine contains a chemical that shuts that enzyme down and allows the DMT to be absorbed orally producing an experience that can last for hours that can be physically very uncomfortable. Um what they're doing at Imperial College is they're giving them DMT by intravenous infusion using basically anesthesia technology to constantly top up the dose to keep the individual in the peak state and unlike other psychedelics there's no tolerance with DMT so you can keep on dosing people

[Stephen]: when you you've taken OAS 80 times

[Graeme Hancock]: something like that something like that um it's not just it's important to be clear about a number of things. First of all, all psychedelics are extremely serious matters. They are not to be taken trivially. They are extremely serious. With uh experienced use of Iawaska, one of the very common reports is this moral dimension that you are presented with your own life, with what you've done with your own life, with the pain that you may have caused to others. And suddenly that pain that you caused to another person which you dismissed as they just deserved that they just deserve those words. You suddenly get it from their point of view. You feel the agony that your words caused that person and you and you find yourself did I do that? Did I say that? You suddenly see what you are. You can't go back into your own past and change negative and useless and pointless things that you did. You can't do that. but you can avoid repeating them in the future. And it's that teaching of a moral lesson uh that I find most valuable in Iawaska. It's helped me to come to terms with my tendency to swift anger. I'm I'm very aware that that's a problem I have and it's something I need to do something about. And I I helped me with that. I' I've become gentler and and softer. Not gentle enough, maybe. It's a journey. It's not a it's not an overnight transformation. Not a magic pill. Uh the main work with Iawaska comes after the medicine. The main work comes with what you do with the experience, how you integrate it into your life. That's where the work begins. People say, "Oh, it's so easy to take a a brew." Well, it's not actually not that easy because you're going to vomit and have diarrhea, but but easy. Um but that's where the work begins, not where it ends.

[Stephen]: And that emotion is that does that stem back to your relationship with your parents? Because I was reading about your early your early years. Look, we're all frail human beings. We're all messed about in lots of ways. We all have we all have issues in our lives. Um, you said regret.

[Graeme Hancock]: Regret. Yes, I I do regret saying hurtful and unkind things to a number of people uh over the years. I do I do regret that very much. I do regret very much that I wasn't I wasn't mature enough to realize why my parents were so difficult. Uh that I never really forgave them for that. I never really forgave them for the stranges of my childhood and and uh the various things that that that that happened. I never really saw it from their point of view. My mother lost three children aside from me. I'm an only child, but her first child was carried to term before me and born dead. Then I was born. I lived and then the next two both died at the age of a year. Well, I know now as a father, I know I know what what quite a catastrophe that is for a person for a for a mother to to lose three children like that.

[Stephen]: You said weird childhood.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. So, this is me. This is little Graeme here with my mother and my father. I was It was 1954 that we landed in India. My father was a s consultant surgeon and so he went as a missionary surgeon to India to a place called the Christian medical college in velour in south India. Um and we lived in a tin hut but he was following his faith. He was doing what was what was right for him. He was giving his skills to help to help people. I I I realize that now and a lot of resentment I have towards him I probably you know shouldn't have. Um he was an odd guy. He was very eccentric. He used to take me in to watch dissections. Um the there were still hangings in India at that time and he would dissect the prisoners after the hangings. He had me in there watching it. Um he took me later on.

[Stephen]: What age?

[Graeme Hancock]: Uh uh five.

[Stephen]: You were watching bodies being cut up at five.

[Graeme Hancock]: I was. Yeah. Absolutely very strange. See it was presented to me as completely normal. Um but but it was it it was strange. Fundamentally he was a good man I believe. But I think allowing a 4 to 5year-old child be to see those things is deeply traumatic in a way that you probably don't recognize until later.

[Stephen]: I I agree. It's it's come home to me more and more as the years have gone by that what happened to me in those years in India scarred me deeply. It wasn't just the operating theaters and the dissections, the dissections. It was the gloom and the misery and the despair that settled over my family at that time and I don't think I ever really recovered from that.

[Stephen]: Did you have nightmares?

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah.

[Stephen]: And what what were those nightmares?

[Graeme Hancock]: Um, usually nightmares of loss. Usually nightmares of suddenly I'm alone. I'm in a I'm in a I'm completely isolated, lost, alone. The reason I ask these questions is there's only ever been one other guest who I sat here with a couple of years ago who I believe's dad was a surgeon. And his dad brought him in to watch operations and dissections when he was young. And it scarred him in a way that he didn't realize until later. Yeah. And he told me about the nightmares of waking up in the night and seeing those bodies of those people around his bed on a predictable basis and told me he actually um coached Michael Jordan and then um Kobe before Kobe Bryant um passed away and he told me still as an adult those bodies join him at night time. So he'll wake up at nighttime and he'll see them around around his bed. So well thank you universe. That didn't happen to me. I I I do not have I don't remember having gruesome nightmares. I remember a feeling of loneliness and abandonment. That's what I remember.

[Stephen]: Loneliness and abandonment.

[Graeme Hancock]: Mhm. I've always felt that way. I was always an outsider at school. Uh everywhere I've been all my life. That's what I'm for. I'm here to be an outsider. I've come to that conclusion. And and uh I need to do that. Well, I need to provide an alternative point of view on the past.

[Stephen]: There's a real cost to being an outsider.

[Graeme Hancock]: Oh, yeah. But there are also some benefits. You know, we are what we are. And and for me, I was always strange. I had this childhood in in in India. I didn't fit into the British school system. I was a total failure at school. I could not connect. I could not connect with any of it. It seemed I just didn't get it. What was this about? And and and the cruelty, the viciousness. My dad went to a boarding school and had a good experience. So he sent me to a boarding school in Durham in the north of England. It was the crulest place, beatings going on. I I was repeatedly beaten about the bare buttocks by a sadistic headmaster with a cane. I couldn't fit in with the other kids at school. And uh I don't feel victimized for being an outsider. I feel I feel it's a privilege. I feel I've been given I've been given an opportunity to take a different view of things as a result of being an outsider.

[Stephen]: Are there words unsaid here with these two people in your life?

[Graeme Hancock]: Yes, there are there are so many words unsaid. I'd like to go back to my mom and say, you know, I understand why you were so obsessed with keeping me alive and making sure that I did something with my life. And I'd like to say to my dad, look, you you were pretty crazy, but you you did at least inspire me to be eccentric. It's a funny thing getting older. I'm 75, 76 in August. One of the things it does is it you realize how collapsed life actually is. I remember being a teenager and I remember being a young man and and I remember being middle-aged. And the feeling is you're immortal. It's going to go on forever. Everything's going to go on forever. And it's long. It's long. Lots of time to do the things you want to do. I have a message. No, it's not long. There is not lots of time. If there's things you want to do with your life, start now. Start right away. Don't wait. Otherwise, you'll not have the opportunity. Life is very short. It's a beautiful, beautiful gift that the universe has given to us. We are responsible for returning that gift by as far as possible within the circumstances that the universe has given us living a full life and contributing something worthwhile to that life. Not being a robot, not being commanded what to do, not We we need to learn to think for ourselves. This is something that is so easily forgotten. It's a miracle that you and I are sitting here at all that I'm here, that you're here, that we're here together. It's absolute miracle. It's a result of billions and billions of years of processes in the universe which had nothing to do with us randomly bring us together at this at this point. It's it's really quite a miraculous situation. To be alive, to be born at all is a miracle. Um I think it was Voltater who talking about reincarnation uh who said um it's no more extraordinary to be born twice than to be born once. Uh and I think there's a point in that.

[Stephen]: Are you religious? You believe in a god or?

[Graeme Hancock]: I would say that I am um that I pay attention close attention to what I would regard as the spiritual non-physical side of life. Um but I do not belong to any organized religion. One of the things I don't like about organized religion is that your relationship to the divine, whatever you call the divine spirit world, whatever you want to call it, your relationship is mediated in some way. Some priest or rabbi or müller teaches you how to mediate that relationship. And I I think what's important in for me anyway in in the spiritual inquiry is a direct relationship, a direct experience. Rather than being taught something, I want to experience it for myself. And that's why I found Iawaska very very valuable. Um because it has enabled me to experience something that is absolutely impossible to experience in normal everyday life. We're so plugged in. We're so plugged in to the physical world and we have to be we've got to be we got to obey the laws of physics. We got to deal with the economics of our circumstances. You know, we have to make our way through life. All of those things we've got to do. Um, but if they become our total focus, we become shut off from everything and anything else that may exist. And what the big psychedelics can do if they're taken in the right circumstances with the right advice with sincere intention, what they can do is get you out of your own way and allow you to connect to that wider realm that normally you cannot connect to. And yes, I do believe that a wider realm exists. uh just in the same way that uh you you know before the invention of the microscope we had no idea that there were bacteria I think I'm right about that we start seeing these tiny little things swimming around gosh major discovery well they were always there we just didn't have the kit to see them and I'm suggesting that what psychedelics can be and certainly what they used as shamans by for is a technology a device uh for getting you out of your own way and allowing you to connect with other levels of reality that in daily life it doesn't serve you to be connected with.

[Stephen]: The interesting thing about DMT in particular is when you speak to people who have done DMT, you know, I spent about a year working in a quite a big psychedelics company just to I got really fascinated. I'd left my company. I didn't have anything to do with my time. So I started this podcast and I also uh on YouTube and I also started working at a psychedelics business cuz I found the studies on mental health and psychedelics really interesting. So I have quite a deep understanding I guess higher than average of IV gain and Iaska and DMT and my partner um is very very spiritual and has done all these things as well. So one of the fascinating things is how similar people's experiences are on something like DMT. the funnily enough your description of these creatures saying you're you belong to us now is almost verbatim what what one of my friends described two weeks ago that they were teleported into this like 4K realm where these creatures that are like slightly animal in their anatomical structure maybe slightly a little bit human as well basically was like had had taken hold of him and they were very curious and inspecting him very colorful realm and then they kind of sent him back or at least you know after the and and it does make one wonder. I think one of my conclusions was if if inhaling a small chemical can completely take me to another place then and and if you from a reasoning perspective it's just a it was an in one inhale of a chemical then it goes to say that my current perception of reality is just is as fragile as an inhale of a chemical. Like me thinking that I'm here with you now is as fragile as inhaling one chemical. Yeah. So to think that this is base reality when the difference between this and being with some grasshopper people in 4K is literally an ale. It just that for me I was like, "Oh, wow." Okay.

[Graeme Hancock]: It's an extraordinary realization when that comes and it causes us to question the nature of reality itself. And this is um this is what's really important about these medicines. First and foremost, you're right. the these um psychedelic medicines are proving incredibly effective as therapeutic tools and that's great. I I I really I think that's incredibly valuable. But there's another level to go which is to the inquiry into the nature of reality and the inquiry into what consciousness is. These medicines are very effective means to conduct that inquiry. And that's why I applaud what they're doing at Imperial College in London. They're also going to be doing trials at the University of California, San Diego. Um they're going to be doing trials in Costa Rica. Uh a whole range of places now are looking into this because it's really interesting people coming back and reporting the same experience when they haven't compared notes yet. How do we explain that? Because it's in a vision and people say that at the moment the default mode is to dismiss it and say that's just rubbish. Don't waste time on it. Our preconceptions about the nature of reality should not limit our inquiry into the nature of reality. And at the moment still unfortunately there are preconceptions about the nature of reality which is that it's materialbased that there's nothing else to it really. Everything is reduced to matter. Even consciousness is reduced to matter. It's reduced to the physical matter of the brain. We don't know that for sure. We don't know what's going on. consciousness is absolutely not understood. And so when we have mysteries like people who are injected a small dose of a chemical like DMT and go off into a completely other reality, that's really interesting. And it's it's it's it's at least as interesting, if not more interesting than exploring other planets right now. I think we need to I think we need to explore ourselves first. We need to We're not in shape as a species to start exploring the universe. We don't want to export our toxicity to other parts of the universe until we've overcome it, until we've grown up as a species, which we haven't done yet. We need to know ourselves. Psychedelics are one way to do that. Not used irresponsibly, but used responsibly in a structured, careful, thoughtful way. They can be very helpful in knowing ourselves. That's the journey we need to do first. Go to Mars by all means, you know, go to the moon. we go even further, but do this first. Know who you are first before you start doing those bigger and wider investigations. Get all that sorted out because we're hardly sorted out anything on this planet and we're talking about exploring other planets. Well, I'm all in favor of exploring other planets, but I'd like to sort out things on this planet first. That's where the resources should be going. And we should stop kidding ourselves that we can just escape this planet and make a complete hole of it, leave it, and go and live somewhere else. No, we can fix this. We are capable of fixing this. We're capable of fixing everything. Human beings have enormous potential. We're just using a fraction of 1% of it at the moment.

[Stephen]: The question I, you know, I mean, the obvious question that comes to mind is how I see, you know, maybe I don't know, maybe some kind of leader comes along.

[Graeme Hancock]: Could be. Um, I think we need to need to move past leaders.

[Stephen]: I just don't know how else humans would change without some kind of leadership. It's very difficult to see. I agree with you. It's very it's very difficult to see how it happens one person at a time um slowly through through word of mouth, through experience. But look, everything in the Iawaska garden is not all flowers either. There's a lot of very wrong behavior going on there. People are exploiting that medicine. Basically, drug dealers are exploiting that medicine and offering it irresponsibly to people in groups of a hundred or even more. that that that's that's actually really really stupid to do that. I Iaska is an intimate experience and it needs to be done in a very small group, not a very large group. So it's not it's not all roses. I'm not you know I'm not trying to paint these medicines in a in in a false light. They have their downsides. They have their problems. They are extremely serious. We should always research and investigate before any experience with psychedelics, but they have a part to play and it's an important part. And thank God we're seeing its effects. Psilocybin effect on long-term depression, very important. Post-traumatic stress disorder, very important. These therapeutic breakthroughs hopefully will open the door to further inquiries into the kind of work that's being done at Imperial College. What does this really tell us about the mystery of consciousness? What does this really tell us about what we think is real?

[Stephen]: Through your journey through um ancient civilizations, what have you come to learn about what this consciousness thing is, if anything at all, or at least what people believed. Um and how those mythologies were similar.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yes. I've partly I've partly come to this through the ancient texts. There's a very specific uh scene in a number of the ancient Egyptianerary texts. It's called the judgment scene. And what you see is you see the deceased entering into a hall into a room at the end of which sits the god Osiris enthroned. And uh the deceased is led into the hall by the goddess Mart. She's recognized by a feather that she wears in her headdress. She's the goddess of truth, justice, and cosmic harmony. He enters the hall. There's a scale in the hall. In one pan of the scale is an object that represents his heart, oblique, his soul. Heart and soul were the same thing for the Egyptians in that sense. And in the other pan is the feather of mart, the feather of truth, harmony, and cosmic justice. You do not want your heart to outweigh the feather at that moment. You want at the very least to be in balance. And in order to be in balance then comes into question the whole way that you've lived your life. Up on the wall of the hall there are 42 little figures. They're called the 42 negative assessors. Each one of them is going to ask you a question. Did you steal? Did you kill? Actually, the ten commandments are all in there and a lot more as well. Ideally, you should be able to answer no to all of those questions, but the ancient Egyptians always understood how frail human beings are and that we can always make mistakes. The question is, what do we do when we make a mistake? Do we learn from it or do we keep on repeating it? And what I read into that is you were given, you deceased, you were given an incredible opportunity. We allowed you to be born in a human body. You could have a range of experiences that no other physical form on your planet could have. You you you had this huge brain. You had this enormous capacity. We gave it this to you. What did you do with it? Did you use it well or did you squander it and waste it? And at that moment, you'd better be there with some answers about how you used it well. So, as I come towards the end of my life, I look very carefully at my life. I and um I try to undo wrongs that I have done in the past if I can and I try to make sure I don't do any more in the future. I want to be a nurturing and positive and useful person to the people around me.

[Stephen]: The the health situation you've gone through has clearly made you quite introspective, probably more so than you you might have been 10 years ago, I'm guessing.

[Graeme Hancock]: Oh, yeah. AB: Absolutely. I was still immortal 10 years ago. M listen each and every one of us, every single human being on this planet could die in the next minute. Life is that fragile. It's that sudden. You can never predict you you how long you're going to live. But what something like this does, it focuses the mind and it does make me wish more and more that I can leave this life with as few regrets as possible and that I can feel that I played a useful and positive role in the life of others and that I even played in some way a useful and positive role in the life of the species to which I belong. Are you happy?

[Stephen]: I am very happy in a lot of ways. I'm blessed to have lived the life I've lived, to have traveled the world, to have the adventures that I have had. I am blessed with a beautiful and wonderful wife and companion. My wife Samtha got this wonderful picture of her. Yeah. Glows. That's me and Samantha. We met when we were about 40 years old. And um I don't think we've been apart more than 4 days in the entire 30 plus years uh since then. Wow. Uh we do everything together. We travel together. Samantha's a photographer. Brilliant photographer. And and and uh I do not have a great visual eye. So we work together. I do the words. Sa does the pictures. We have the adventures together. We did the scuba diving together. Samantha nearly lost her life twice in intense currents scuba diving. She's brave. She's an adventurer. She's a wonderful mother. This is so important. Samantha and I have six children between us. Samantha brought two from her previous marriage. I brought two from my first marriage and two from my second marriage. So, six children from three broken marriages is a potential disaster. Santa brought them all together into a group of loving, deeply committed siblings who care for one another, who are constantly in each other's lives, who are there to support one another. SA did that by just being a brilliant, loving person. So, I'm very happy to have such a great partner who's stood by me through thick and thin and who's brought out these wonderful characters in in in our children and now our grandchildren. You know, nine grandchildren, six grandkids, all of it's down to Santa. It's remarkable that through all the wonders of human history and all the things we talked about that love like this kind of romantic love is so central, so important, so central to our happiness. I just thought, oh, it's it's just a wonderful reminder of um how easy it is to get caught up in the material and and all the toxic whereas, you know, so much of it comes from just the simplicity of falling in love with someone.

[Graeme Hancock]: Love is what it's all about. And and love is love is giving. It's giving yourself to somebody else. It's putting the other person. Sorry, I'm going to end up crying. This This is what my wife does all the time with everybody. She puts other people first and uh others benefit enormously from that. I'm very fortunate. I think I think if I hadn't met Samantha when I did and we hadn't formed this joint life, I think I would have made nothing of my life. Nothing at all really. I think it would have just gone down the tubes. I needed a loving steering hand at that point. Anyway, very lucky. I I I am happy. There are things that make me unhappy, of course, just like every every every other human being. I I don't understand why those who are bitterly opposed to my work want to try and present me as some kind of fraud or grifter. But I suppose it's a easy way to lazily dismiss somebody else. Uh, another thing that has been used is because I've considered the possibility of a lost civilization having an influence on other known historical civilization. Uh I've been accused of racism as well that I've been I've been accused of taking away the authenticity of indigenous achievements. Um and and that again has been without without any receipts. It's not been it's just thrown out there as an accusation. Now for me with with a multithnic family uh that racism abuse that has been thrown at me constantly uh is extremely hurtful and extremely painful. It's one of the few things that have been thrown at me that I actually cannot forgive. It's unforgivable to use that lazy easy dismissal in a society where a lot of people don't read anymore. I mean, pretty much guarantee people who hear that on the internet, they're not going to go and read the books and actually find out what I said. They're just going to take it as face value. So, that does hurt and it does make me sad. But generally, I'm blessed. I'm lucky. I've lived a fantastic privileged life. I've explored the world. I'm surrounded by love and onwards and upwards as far as I'm concerned.

[Stephen]: Well, you know, Graeme, I think at the end of the day, the thing that endures is the impact, the curiosity that you've you've provoked in people, allowed them to wander beyond the narrowness of our lives, which is quite miserable. A narrow life is feels quite like a miserable life where you can't be open-minded and explore. And and that's why I love these conversations. It's not to say that I that I always accept when I have these kind of conversations everything to be 100% true, but the net benefit for me is just expanding my mind to possibility.

[Graeme Hancock]: Absolutely.

[Stephen]: And like please don't rob me of the opportunity to expand my mind to possibility. What would my life become without possibility or hope or these things? And and actually when I look at graphs like this that show how our beliefs uh and scientific understanding has changed even in recent times as as recent as 2017 on this particular graph. I go well I have some arrogance to assume that I know it all today.

[Graeme Hancock]: Totally. Things things are constantly changing. You know every turn of the spade in an archaeological dig can change the whole story.

[Stephen]: Change the whole story. This is not limited to archaeology. This is found in all fields where there are specialists that they they tend to get locked into a particular reference frame and actually defend it in a territorial way. It becomes like a war and they they they feel absolutely responsible to defend that territory against all comers and will use any dirty tricks that are needed to be used in order to defeat the enemy. So you asked me a straightforward question. Am I happy? Yes, I am happy. And I honestly answered you that there are certain things, particularly the racism assaults on me, that do make me extremely unhappy.

[Stephen]: What else do I need to know about the the possibility of an ancient civilization that might inform how I think about myself, my life, and I guess also our future. What I found so fascinating is especially we're in a moment of this AI revolution where you've got these sort of big forces of you got nuclear weapons over here, you've now got this advanced intelligence, there's humanoid robots on the horizon. And if there was ever a moment where the word, you know, existential is being used in a in a way that is probably appropriate for me, it feels like now.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah, feels like now to me, too. Uh this is uh no doubt uh our species is poised on the edge of an abyss right now. Uh our technology has outgrown our mentality. Uh and we're not uh we're not in good shape to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. I I un unfortunately the chances of a nuclear exchange are just higher and higher. That's just a realistic assessment of the way the world is with these maniacal leaders. So what could we learn from the past? We can I I I believe we can learn that there's another way to live that we don't have to do it this way.

[Stephen]: I I that's that's something I believe.

[Graeme Hancock]: Okay. Believe.

[Stephen]: that's something I don't know.

[Graeme Hancock]: Okay. I guess I'm optimistic that human beings have made it through all these centuries, all these thousands of years, all these hundreds of thousands of years that we've made it through. We've made terrible mistakes and terrible. I mean, look at the Second World War. God know how many people were killed there. 20 million Russians alone if I remember correct. It was just horrific. Absolute horror. It's only when I was born in 1950, the Second World War was only 5 years away. and at the end of it and it hung over us. You know, you our our generation were aware of that, but it seems to me people today aren't aware of the horror of global war in the way that they were and and and uh that adds to the to the danger that we will emulate ourselves. I think a new approach to the nature of reality is really vital. I think we we need to begin to understand consciousness better. Uh and what I would wish for the human species is that we understand we are actually all one. Incredibly diverse, full of creativity and differences, but but all one. And a mother in the middle of subsahara and Africa and a mother in New York City, they love their kids in exactly the same way. They hope for their kids in exactly the same way. There's no difference between them at all. As long as we're as long as we're indoctrinated into this notion of divisive differences, I'm all in favor of differences between human beings. That's part of our creativity as our species, but divisive differences, that's what's going to kill us off. Uh, and that's, I think, the message that comes down from the past. Whether it's a correct message or not, the message is we, a former civilization, made a terrible mistake. and it resulted in a cataclysm that brought us down. I think we need to realize that can happen again. Uh and that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. Uh there may there may be a danger of further comet impacts. The younger drius comet fragments. It's called the torid meteor stream. The earth passes through it twice a year in June and in October, November. Uh there are hundreds of deadly objects in the torid meteor stream. It could happen. But I think a much more likely way that we're going to bring our civilization back almost to the stone age is nuclear war. We're going to do it to ourselves. Unless we wake up, unless we become more conscious of what it is to be a human being, of the privilege and the gift of being a human being, and how that privilege of gift belongs to every human being, not just to us. But I don't know how that's going to be done. I I I do think psychedelics can play a role. I've said many times and I'll say it again. If I if I had the power to do so, I would insist that every world leader has at least at least a dozen sessions of Iawaska before they even apply for the job.

[Stephen]: Because you believe that would give them the same feeling of oneness that

[Graeme Hancock]: I think most of them wouldn't apply for the job at all.

[Stephen]: Oh, really?

[Graeme Hancock]: And those who did would would probably do a much better job because they'd understand themselves better.

[Stephen]: Graeme, what is the most important thing we haven't discussed as it relates to our past and what it might teach us or, you know, how it might inform how we choose to live our lives today? Um, that we haven't discussed. Look, the most important thing as far as far as I'm concerned is independent inquiry. We need to start thinking for ourselves and that's true of the past and it's true of everything else. uh to the to the extent that I that I do get positive feedback from young people and I do a lot that feedback is thank you for being an example to question everything. It happens that what I'm questioning is the past but that can be a model for questioning everything. I I feel that that very poor journalism being used to smear my name because I asked questions and because I asked them vigorously and because most important of all I reached a large audience. That's it really. They won't sneer your name if you don't reach a large audience. You're not worth their trouble.

[Stephen]: I know the feeling.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. But I think but you know for me my thing has always been that um all it's done has made me clearer like you know you have a bigger platform more people um watching you etc and talking about you all it's done for me is made me clearer on my principles and what I believe and I'm actually really thankful for that in a weird way. Yeah,

[Stephen]: because you're forced to, you know, when you hear so many things said about you or written about you, whatever, it does focus one minds on, okay, like who am I and what matters? What am I where am I uncompromising in terms of the conversations I want to have, the way I want to do it? And that's given me a huge amount of clarity and one of the things that I'm really I really want to make sure is that it doesn't make me um bitter or resentful in any way.

[Graeme Hancock]: Very important.

[Stephen]: And you can see how it happens. Yeah, I can I can absolutely see how it happens because you you have to live with a sort of um injustice potentially or being mischaracterized or whatever. So, it's easy to see how one can slip off into bitterness and resentment and

[Graeme Hancock]: that's a that's a big part of the work I'm doing on myself at the moment. I I'm confident that I am doing the right thing with my life. I'm doing no harm to anyone and I'm putting ideas out there that are worth thinking about. I'm confident of that. I have no I have no doubts about that. And what will you care about on your on your last day? Most of all, the love of my family. That's the most important thing to me. And um I don't know, the feeling that I did my best. I did the best I could to carry out the task that uh fell upon me quite by accident. I didn't I was a current affairs journalist in the 1980s. I had no idea I was going to go down this rabbit hole into the ancient world. It was a series of accidents that led to it. But having gone down it, I feel very very very committed to it.

[Stephen]: It's interesting because one of the ways that I um I've always chosen to conduct my interviews is just to um judge people as I find them. I remember once upon a time I had Brian Johnson coming on my podcast and you know he's quite a he's a he has some radical beliefs about living forever etc. He's the longevity guy. And I remember one of my team members walking up to me beforehand and saying before he had arrived and saying, "What do you think of him?" And I remember saying, "I have no idea. I've not met him yet." And then I sat down with him, had this interview, and he said this thing to me at the end of the interview where he goes, "Thank you." And I go, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Thank you. This is the first time I've done an interview in my life where the interviewer had like no preconceptions of me." And he goes, "It meant that I was relaxed and able to be myself and blah blah blah blah." And I and I say that because my opinion of you is someone who is really curious about about humanity and has this interesting idea that is really expansive for one's mind about what could have happened. And um again, the net benefit for me of that is just expanding my mind in a way that makes me empathetic to other people. Makes me feel like me and you aren't different.

[Graeme Hancock]: Yeah. like I've met you today but we're probably you know we we we go back a long way maybe consciously we're the same but in our history and our lineage we are we are one of the same and um it also gives me a huge amount of respect for other living things including my ancestors in a way that you kind of think of your ancestors as these like monkeys that lived in trees potentially but actually hearing some of these stories makes me go oh my gosh and actually it gives me a huge sense of responsibility to leave this planet and this earth in a way that it's going to be good for, you know, the future the future kids that will live 20,000 years from now in the future and that will probably look at our um fossil records and wonder.

[Graeme Hancock]: I I think I think those of us who have a a platform do have a responsibility very very very definitely. I mean, we're living in this strange new world. This this world was inconceivable even in the beginning of the 1990s. This this this world of communication that we live in now. And there's no doubt that that um this is where influence can be applied. And and if that influence is encouraging all that's good in the human race, then that's really great and it's a wonderful thing. And if it's encouraging all that's dark and negative and cruel and unkind and vicious in the human race, because that's also out there on the internet, then it's not so good.

[Stephen]: Graeme, we have a um closing tradition on the show where the last guest leaves the question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, is there a danger of us sleepwalking into worshiping a machine god?

[Graeme Hancock]: You want me to answer that question? Yes, we're already worshiping a machine god. As I said earlier in our discussion, uh in the minds of many, science has already been elevated to occupy the space that was once occupied by religions. That is a belief in a machine fundamentally that's taking place there. Science should be seen as a tool, one amongst many tools that we as human beings have at our disposal. It should never be the only tool and it should never be woripped. I don't ever want to hear the words, trust the science. The words for me are investigate the science. See whether it's right for you or not. See what else is available in the in the in the situation. Don't just routinely without thought, without question, trust the science. Don't do that. That's that's betraying science as well. One of the fundamental ethics of science is not to trust the science is to question and challenge the science. That's what we should be doing with the science. And yes, we are in danger of creating a kind of multi-dimensional machine which reaches into all aspects of human consciousness and and controls us. Yeah. We got to stop worshiping science. That's for sure. We got to put it in its rightful place as an incredibly valuable tool which which can do great things for human beings but which can also do terrible harm and damage.

[Stephen]: Because when we trust science, there's something we stop listening to.

[Graeme Hancock]: Well, when you put your trust in anything, you better have good reason to put your trust in it. If I if I'm going to trust another human being with my life, I I really want to know that I can trust that person. And I'm not just going to say, "Oh, you're a doctor, so I trust you." No, it's not that's not enough. I want to know more about that doctor. And uh in in indeed, I have pursued that just recently. Science is great. Science is really useful, but we're not we're not being what we should be. We're not living up to the potential that the universe gave us if we just go around trusting everything all the time. We're here to ask questions. That's what we got these enormous brains for. and this incredible connectivity is to ask questions. Anybody who says don't ask questions is doing a great deal of harm.

[Stephen]: Well, I hope my audience are very curious. Um, and I think they must be by now if they're still hanging around uh on this platform because we've had lots of very curious conversations and hopefully expansive. I this acronym DOA obviously stands for Draio, but also we think of it as like being for dreamers and open-minded people, which is the O, and the A being about expanding awareness and the C really being about feeling more connected.

[Graeme Hancock]: Brilliant. like hearing your story and about your partner and your journey and your parents all makes me all, you know, I think it makes us like spiritually connected in a way that's increasingly rare.

[Stephen]: If people want to learn and read more from you, Graeme, where do they go? I mean, you've written so many wonderful books. You've got another one on the way. I'll link all of these books you've written and the others that aren't here below.

[Graeme Hancock]: Okay. Um, very briefly, the the the book that put me on the map was Fingerprints of the Gods. And that's the book where I really investigate begin to investigate the possibility of a lost civilization. Before that came the sign and the seal which was which was about Ethiopia's claim to possess the lost ark of the covenant. It happened that as a reporter in the 1980s I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia and I came across this tradition which is fundamental to all religious life in Ethiopia. uh and and um ended up writing a book about it that put me on the track of a lost civilization led to fingerprints of the gods. Then after fingerprints of the gods, there's a book that's not here which is keeper of genesis that I wrote with Robert Bval underworld. This was seven years of scuba diving that Sam and I did all around the world following up tips from local fishermen, local divers. They'd seen something interesting, something that looked man-made at a depth of 30 m just offshore there and they would take us and we would find it. Uh so underworld is about all those flooded continental shelves. 27 million square kilmters of continental shelf were flooded at the end of the ice age. That's 27 million square kilmters. That's Europe and China and a bit more combined. uh were the best real estate on Earth uh 20,000 years ago and are all underwater today and and there's signs that there was life there. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Civilizations there. Yeah. Well, we found very large structures underwater. Um so that's that's uh underworld. Then after underworld I wrote supernatural which is that one there which has been reissued in America under the title visionary. And that's where I went deep into the shamanistic medicines, the the iawasa, psilocybin, and and and the whole notion that cave art, the art that we see in the painted caves is an art of visions, that this is shamans who had entered deeply altered states of consciousness. They'd remembered what they'd seen, and when they came back to the everyday state of consciousness, they painted their visions in caves. is the best explanation for cave arts and why cave art is so similar all around the world and so similar to the visions of Iawaska shamans to this day.

[Stephen]: Graham, thank you so much for all that you do. I won't repeat every all the reasons why, but you've you've blown my mind open in a way that's just driven curiosity. And um I think that's maybe the start of all inquiry is deep curiosity. And that's what you've done for not just myself, but the hundreds of millions of people that have watched you over the years um all over the world and I hope long may it continue and good luck with your heart operation and hopefully we'll be back again to continue this conversation soon.

[Graeme Hancock]: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Really good to meet you.

[Stephen]: Thank you so much. That was brilliant. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out and I bet you you might love.