Diary of A CEO: w/ Graham Hancock – They Secretly Found Antarctica 300 Years Before Us (Transcript)

And this is what happened to the Younger Dryas 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.

Comet Encke is the best-known bit of that former comet. Many of the academics who look at this think that Comet Encke, which is about 6 kilometers in diameter and which does cross the orbit of the Earth, they think 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 airburst 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, explains what happened then. Because 12,800 years ago, we were still in the Ice Age, but the Earth was coming out of the Ice Age. In fact, for about 1,000, 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, suddenly goes back into a massive deep freeze.

And this is the time when all the famous big animals of the Ice Age, the megafauna, are wiped out. The woolly mammoths, the mastodons, the giant sloths, these things like 14 feet tall — 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 Dryas? It shouldn’t have happened.

The comet theory explains it perfectly. The mass, the impact, the heat, the airbursts — that would have been enough to send the ice sheets into meltdown and to cause this pulse of meltwater. Then the freeze sets in. You have about 1,200 years of freezing, desperately cold conditions. And then again, 11,600 years ago, woomph, it suddenly warms up. I mean, these are radical climate changes. They’re beyond anything that’s happening now. And 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. 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 Dryas Impact Hypothesis. And maybe some other explanation will come up, but what nobody disputes is that the Younger Dryas was a catastrophe. It was global and it had huge effects.

Why Graham Hancock Chose to Speak Now

STEVEN BARTLETT: You chose intentionally to come and have this conversation today. Yeah. Why today?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Well, I’ve been quite unwell, really noticeably unwell since January, February. This year, particularly very, very short of breath. It’s because one of the failed valves in my heart is 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 2 or 3 years without the surgery, maybe even 5, but the quality of life would be very low. I can’t even walk up 3 stairs without being exhausted at the moment. So I’ve definitely decided 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This month?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, this month. And if that were the case, this would be the last time I’ve spoken about myself, my work, my life, challenges I faced in an open forum like this. And I choose to do that, and I’m going to say specifically why, without mentioning names.

I choose to do that because 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. That’s why I’m here, Steven.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you want the last word of your life to be?

The Mystery of Lost Civilizations

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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 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 it’s my obligation and my responsibility to do this.

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

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I’d like to be clear, it’s not a belief. This is another mistake that my critics often make. They think that I’m dealing with some sort of belief system or some sort of cult here. No, I’m not. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is it that the people that aren’t puzzled and are certain believe?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, they think that glacial lakes in North America gradually grew in size and overspill 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 Dryas was a cataclysmic event. It’s just the degree of the cataclysm that’s disputed and what caused it that’s disputed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But everyone agrees that humans are 300— yes, 15,000 years old?

How Long Have Anatomically Modern Humans Existed?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I mean, at present. When I started on this quest 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 196,000-year-old anatomically modern human remains from Ethiopia. And then finally, 315,000 years ago, a recent find in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, again anatomically modern humans.

So we can say that if we define ourselves by our anatomy, 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 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 did we wait so long?

We got all the kit. There’s evidence 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 did we wait until that moment?

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 bullshit. I think they were a very different civilization from ours, but they had conquered a number of peaks.

Ancient Maps and the Discovery of Antarctica

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. And another really important breakthrough evidenced by the ancient maps, but particularly a category of maps called the Portolanos, is accurate relative longitudes.

This is the Orontius Phineas map. It shows Antarctica right there. And this is interesting because this map was drawn in 1531. The problem is that our civilization didn’t discover Antarctica until 1820, so its appearance on a map drawn in 1531, particularly when we know that the map was based on older source maps and the mapmaker tells us in his own legend that he has uncovered material previously hidden in darkness— when we find that, we have to begin to wonder what is going on here. Had somebody found Antarctica long before we did, 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, 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 worked out, you know exactly where you are. We didn’t get that until 1750, 1760s, thereabouts, with Harrison’s chronometer. So finding good longitudes on very ancient maps is another puzzle that I don’t think archaeology has solved.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think there could have been a civilization 20,000 years ago, which was before this Younger Dryas moment? Yeah. Where, I mean, I’ve got this photo here which I’ll throw up on the screen.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think you say is evidence that something took place. It is, it is. That’s the Younger Dryas boundary.

The Younger Dryas Boundary Layer

GRAHAM HANCOCK: And I’m with Alan West, who’s one of the scientists from the Comet Research Group who are working on the Younger Dryas 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. It’s full of nanodiamonds, tiny little diamonds, microscopic size, which are a classic product of comet impacts. Microspherules, some platinum, some iridium. All signatures of a cometary impact. And there it is, it’s about 5 inches thick. That layer is the Younger Dryas boundary layer. It dates to 12,800 years ago.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So for anyone that can’t see, it’s just like a slice of Earth and there’s this black line going through the Earth. Yeah.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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 Dryas boundary.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the current hypothesis 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? Yes. So civilization then, in your definition of the word, how do you define that? A group of people gathering and working together?

Göbekli Tepe and the Hunter-Gatherer Civilization

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Fundamentally, it involves the willing organization or the unwilling organization of labor. If you look at a site like Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, we have it on our timeline here somewhere, it’s 11,600 years old. This is really an extraordinary site. 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. This was not done by 2 or 3 people working together.

That’s Göbekli Tepe today, covered by a modern canopy to keep the weather off it, because it was previously deliberately buried by its builders. And 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 this was a major project.

And interestingly, the people who built Göbekli Tepe, at the time Göbekli Tepe 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 Göbekli Tepe is not alone. It’s one of dozens of sites like that all over Anatolia in Turkey. This was a highly organized, sophisticated hunter-gatherer civilization that was involved in making this place.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m a little bit confused. So if the Ice Age ended 11,700 years ago, and Göbekli Tepe is 11,600 years ago, that means there’s a 100-year gap between the end of the Ice Age and something as sophisticated as Göbekli Tepe.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Not exactly, 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 created.

And the mystery is— mystery 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. 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, and we’ll support you in doing that.” That was the idea, and that was why it was felt something like Göbekli Tepe couldn’t be built until about 6,000 years ago when there was widespread agriculture.

But that turned out not to be true. It was built by hunter-gatherers, but within 1,000 years of it being built, agriculture becomes present in that whole area. Origins of agriculture are definitely earlier than we’ve been taught.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s funny because I don’t know a lot about the Ice Age, but humans survived the Ice Age?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Oh God, yes. We did. It’s just— where do you want to be during an ice age? That’s the question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are my options?

Where Would a Lost Civilization Have Thrived?

GRAHAM 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 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 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. 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 around Papua New Guinea. All of these areas that were really great places to live during the Ice Age. That’s the kind of place that the sort of civilization I’m talking about could have thrived.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the difference? Because on here it says the earliest known humans were 300,000-odd years ago. Yeah. 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?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The same?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: The same, yeah. And again, that’s not disputed. Nobody’s saying that Jebel Irhoud human beings were somehow different from us. They’re anatomically modern humans.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But how did they live versus your definition of a civilization?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: They lived a simple hunter-gatherer life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, in small groups.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah. But somehow around 11,600 years ago, people started accumulating monuments that can only be made with large groups and organized labor. You have to have a system. You can’t build something like Göbekli Tepe without planning it out in advance. You’ve got to draw it out somehow. There has to be a plan. It’s not something you just wing. So there’s a missing background to all of that, which bothers me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And again, so most people think civilization started, what, 6,000 years ago?

The Emergence of Ancient Civilizations

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yes, that would be when civilizations become archaeologically visible. So you have ancient Sumer, Mesopotamia, 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.

Round 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 Sumer, narrowing that window. Effectively, you can say that these two civilizations become archaeologically visible at the same time.

And they’re not alone, because on the other side of the world in Peru, there’s a civilization now recognized called the Caral-Supe civilization, which built pyramids, which also goes back 5,500 years. And this is one of the mysteries I’m looking at now, is why we have these apparently coincidental emergence of high civilizations in the same window all around the world. Indus Valley civilization, roughly the same, 5,000 years old.

Yeah, we’re looking at Caral here, I think. Yeah, yeah. These classic— this feature is these circular plazas in front of them and then the pyramid with a— and, you know, these were 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s 600 years ago.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: That’s 600 years ago. That’s yesterday. Whereas these Caral-Supe pyramids— Caral, Aspero, Bandurria, Penico— 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 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 that time. They’re a hunter-gatherer civilization. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Tell me about this forgotten episode in the human story.

The Myth of a Golden Age

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, it’s remembered all around the world as a golden age. Where there was no violence, no cruelty, 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 nonexistent by us as scientists, were regarded as a matter of fact of life in this ancient world. That’s a civilization that emerged out of shamanism. Made something good.

But then, if you follow the myths further, as I’ve done, you find something odd happens. You find that they 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 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 always this feeling in the myths, and I can’t explain it, I don’t know what it comes from, but it’s always there, is that in some way we ourselves brought this upon ourselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is this those people not understanding the forces of Mother Nature and trying to justify it as—

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Or perhaps a deeper understanding of the forces of Mother Nature. Maybe. Perhaps the way that human beings are operating in the world today should be included amongst the forces of nature. We are a geological force. And worse than that, we’re a psychic force which is full of anger and hatred and suspicion and mutual destruction. That’s not going to be good for nature. That’s going to be disturbing. We’re an integrated system in my view. 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 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 envisage a situation 10,000 or 15,000 years from now when we will be a myth, a fantasy, that our ancestors actually could speak to one another on opposite sides of the planet, that our ancestors, they could fly to the moon, 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 the way it’s being generated around the world at the moment and mobilized and focused is— it’s got to be bad for all of us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Especially when we have such powers to self-destruct.

Low Consciousness Leadership and the Dangers of Nationalism

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Ah, it’s terrible. This is what drives me nuts 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, who are focused on— this also gets me into trouble, but 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 to 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. That’s what anarchy means. It means without government. I don’t want any government at all. But we have to get past this notion that by accident I was born with this particular skin. The notion is that these accidents of birth define us, that we must somehow massively respect and love people who look like us 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 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, 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 a childish species. Leading our species are leaders who have the mentality of deranged teenagers.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We elected them.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, we did, very unfortunately, which shows how easy it is to manipulate 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.

The Flood Myth and the Noah Connection

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this 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 talk about it in mythology.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I floated that notion. Yeah, yeah, 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 with 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 god who’s called Enki says to Atrahasis, “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 a kind of survival ark, which is exactly the same as Noah’s Ark. Noah’s Ark is just copied on that. It’s just borrowed from that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And to people that say, well, these are just stories, these are fictions that someone wrote and then they passed them down and there’s no truth in these things, they’re welcome to say that.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I just happen to think they’re not. 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 Hancock claims he’s proved that is lying. I don’t claim that. I claim I’m puzzled and mystified, and 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that lost civilization, you said they were potentially seafaring. Yeah, yeah. Which means they had boats.

Ancient Seafaring and the Question of Civilization

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

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hmm. I just don’t understand how, if they’re traveling the seas in boats, how they aren’t classified as a civilization.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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 landmass 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 satisfactory. Doesn’t— it just doesn’t add up. These things need to be explained.

And it’s why, in every society which wishes to make progress, mavericks, people who go against the grain, no matter how much s* 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 is about to save my life. I have major heart surgery coming up in 2 weeks’ time. I’m not against it at all, but I think it should be one weapon in our armory, not the only weapon.

The Pyramids of Giza

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things I was super curious about, because I was actually there last week, is this place.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Giza.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Pyramids of Giza.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: The Great Pyramid of Giza. Here we look at it. Attributed to the pharaoh Khufu, who was a pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the mystery here? So again, pyramids are this big stack of concrete blocks in Egypt. What is the— why is it so mysterious?

The Great Pyramid: Precision, Scale, and Hidden Knowledge

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Well, first of all, they’re not concrete. They’re hewn limestone and granite. First of all, it’s mysterious for the sheer size of it. Look, she got roughly 750 feet along each side, 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 corkscrew 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 5 times. Once I climbed it when there was an event taking place on the Giza Plateau — picnics, basically. And a lot of Cairns just decided to climb the pyramid. As I say, I’ve climbed it 4 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 2 or 3 courses, you fall, you’re dead. It’s a 52-degree 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 3/60 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, 3/60 of a single degree to true north.

And they’ve done that on a 6 million ton monument which is 481 feet high, if you take account of its original height, which has a 52-degree 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. Could our civilization do it? Yeah, I think we could. But would we do it? No, I don’t think we would. 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.

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 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 one-third of the way between the North Pole and the equator. And 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, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth.

Archaeologists know this. They say it’s a coincidence, total coincidence, just by chance. However, I could agree with them actually if the scale was not 1:43,200, but the fact that it’s 1:43,200 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 Santillana, 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 Precession of the Equinoxes

The precession 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No comment.

GRAHAM 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 precession is actually caused by a wobble on the axis of the Earth. I’m going to pretend that this is the Earth. Okay. 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 2 things noticeably. One thing it affects is the pole star. At the moment, the pole star is Polaris. The pole star — this is astronomical north. It’s the star towards which the extended north pole of the Earth points most directly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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 1:57,000, 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 Rig Veda, for example. You find this all over the world, everywhere.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what does that imply or suggest?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: What it suggests is that incorporated into the building of the Great Pyramid was knowledge that was not supposed to have existed 4,500 years ago. In fact, knowledge that was not supposed to have existed until 2,000 years ago. Hipparchus of Alexandria is the Greek who was supposed to have discovered precession. But the incorporation of precession in the structure of the Great Pyramid says to me that that knowledge is much older. It was already old then.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I really want to make sure I’m clear on this precession thing because I’m not super clear. What does it mean, precession? It means that there’s a certain star pattern that we see once every 20,000 years?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It precesses, it goes backwards. The direction through the zodiac is forwards in the normal year, but in the long-term year, because of the wobble, the sunrise against the background of the spring equinox — the sunrise is 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 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so the star pattern.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah. A zodiacal constellation. The constellations of the zodiac lie along what is called the ecliptic, the path of the sun.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: The Earth, the moon, we are all on the ecliptic within a few degrees above or below it. And therefore these are constellations that we can see the sun against the background of. A 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 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. We think it doesn’t. I’m not sure who’s right.

The Scale of 43,200 and What It Reveals

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’m going to repeat this back to you to check if 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 43,200.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It’s a scale.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a scale.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It’s a scale that’s used for the height and the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid. Base perimeter measure, 4 sides, add it together. Height, the actual height of the Great Pyramid, its true original height. It lost about 30 feet in an earthquake in 1301, but you can calculate the true original height from the angle of the sides. And when you take that height and multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You get the radius of the Earth.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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 polar radius. A key dimension of the Earth. Measure the sides and you get, on the same scale, 1:43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth, what the Earth measures at its equator, its largest measure. And that 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That means that they must have known the circumference of the Earth.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, it means that they knew the circumference of the Earth, and it means they chose a place to put the Great Pyramid which also was relevant. This isn’t latitude 23 or latitude 37. This is just a fraction off latitude 30 degrees north, so therefore one-third of the way between the equator and the North Pole. It’s a significant relative. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How could they possibly know the circumference of the Earth 4,500 years ago?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Because they’re a lost civilization. Because 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which could be 20,000 years ago. And they’ve passed it down in myths and stories?

The Seven Sages and the Keepers of Ancient Knowledge

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yes, passed it down, but not only in myths and stories. This is something else that I will 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 Apkallu. 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 long-lived organization here, which is carrying down information, looking for the right time to switch the engine of civilization back on again.

I know it sounds extreme, but that’s what I do. I explore extreme ideas and see whether they fit or not. And I’m beginning to find this idea does fit. It fits with a whole range of information which will be in the next book.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A sage that reports to the king and —

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It totally reports to the king, that advises the king.

STEVEN BARTLETT: On what?

The Mystery Beneath the Pyramids

GRAHAM HANCOCK: On everything, on what to do. The Apkallu in the ancient traditions of Sumer, they existed in the pre-diluvian world. They were there in the world before the flood, and they taught mankind knowledge then. But the flood came, the cataclysm came, they were wiped out. But some of the Apkallu survived, and they appear after the flood as advisors to the earliest historical kings of Sumer.

And I’m just wondering whether 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 don’t find it a satisfactory avenue, I’ll abandon it, but at the moment it’s looking very interesting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Then where did all this information go? Because if the people who built the Pyramids of Giza had this information, where did the sages go and with their information?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, it’s very odd. Actually, what happens after Giza is fascinating because once you leave the Fourth Dynasty period, you 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 Saqqara, 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, done that, move on.

And that’s going to speak to human beings not just for a generation, not just for 100 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 it 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Again, why? Because they had intelligence that they’re not credited with having at that time?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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 2,500 years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So they must have got it from somewhere?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yes, they must have got it from somewhere. And the fact that it’s there 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, 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.”

What Lies Beneath the Great Pyramid

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think there’s something underneath it?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Oh, there’s definitely something underneath it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because we think of it as this sort of building with tunnels inside it, but—

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, when you go into the Great Pyramid now, you go in through what is called the Robber’s Tunnel or Mamun’s Hole. The Caliph al-Mamun had a notion that there would be an 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 1301, 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. Then at a certain moment, when they’re about 60 or 70 feet 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 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Deep in the bedrock. I actually think that was the original sacred site on that monument — that subterranean chamber. I don’t advise anybody with claustrophobia to go down there. You’re very conscious that you’ve got a 6 million-ton monument sitting right above you in a place that has earthquakes. It can be quite oppressive.

But that’s just a hint of what’s under the Giza Plateau. That’s just an accessible bit. But it’s already obvious that there is so much more. Some of it’s been 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 Biondi—

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is he saying?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: He’s saying that there are enormous structures under the second pyramid, not the Great Pyramid, under the pyramid attributed to Khafre, Khufu’s successor. The structures go hundreds of feet deep under there, structures that involve spiral kind of stairways. The reaction has been overwhelmingly dismissing this. Archaeologists 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 trialed in Turkey. There are underground cities in Turkey, Kaymaklı, 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 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 Rastau — 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.

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 feel the pyramid withdrawing. It’s like it doesn’t want to speak to you anymore. The place becomes a dead space. 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 Hancock’s a lunatic, but I’m just telling you what happens to me. I think it’s a monument that communicates.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did it say to you?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It said to me, “Go further.” Very much so. I feel in a weird way validated by the Great Pyramid. I think it’s not only me, others as well who’ve devoted big chunks of their lives to the Great Pyramid, like Robert Bauval, 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 because they want to destroy every new idea rather than spend a bit of time thinking about it.

What a Lost Civilization Means for Us Today

STEVEN BARTLETT: If what you’re saying is true around the first civilizations being 20-plus thousand years ago, what does that mean for us, for our lives?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Oh, it’s really important meaning for us 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 are so filled with arrogance and pride right now with our technological achievements, our great abilities, our great powers. And the arrogance that comes with that, the Greeks used to call that hubris. It ultimately ends in nemesis, ultimately brings you down. Arrogance is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing in an individual and it’s a terrible thing in a civilization.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It also means that a lot of the things that we’ve dismissed as conspiracy or hocus-pocus, whatever, might not be. I mean, you talk a lot about astrology and stuff like that.

Ancient Wisdom, Psychedelics, and Personal Healing

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, I think we should keep open to systems that the ancients used, which we’ve dismissed. Like? Astrology is one of them. What does astrology ultimately say? 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 recognizing that there may be patterns in that. And 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 Rupert Sheldrake, a serious scientist, one of the very few who’s doing serious scientific 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 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 100 years, which is the heritage of modern science. Well, 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.

If you take the human being as the heart of this and you were to find a little pimple on the nose of that human being, that would be science. It’s a pimple. A sample 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?

The Hidden Structures of the Amazon

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, one of the interesting things is I actually did go to the Amazon rainforest in Peru. Yeah. And they’ve discovered these big square things underground.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I’ve been involved in that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is that? What is that?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Well, the name that’s being given to them is geoglyphs.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Geoglyphs.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I think I know this one. Nobody knew they existed at all until about 40 years ago. Really? And because the Amazon rainforest is a rainforest and densely covered with 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 Martti Paasanen. In fact, he was on my Netflix show. He’s an archaeologist from Finland and with Alteo Ranzi, a Brazilian geographer. What they’re doing is a dense LiDAR survey of the whole of Acre Province in Brazil. 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, low impact, just a few of them go in, check it out, see what’s there, and then begin the archaeology on the site.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, this is a prime example. 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. That’s right. But in the 1970s, we discovered, what, 1,000 of these structures?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: At least. They’re confident now from the LiDAR work that they’re talking of thousands, 3,000, 5,000, 6,000. There are also roadways that run for 100 kilometers plus. There’s absolutely no doubt that the Amazon once supported a population of millions with extraordinary clever management of rainforest soils by creating a man-made soil that they call terra preta. 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, who joined those communities with long straight roadways. 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. Geometry. What’s it doing there in the Amazon? And when I talk to a local shaman about this, and I did on camera in the Netflix show, 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 of the human adventure, and all civilizations emerged from shamanism. And this one was not—

STEVEN BARTLETT: Shamanism.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Shamanism, yes. Shamanism being the system of using altered states of consciousness to gain direct access to other levels of reality.

Ayahuasca, DMT, and the Shamanic Experience

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like psychedelics.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, psychedelics, or you can fast for a month. That will give you some visions too. There are other ways, 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 where you see it most strongly.

And DMT, the active ingredient of ayahuasca, is very fast-acting in the way that it’s normally consumed. It’s normally vaped or smoked. It produces a 10-minute journey literally to the other side of reality, and there’s not much you can do about it once you’re in there. But then you’re out again.

Ayahuasca is a very clever technology. The ayahuasca brew contains DMT. DMT is not orally active, so you can drink a tea made 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 ayahuasca 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.

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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you— you’ve taken ayahuasca 80 times?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Something like that. Something like that. 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 experienced use of ayahuasca, 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 deserved those words,” you suddenly get it from their point of view. You feel the agony that your words caused that person. 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 that I find most valuable in ayahuasca. It’s helped me to come to terms with my tendency to swift anger. I’m very aware that that’s a problem I have and it’s something I need to do something about. And ayahuasca has helped me with that. I’ve become gentler and softer. Not gentle enough, maybe.

It’s a journey. It’s not an overnight transformation, not a magic pill. The main work with ayahuasca 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 it’s so easy to take a brew. Well, it’s actually not that easy because you’re going to vomit and have diarrhea, but that’s where the work begins, not where it ends.

Childhood Trauma and the Roots of Regret

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that emotion, is that— does that stem back to your relationship with your parents? Because I was reading about your early—

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, look, we’re all frail human beings. We’re all messed about in lots of ways. We all have issues in our lives.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said regret.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Regret, yes. I do regret saying hurtful and unkind things to a number of people over the years. I do regret that very much. I do regret very much that I wasn’t mature enough to realize why my parents were so difficult, that I never really forgave them for that. I never really forgave them for the strangeness of my childhood and the various things that happened. I never really saw it from their point of view.

My mother lost 3 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 what kind of catastrophe that is for a person, for a mother to lose three children like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said weird childhood.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah. So this is me. This is little Graham here with my mother and my father. It was 1954 that we landed in India. My father was a consultant surgeon, and so he went as a missionary surgeon to India to a place called the Christian Medical College in Vellore in South India. And we lived in a tin hut. But he was following his faith. He was doing what was right for him. He was giving his skills to help people. I realize that now, and a lot of resentment I have towards him I probably shouldn’t have.

He was an odd guy. He was very eccentric. He used to take me in to watch dissections. 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. He took me later on— At what age? Uh, 5.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You were watching bodies being cut up at 5?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I was, yeah. Absolutely. Very strange. See, it was presented to me as completely normal, but it wasn’t. It was strange. Fundamentally, he was a good man, I believe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I think allowing a 4 to 5-year-old child to see those things is deeply traumatic in a way that you probably don’t recognize until later.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I agree. 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. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you have nightmares?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what were those nightmares?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Usually nightmares of loss. Usually nightmares of suddenly I’m alone. I’m completely isolated, lost, alone.

The Outsider’s Path

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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 his dad was a surgeon, and his dad brought him in to watch operations and dissections when he was young.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it scarred him in a way that he didn’t realize until later. 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’s actually the guy that coached Michael Jordan and then Kobe before Kobe Bryant passed away. And he told me still as an adult, those bodies join him at nighttime. So he’ll wake up at nighttime and he’ll see them around his bed.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Well, thank you, universe. That didn’t happen to me. I do not have— I don’t remember having gruesome nightmares. I remember a feeling of loneliness and abandonment. That’s what I remember.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Loneliness and abandonment.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I’ve always felt that way. I was always an outsider at school, 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 I need to do that well. I need to provide an alternative point of view on the past.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a real cost to being an outsider.

The Gift of Being an Outsider

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Oh yeah, but there are some benefits. You know, we are what we are, and for me, I was always strange. I had this childhood 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 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 cruelest place. Beatings going on. 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 I don’t feel victimized for being an outsider. I feel it’s a privilege. I feel I’ve been given an opportunity to take a different view of things as a result of being an outsider.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there words unsaid here with these two people in your life?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yes, 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 were pretty crazy, but 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, I remember being a young man, 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, 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 — 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 an absolute miracle. It’s the result of billions and billions of years of processes in the universe, which had nothing to do with us, randomly bringing us together at this point. It’s really quite a miraculous situation. To be alive, to be born at all, is a miracle. I think it was Voltaire who, talking about reincarnation, said, “It’s no more extraordinary to be born twice than to be born once.” And I think there’s a point in that.

Spirituality, Religion, and Direct Experience

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you religious? Do you believe in a God, or—

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I would say that I pay attention, close attention, to what I would regard as the spiritual, non-physical side of life. 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 mullah teaches you how to mediate that relationship.

And I think what’s important — for me anyway, 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 ayahuasca very, very valuable, because it has enabled me to experience something that is absolutely impossible to experience in normal everyday life.

We’re so plugged into the physical world, and we have to be. We’ve got to obey the laws of physics. We’ve got to deal with the economics of our circumstances. We have to make our way through life. All of those things we’ve got to do. 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, 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, just in the same way that, before the invention of the microscope, we had no idea that there were bacteria. We start seeing these tiny little things swimming around. Gosh, major discovery. 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’re used as by shamans, is a technology, a device, 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.

The Similarity of Psychedelic Experiences

STEVEN BARTLETT: The interesting thing about DMT in particular is when you speak to people who have done DMT — I spent about a year working in quite a big psychedelics company.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Just to—

STEVEN BARTLETT: I got really fascinated. I’d left my company, I didn’t have anything to do with my time, so I started this podcast — on YouTube — and I also started working at a psychedelics business because I found the studies on mental health and psychedelics really interesting. So I have quite a deep understanding, I guess higher than average, of ibogaine and ayahuasca and DMT. And my partner 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. Funnily enough, your description of these creatures saying, “You belong to us now,” is almost verbatim what one of my friends described 2 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 had taken hold of him. And they were very curious and inspecting him, very colorful realm. And then they kind of sent him back, after that.

And it does make one wonder. I think one of my conclusions was if inhaling a small chemical can completely take me to another place — and from a reasoning perspective, it was just one inhale of a chemical — then it goes to say that my current perception of reality is just 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. So to think that this is base reality, when the difference between this and being with some grasshopper people in 4K is literally an inhale. For me, I was like, oh wow, okay.

Consciousness, Reality, and the Need to Know Ourselves

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It’s an extraordinary realization when that comes in. It causes us to question the nature of reality itself. And this is what’s really important about these medicines. First and foremost, you’re right, these psychedelic medicines are proving incredibly effective as therapeutic tools, and that’s great. I think that’s incredibly valuable. But there’s another level to go, which is 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. They’re going to be doing trials in Costa Rica. 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 material-based, 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. It’s at least as interesting, if not more interesting, than exploring other planets right now. I think we need to explore ourselves first. 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, go to the moon, 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’ve hardly sorted out anything on this planet and we’re talking about exploring other planets.

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, make a complete shithole of it, leave it and go and live somewhere else. No, we can fix this. We are capable of fixing this. We are capable of fixing everything. Human beings have enormous potential. We’re just using a fraction of 1% of it at the moment.

One Person at a Time

STEVEN BARTLETT: The question — the obvious question that comes to mind is how? Maybe some kind of leader comes along.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Could be. I think we need to move past leaders.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I just don’t know how else humans would change without some kind of leadership.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It’s very difficult to see. I agree with you, it’s very difficult to see how it happens. One person at a time, slowly, through word of mouth, through experience. But look, everything in the ayahuasca 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 100 or even more. That’s actually really, really stupid to do that. Ayahuasca is an intimate experience, and it needs to be done in a very small group, not a very large group.

So it’s not all roses. I’m not trying to paint these medicines 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’s 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?

Ancient Civilizations and the Mystery of Consciousness

STEVEN BARTLETT: Through your journey through ancient civilizations, what have you come to learn about what this consciousness thing is, if anything at all, or at least what people believed? And how those mythologies were similar.

The Judgment of the Heart

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yes, I’ve partly come to this through the ancient texts. There’s a very specific scene in a number of the ancient Egyptian funerary 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 the deceased is led into the hall by the goddess Maat. 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, his soul. Heart and soul were the same thing for the Egyptians in that sense. And in the other pan is the feather of Maat, 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, the 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 had this huge brain, you had this enormous capacity, we gave it — I gave 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 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The health situation you’ve gone through has clearly made you quite introspective, probably more so than you might have been 10 years ago, I’m guessing.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Oh yeah, absolutely. I was still immortal 10 years ago. 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 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you happy?

Love, Family, and Happiness

GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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’m blessed with a beautiful and wonderful wife and companion, my wife, Santha.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’ve got this wonderful picture of her. Yeah.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: That’s me and Santha. We met when we were about 40 years old. And I don’t think we’ve been apart more than 4 days in the entire 30-plus years since then.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wow.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: We do everything together. We travel together. Santha’s a photographer, brilliant photographer. And I do not have a great visual eye. So we work together. I do the words, Santha does the pictures. We have the adventures together. We did the scuba diving together. Santha 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. Santha and I have 6 children between us. Santha brought 2 from her previous marriage. I brought 2 from my first marriage and 2 from my second marriage. So 6 children from 3 broken marriages is a potential disaster. Santha 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. Santha 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 our children and now our grandchildren. 9 grandchildren, 6 grandkids. All of it’s down to Santha.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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, it’s just a wonderful reminder of how easy it is to get caught up in the material and all the toxic, whereas so much of it comes from just the simplicity of falling in love with someone.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Love is what it’s about. And 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 is what my wife does all the time with everybody. She puts other people first, and others benefit enormously from that.

I’m very fortunate. I think if I hadn’t met Santha 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 am happy.

Accusations and Criticism

There are things that make me unhappy, of course, just like every other human being. 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 an easy way to lazily dismiss somebody else.

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, I’ve been accused of racism as well. That I’ve been accused of taking away the authenticity of indigenous achievements. And that again has been without any receipts. It’s not been — it’s just thrown out there as an accusation.

Now for me, with a multiethnic family, that racism abuse that has been thrown at me constantly 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. 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 at 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, you know, Graham, I think at the end of the day, the thing that endures is the impact, the curiosity that you’ve provoked in people, allowed them to wander beyond the narrowness of our lives, which is quite miserable. A narrow life feels quite like a miserable life where you can’t be open-minded and explore. And that’s why I love these conversations. It’s not to say 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. Yeah, to possibility. Absolutely. And please don’t rob me of the opportunity to expand my mind to possibility. What would my life become without possibility or hope or all these things?

And actually, when I look at graphs like this that show how our beliefs and our scientific understanding has changed even in recent times, as recent as 2017 on this particular graph, I go, well, I’d have some arrogance to assume that I know it all today.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Totally. Exactly. Things are constantly changing. Every turn of the spade in an archaeological dig can change the whole story. Change the whole story. This is not limited to archaeology. This is found in all fields where there are specialists. That they tend to get locked into a particular reference frame and actually defend it in a territorial way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: It becomes like a war and 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.

Lessons From the Past for Our Future

STEVEN BARTLETT: What else do I need to know about 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, if you’ve 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 existential is being used in a way that is probably appropriate, for me, it feels like now.

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

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you know?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: That’s something I believe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, believe.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: That’s something I don’t know. 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, done terrible things. I mean, look at the Second World War. God, no. How many people were killed there? 20 million Russians alone, if I remember correctly. It was just horrific, absolute horror.

When I was born in 1950, the Second World War was only 5 years away, and it hung over us. 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 then. And that adds to the danger that we will immolate ourselves.

I think a new approach to the nature of reality is really vital. I think we need to begin to understand consciousness better. 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 all one. And a mother in the middle of sub-Saharan 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 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. 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 and that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. There may be a danger of further comet impacts. The Younger Dryas comet fragments, it’s called the Taurid meteor stream, the Earth passes through it twice a year in June and in October-November. There are hundreds of deadly objects in the Taurid 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 and gift belongs to every human being, not just to us. But I don’t know how that’s going to be done. I do think psychedelics can play a role. I’ve said many times, and I’ll say it again, if I had the power to do so, I would insist that every world leader has at least a dozen sessions of ayahuasca before they even apply for the job.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you believe that would give them the same feeling of oneness that —

The Responsibility of a Platform

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I think most of them wouldn’t apply for the job at all. Oh, really? And those who did would probably do a much better job because they’d understand themselves better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Graham, what is the most important thing we haven’t discussed as it relates to our past and what it might teach us, or how it might inform how we choose to live our lives today, that we haven’t discussed?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Look, the most important thing 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.

To the extent 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 feel that very poor journalism is 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 smear your name if you don’t reach a large audience. You’re not worth their trouble.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know the feeling. Yeah.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: But I think you do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you know, for me, my thing has always been that all it’s done is made me clearer. You have a bigger platform, more people watching you, etc. and talking about you. All it’s done for me is made me clearer on my principles and what I believe. Yeah. And I’m actually really thankful for that in a weird way.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you’re forced to, when you hear so many things said about you or written about you, whatever, it does focus one’s mind on, okay, who am I?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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 really want to make sure is that it doesn’t make me bitter or resentful in any way. And you can see how it happens. Yeah, because I can absolutely see how it happens because you have to live with this sort of injustice potentially, or being mischaracterized, whatever. So it’s easy to see how one can slip off into bitterness and resentment.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: And that’s a big part of the work I’m doing on myself at the moment. 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 doubts about that.

What Will Matter in the End

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what will you care about on your last day?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Most of all, the love of my family. That’s the most important thing to me. And the feeling that I did my best. I did the best I could to carry out the task that fell upon me quite by accident. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting because one of the ways that I’ve always chosen to conduct my interviews is just to judge people as I find them. I remember once upon a time I had Bryan Johnson coming on my podcast and 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, “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 no preconceptions of me.” And he goes, “It meant that I was relaxed and able to be myself.”

And I say that because my opinion of you is someone who is really curious about humanity and has this interesting idea that is really expansive for one’s mind about what could have happened. And again, the net benefit for me of that is just expanding my mind in a way that makes me empathetic to other people. Yeah. Makes me feel like me and you aren’t different.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve met you today, but we’re probably, you know, we go back a long way. Maybe consciously we’re the same, but in our history and our lineage, we are one of the same. And 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 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 the future kids that will live 20,000 years from now in the future. And that’ll probably look at our fossil records and wonder.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: I think those of us who have a platform do have a responsibility. Very definitely. I mean, we are living in this strange new world. This world was inconceivable even in the beginning of the 1990s. This world of communication that we live in now, and there’s no doubt that this is where influence can be applied. And if that influence is encouraging all that’s good in the human race, then that’s really great. 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.

Are We Sleepwalking Into Worshiping a Machine God?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Graham, we have a 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?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: You want me to answer that question? Yes, we’re already worshiping a machine god. As I said earlier in our discussion, in the minds of many, science has already been elevated to occupy the space that was once occupied by religion. 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 worshipped. 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 situation. Don’t just routinely, without thought, without question, trust the science. Don’t do that. 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 controls us. Yeah, we’ve got to stop worshiping science, that’s for sure. We’ve got to put it in its rightful place as an incredibly valuable tool which can do great things for human beings, but which can also do terrible harm and damage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because when we trust science, there’s something we stop listening to?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Well, when you put your trust in anything, you better have good reason to put your trust in it. If I’m going to trust another human being with my life, I really want to know that I can trust that person. I’m not just going to say, “Oh, you’re a doctor, so I trust you.” No, that’s not enough. I want to know more about that doctor. And indeed, I have pursued that just recently.

Science is great. Science is really useful, but 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.

Graham’s Books and Where to Find Him

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I hope my audience are very curious and I think they must be by now if they’re still hanging around on this platform. Yeah. Because we’ve had lots of very, very curious conversations and hopefully expansive. I, with this acronym, DOAC, obviously stands for Diary of a CEO, 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. Brilliant. Like hearing your story and about your partner and your journey and your parents all makes me think it makes us look spiritually connected in a way that’s increasingly rare. If people want to learn more from you, Graham, 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.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Okay, very briefly, the book that put me on the map was Fingerprints of the Gods.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: And that’s the book where I really begin to investigate the possibility of a lost civilization. Before that came The Sign and the Seal, 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, and 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 Bauval. Underworld — this was 7 years of scuba diving that Santha 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 meters just offshore there, and they would take us and we would find it. So Underworld is about all those flooded continental shelves. 27 million square kilometers of continental shelf were flooded at the end of the Ice Age. That’s 27 million square kilometers — that’s Europe and China and a bit more combined — were the best real estate on Earth 20,000 years ago and are all underwater today.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there’s signs that there was life there?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Civilizations there?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Yeah, well, we found very large structures underwater. So that’s 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 ayahuasca, psilocybin, 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. It’s the best explanation for cave art and why cave art is so similar all around the world. And so similar to the visions of ayahuasca shamans to this day.

Closing Thoughts

STEVEN BARTLETT: Graham, thank you so much for all that you do. I won’t repeat all the reasons why, but you’ve blown my mind open in a way that’s just driven curiosity. And 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, 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.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much.

GRAHAM HANCOCK: Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Really good to meet you.

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