#2051 - Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Good to see you, my friend.

Graham Hancock (0:15)

Good to be back with you.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Congratulations on the success of your show. It's been very awesome to see, and it's been really awesome to hear from so many people about it, that know that I'm really fascinated by the subject.

And the reviews have all been super positive for my friends, so I'm really excited about it.

Graham Hancock (0:30)

Well, thank you for appearing on Ancient Apocalypse as well.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

My pleasure. My pleasure. It's a subject to me that is so unbelievably fascinating and so bizarre that it's controversial. I do not understand. I mean, we were just talking about this, and I said, let's stop talking when we're getting coffee.

To me, it seems like there's things that are concrete, right? We know when Genghis Khan lived.

Graham Hancock (0:55)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:55)

We know when they built the 16th Chapel.

We know a lot about the Parthenon and the Acropolis. We know about 2,000 years ago. We know when you start going way, way, way, way, way back, things get real sketchy. And to not admit that seems so crazy when they find things when they're making apartment building sometimes, they're digging into the ground. They go, oh, hold on a second. What is this? Doesn't it happen in Mexico City all the time?

Graham Hancock (1:20)

Yeah, it does. And actually, that's how a lot of archaeology happens.

Somebody's building a road or building apartment buildings or building a dam, and they call in archaeologists to see if there's anything, any interesting archaeology there. And this is part of the problem I have with archaeology as a discipline. It likes to think of itself as scientific. But what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past.

Joe Rogan (1:54)

Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates?

Graham Hancock (2:07)

Yeah, I think it's a complicated mixture of things. First of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo.

You know, anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with. And then it takes the next step and really seeks to attack out on the edge ideas. Now, I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out on the edge idea. We've had lost civilizations before. The Indus Valley civilization today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s. It was found by accident.

And every turn of the archaeologist spade can reveal new information. But the reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995 But with Ancient Apocalypse, much bigger platform reaching a much wider audience, the reaction was just hysterical.

And it went on for a very long time. And it appeared to be, it appeared to me, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I don't think archaeologists are involved in a conspiracy. I think the people who are attacking me genuinely believe in what they're saying, and they genuinely think I'm harmful. But that's like calling it the most dangerous show on Netflix.

Joe Rogan (3:35)

How did they come up with that?

How is it harmful to be speculating about ancient structures? It's interesting.

Graham Hancock (3:44)

Yeah, that's what I don't get.

Joe Rogan (3:46)

The other thing is the racist angle. Like, we're talking about the exact same people.

We're just talking about an older time. It doesn't make any sense at all. In fact, it kind of points to the superiority of the Egyptian race.

Graham Hancock (4:01)

Absolutely.

Joe Rogan (4:01)

I mean, whatever they did, however they did it, is unbelievably extraordinary. And I think pointing that out is amazing. I mean, what you're discovering and what you're showing on that show is that there are a lot of mysteries when it comes to the history of human beings, and we should embrace those mysteries because there's concrete, irrefutable evidence, especially in terms of like Gobekli Tepe and some of the other structures. I mean, this is wild stuff.

The idea that human beings had an advanced civilization 10,000, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, what happened? That's what's really interesting. What happened?

Graham Hancock (4:44)

And that's why it's Ancient Apocalypse, because we know that there was a global cataclysm, a slow one, 1,200 years long, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, called the Younger Dryas.