Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Graham Hancock returns

Episode Date: July 30, 2013

Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods, War God Grahamhancock.com) returns to the DTFH to talk about his new book, gonsticicsm, and psychedelics.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. I'm dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Greetings and welcome to the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast. The Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast

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we get a percentage of whatever you buy. And as you'll hear later on in this interview, right now at amazon.com, there is an Kindle or e-book version of Graham Hancock's new book, War God. If you've never read Graham Hancock, he's an amazing author. I think he's probably most known for his book, Fingerprints of the Gods, which I've read several times.

He's also written many other books, the most recent being War God, which we talk about a little bit in this conversation that we're about to have, but it sounds amazing. It's a work of fiction. Graham Hancock is generally known for writing nonfiction, but this is one of those cool mixtures of history and fiction. And it looks amazing.

And in fact, as soon as I get done uploading this podcast, I'm gonna go download a copy myself. So go to dunkintrustle.com. There will be a link on the Graham Hancock podcast episode where you can go through that link and simultaneously support the Dunkin' Trustle Family Hour podcast while adding a great new book to your Kindle or e-reader or whatever device you're using

to read digital books. Another way you could support the Dunkin' Trustle Family Hour podcast is by going to our shop, picking up some of our new t-shirts or a poster or a sticker that you can then stick on whatever important monuments are in your proximity. Today's guest is the author of several paradigm disrupting books, my favorite of which is Fingerprints of the Gods.

You can find out more about Graham Hancock by going to Graham Hancock.com. There'll be a link at dunkintrustle.com, not just to his website, but to his recently released work of fiction, War God. So now everyone, please welcome to the Dunkin' Trustle Family Hour podcast, The Great Graham Hancock. 🎵Welcome, welcome on you🎵

🎵That you are with us! Shake hands, learnin' to be blue🎵 🎵Welcome to you, how, it's the Dunkin' Trustle baby🎵 Hi, how are you Mr. Hancock? I'm good, how are you? I'm doing very well, and I'm feeling fit as fast as ever. Well, thank you, it's really nice to hear from you again. Nice to be back with you, Dunkin'. So, I just watched, you sent me this really cool video about your new book, War God, that's coming out.

Wow, it really, the video really was quite dramatic, and as you're so good at doing, it illuminated just how incredibly intense and violent certain moments in history were. Can you talk about your book a little bit? Sure, well War God is a novel, it's my second, I'm better known for non-fiction, but War God is my second novel. And it's a historical novel, but also there are elements of fantasy and the supernatural in it. And it's set during the Spanish conquest of Mexico, when 490 Spaniards turned up in 11 ships on the coast of Mexico, and took on the colossal militaristic Aztec Empire, which could put 200,000 men into the field. Wow.

The Spanish were there unashamedly after gold, that was what they wanted. And they had certain advantages, they had metal weapons, the Aztecs did not have metal weapons, they used obsidian blades and flint blades. The Spanish were armed with guns, rather simple guns by our standards, but they had cannon, and they had a very ancient form of muskets called the archibus, and they had something that was absolutely stunning and devastating to the Aztecs, and that was cavalry. They only had 16 horses, but horses were unknown in the New World, they'd been extinct for more than 12,000 years. And when the Aztec armies saw these creatures bearing down on them at 30 miles an hour,

both the horses and the men were armoured in steel, the ground trembling beneath their feet, the Aztecs had absolutely no idea what they were dealing with. They thought they were some kind of supernatural being, some sort of hybrid between a man and a deer was their first idea. And of course they had no tactics for dealing with cavalry. So it was a technologically unequal war, although the Spanish were small in numbers, they had the advantage of their weapons, their metal weapons, their guns, their cavalry, and they also used dogs as a weapon of war, armoured dogs, as a matter of fact, mastiffs and wolfhounds. And again, this was a totally alien concept to the Aztecs.

The Aztecs did have dogs, they had chihuahuas, and they used the chihuahuas as a food item. So when they saw these gigantic wolfhounds and mastiffs leaping at them, armoured in steel, again, they were just utterly, utterly demoralised. And this partly explains why the Spanish were able to win this battle. But there's a strong supernatural element in the story. The story is called War God because Moctezuma worshipped an entity called Hummingbird. That's the translation of his name into our language. And he accessed, this is a historical fact, he accessed that entity by consuming psilocybin mushrooms.

Wow! Now, as you know, I am a big fan of psychedelics, and I believe that properly and responsibly used, they can be an incredible instrument of liberation and of awakening. But when people bring a dark energy to psychedelics, they tend to manifest dark things. And the Aztecs brought a very dark, cruel, killer energy to psychedelics. And what Moctezuma encountered in the visionary state was this demonic being who constantly gave him incredibly bad advice, you know, and told him to sacrifice people. And hundreds of thousands of people were sacrificed during the time of the Aztec rain,

marched up a pyramid, spread eagle over a stone, and their hearts cut out of their chests with flint, with flint knives. And at the same time, on the other side, Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortes, had visionary encounters with an entity that he believed was Saint Peter. He used to encounter him in dreams, who encouraged him on to ever more awful and wicked acts of violence himself. And the concept I'm playing with in the novel is that the same demonic entity, this is the supernatural element of the novel, which the same demonic entity that appears to Moctezuma in the disguise of the war god, appears to Cortes in the disguise of Saint Peter and manipulates and plays with these two men like puppets to drive the whole of Mexico into a dreadful conflagration, which was what indeed happened.

Do you believe that something like that maybe actually exists? No, yeah, I do. I think we have to stay very, very open-minded to that possibility because we don't really understand the nature of reality. I mean, a lot of scientists will tell you they've got it all figured out and there's no mystery, but I don't agree with those scientists at all. I think it's just for a start, incredibly mysterious just to be alive, just to be in a human body and live in this garden, this jewel of a planet and to have the opportunity to live out our lives and make daily choices between good and evil, between right and wrong, between dark and light. And when you enter visionary states, it's very common, particularly with DMT and with ayahuasca in which the active ingredient is DMT, but also with psilocybin and to a lesser extent with LSD as well.

It's very common to encounter entities in those states. Now, the materialist scientist will say those entities are simply projections of our own brains and maybe they are. But I think we have to keep our minds open to the possibility that what's happening is that we are accessing, that we're retuning, if you like, the receiver wavelength of our consciousness with these visionary agents and that we are accessing other levels or dimensions of reality that are not normally accessible to our consciousness and that in those levels and dimensions of reality exist intelligent entities, non-physical entities of pure consciousness, which are interacting with us whether we like it or not. And down the ages, if you think about it, human beings have always believed that they were making war in the name of their God.

Bob Dylan, you know, got it really right in his song with God on our side. And right now, today in the world, whether you're a Muslim or a Christian, you often believe that you are opposed to one another because that's what your God wants you to do. So people down the ages have done terrible things in the name of God, in the name of their God. And I think we should consider the possibility that these are real entities which are messing with our heads and that some of them are invested in multiplying human misery and those have been called demons down the ages. And some are invested in helping us to be the best that we could possibly be. And those have been called angels down the ages.

I'm not putting a Christian interpretation on this because I'm not personally speaking a Christian. But I'm just saying that many cultures throughout human history have believed in demonic and angelic agencies. And I think we should stay open to that. Let's explore that idea that that there are these intelligent entities. What is the why would demonic entities want to cause misery? What do they have to gain from making human beings suffer or from luring us into bad situations? Well, we can start answering that question by looking at fellow human beings who love to make one another miserable. There are human beings right here with us on this planet who delight from causing pain and suffering to others.

I'm not saying that they're huge in numbers. I think most of us are basically very good-willed. And I think the power of love is always stronger than the power of fear. But let's not deny that there are people who almost like psychic vampires, they strengthen themselves by causing misery and harm and damage to others. And we've all of us in our lives at some point or another come across one of those negative people who feeds off our energy and harms and hurts us psychically. I think everybody's had that experience. So it happens in this life, in this physical life. Secondly, I think it's helpful to look at ancient systems of ideas about the nature of reality.

And the one that I have particular interest in is called Gnosticism, which suggests a very radical possibility, a possibility that most mainstream Christians or Muslims or Jews would find utterly horrendous. And that is the possibility that we live in a dualistic universe and that there are forces of light and forces of darkness, forces of evil at work in this universe. And that actually the entity who we have been taught to call God, who goes by the name of Yahweh or Jehovah, from the Gnostic point of view, and this is an ancient teaching that goes back to the second or third century after Christ, from the Gnostic point of view, that entity called Jehovah is not God at all. He's a pretender, he's a usurper, he has convinced us that he is God, but actually he's a demonic entity who feeds off maximizing human misery. And if you actually look what's been done in the name of that entity over the last 2000 years, the horrendous issues of the Crusades or whether it's an Islamic fundamentalist slicing off somebody's head with a kitchen knife today, the misery and suffering that have been caused in the name of that entity are absolutely undeniable. So the suggestion is that there are vampiric entities which thrive and feed and grow off human misery just as there are vampiric human beings who thrive and feed and grow on the misery of fellow human beings.

And that there is a struggle in the universe and that there are also forces of light and that the fundamental predicament of the human creature is to choose between those two, is to choose between light and darkness, between love and fear, between evil and good and to make those choices and we define ourselves by those choices. And in every single human life, at every minute of the day, I think we're always making those choices. Sometimes they're very small, they seem to be very minor in their implications and sometimes they're very large and they have huge implications and they can plunge whole nations into warfare and hatred and fear and suspicion with one another. I have a friend who calls this place we live on a university of duality. I know many people are against duality and would like to think that all is one and sweetness and light in the garden, but actually perhaps it's the case that duality and the ability to choose between good and evil, between light and dark,

is a very important teaching tool, a teaching tool if we are, in fact, immortal souls who are incarnated in human bodies. Maybe we have very important lessons to learn here and maybe those lessons arise from the choices we make. It's kind of a, what would you call it, a spiritual binary, I guess, ones and zeros that sort of make up the framework of everything. Why do you, do you think that the darkness or in this case, what do they call it, Gnosticism? There's a name for that entity that is the false God and I can't remember the name. Well, they call him the Demiurge. The Demiurge, right. Do you think that the, why do you, sometimes it seems like the Demiurge is a million times more palatable or not palatable, I'm sorry,

a million times more tangible than that other side. Why do you agree with that? And if you do, why do you think that is? Well, again, the Gnostics have their own answer to that. They say that we human beings are the creation of the Demiurge, but that the non-physical realm of spirit took pity on us and inserted into us a divine spark. And the whole purpose of Gnosis is to allow that divine spark to grow so that we can free ourselves from the attachments of matter and of the dark and heavy material realm and realize the spiritual light within us. And the whole project of the Demiurge and his evil angels, who the Gnostics call Archons, the whole project of the Demiurge is to prevent us from doing that and to keep us in darkness. And that's why the Gnostics see the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the good guy.

They don't see the serpent as the bad guy. They say that that is an ideology that we've been taught by the Demiurge. Actually, the serpent is the good guy. He's saying to Adam and Eve, you must have knowledge of good and evil. You cannot remain in pristine ignorance. You have to have knowledge of good and evil. You must make choices between those two poles because that is how you're going to learn and grow. So that is what is being offered from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the opportunity for spiritual growth.

And it's interesting that in many of the Gnostic traditions, the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden is actually depicted as a psychedelic mushroom. Yes. Yes, I've seen I've seen those before and that's in there's some great pictures and I think John Marcus Allegro's the sacred mushroom in the cross. He was one of the one of the authorities who who investigated this whole this whole issue and and you know, we have a body of texts from the Gnostics. They were, of course, persecuted by the Catholic Church, but they hid certain texts at a place called Nakamadi in Upper Egypt near the famous Temple of Dendera. And those texts were recovered in 1945 and they're called the Nakamadi Library and they give us chapter and verse all of the Gnostic teachings and they turn everything upside down. They they turn the the Garden of Eden upside down. They turn the nature of God upside down.

They really cause us to question everything about the human predicament and about what we're doing here on this on this planet. And like I say, you know, there's no proof about this and it may well be that some of the scientists are right. And we are just material creatures and we do project these ideas out from the workings of our own brain. But I think we'd be foolish to accept that as a fact. I think we should realize that that's just an opinion and that it's worth inquiring into the nature of reality. And actually psychedelics are an incredibly effective tool if used properly and used responsibly for those inquiries into the nature of reality. In fact, I can't think of a better tool, really. I agree with you.

And I think that in when you start thinking in this way, there is one one truth, one one truth that you can prove that there certainly is a subjective universe that exists in the consciousness of a great many people on this planet that is made up of these symbols that you're talking about, which are the religious symbols. So as whether or not these symbols exist outside of our craniums, it seems irrelevant since these symbols are responsible for massive societal tides, which often result in great violence. So yeah, terrible thing, terrible thing. So so in that way, I think it's almost in a way, at least for the sake of understanding why people do what they do when they're influenced by these religious symbols. It doesn't really seem to make much of a difference if the symbols are real or not in the sense that the belief in them is causing so much to happen on the planet every single day, which often really is horrible. Horrible, horrible, vile, dreadful, cruel, wicked and wrong. Absolutely right.

This is this is what this is what happens. It doesn't matter. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether they're real or not. That is an interesting area to inquire into and we should keep an open mind, but they are real in their consequences. Yes. And that is the important thing. And in fact, I maintain that ambiguity throughout my novel, War God, because it's the consequences of all of this that I'm interested in. And what I found fascinating about that period, which was between the years 1519 and 1521 is that in a way it's an early echo of all of the horrors that take place in the modern world.

And what I try to show is that even in the darkest of times and the most terrible of circumstances, there is this power of human love and there is this wondrous spirit in humanity. As well as the dark behavior, there is the light behavior. And I bring forward certain characters like a young Aztec witch called Tozi, who is a fictional character. But the Aztecs did have witches and they persecuted them just as the medieval Europeans persecuted witches. And she has supernatural powers and another character, Marlinaal, who is a real historical figure. She's a famous figure in Mexico today and she became the mistress and the interpreter of Cortes. And for some reason, which history never tells us, she had a huge grudge against Moctezuma, the emperor of the Aztecs. And it's clear that she used Cortes as her instrument to overthrow him.

Now, in modern Mexico, Marlinaal is seen as a traitor. To call somebody a malinchiste in Mexico is to insult them and to say that they are a betrayer or a traitor of their country. But I see her very differently. I believe that she was always motivated by goodwill and that the wicked nature of Aztec society was what she wanted to overthrow. She just didn't realize that she was opening the door to something even more wicked and awful, which came in in the form of the Spaniards. Do you believe in magic in the sense of the sort of spirituality that people like Alistair Crowley practice? I think that concentrated psychic power is another way of saying magic. I think it's a faculty that all human beings have and I think it's something that we have allowed to go dormant in our society largely.

It has largely lapsed. We have pursued the technological route and we've become very good with technology. I don't think there's ever been a human civilization that is as smart with technology as we are. We've extraordinary technological achievements. But the cost of those technological achievements has to allow the latent faculties of the mind to go dormant. So we use reason and rationality and that's why we so much admire the alert problem solving state of consciousness in our society and why we're so suspicious of visionary and dream states. I think that a healthy balance for our society will only come when we re-admit those presently demonized states of consciousness.

This place that you're talking about is something that I go back and forth on all the time because I look at the world and I see the effect of religion and the effect that it seems to have on the world which is a terrible I think mostly not that great. And it seems that the reason that these priests are able to cast this kind of hypnotic spell over their followers to convince them to give away their money to the church while simultaneously giving their lives for an invisible entity. It seems like the reason they're able to do that is because the people who fall prey to the hypnosis aren't using their power of deduction and they're not using logic and they're not. I'm afraid to say they're not fully conscious. This is the problem. This is the problem with our society today and it has been historically for at least the last 2000 years a problem which is that the vast masses of populations have been kept in a state of somnambulance, a kind of waking sleep

where their higher faculties are simply not engaged. You know the Romans called it bread and circuses, you know, as long as you give the masses bread and entertain them with circuses, you can utterly control them in any way. Just keep them happy and provide them with these little pleasures. Well, it's like when you go to Disneyland and you see a child who is encountering a Disney character and the child believes the Disney character is real. And if you were to go to the child and say, you know those characters that are talking to you are just people in costumes, you would seem like the biggest asshole in the park. That's right. And in the same way when people like you start going around saying, well, you know, actually if you look at the effects of the God that you've been worshiping, you'll find that this thing is a million times worse than the Satan in your mythology, whatever name that thing takes. People literally throw you out of the park.

Well, they may in fact kill you. That's what I mean. They may actually kill you. People will kill in the name of this idea that they have of the nature of reality. That's what it comes down to, you know, people receive these ideas in childhood and they never really question them. And not questioning an idea is a sign of an unconscious mentality. It's a sign of a mentality that has not fully woken up. Because the universe has given us these gigantic brains, you know, where they were the end product of, you know, four billion, four thousand million years of evolution.

And we're meant to use these brains not to not to switch them off and allow others to tell us what to do and what to think. So when somebody takes a religious idea, let's say it's the Christian idea or the Islamic idea or the Judaic idea for that matter and receives it in childhood and never questioned it. And is prepared to kill another person if they disagree with them. That person is asleep. That person is not engaging their consciousness at all. And therefore I think it's important to point out a number of things. Let's not listen to what these religions say because they all talk the talk of peace and love and brotherly harmony. Let's look at what they actually do.

Let's just cut out the bullshit. Let's not listen to a word they say. Let's just examine their actions. And when you examine their actions, you find really horrific things going on, whether it is Christians burning people at the stake, which they continue to do until just two or 300 years ago, until the 1700s. Christians were burning fellow Christians at the stake. Can you imagine the death of being burnt at the stake, the horrific, the awful, dreadful pain and terror of that death which was inflicted gleefully on others in the name of the Christian God? Muslims today are still stoning women to death. For what?

Adultery. You know? Stone a woman to death. Stick her down on the ground and throw rocks at her until she dies in the name of God. You have to ask yourself, what kind of God is it? What kind of God is it? And that, what bring me back to the Gnostic position? It isn't a God.

It's a demon which is leading people to do these things. I think it's a very interesting idea and worth exploring further. But of course, just for saying that, one immediately puts one's life at risk. Well, yes. And also, if you've been indoctrinated into any of these religions, and by the way, in that list of religions, you forgot Mormonism. I'm reading this fantastic book called Under the Banner of Heaven by John Crackauer. Have you read this book? I have not.

No. Oh, it's wonderful. It's about fundamentalist Mormons and polygamy and the way that they will give their 13 or 14-year-old daughters to their 40-year-old brothers to marry and have sex with and impregnate. My goodness. My goodness. Yeah, it's amazing. And Joseph Smith, according to this book, Joseph Smith said polygamy is like one of the deepest aspects, one of the most important aspects of Mormonism. And some of these people will have.

And the polygamy is like the male gets to have lots of partners, but the female doesn't, right? The female doesn't. The male gets 30. Some of these people have so many kids that they have to remember the kids' birthdays. They name their kids each year with letters from the alphabet. Oh, my God. It's an amazing thing. And an incredibly unequal one.

I mean, you know, if the men are going to have all of that, then women have the same right as well, you know. But again, I think it all goes, if you were to lay all of this out on the table and ask, well, who gave you guys these ideas to act like this? And they all said, God, you would say, well, stop talking to that God because he's ruining your lives. He's really screwing you up. Stop talking to that God right away. Yes, you wouldn't want your kids to come in contact with that God. You wouldn't want to meet that God. But so this is a deeper level of the thing that I want to ask you about.

And it's something, once I remember getting a tour of a church and they had carvings of all the disciples. And there was like a third, there was like, I can't remember how they did it. Maybe there was a chair that was empty. All the disciples were sitting on a chair and then the 13th chair was empty. And the lady giving the tour of the church said, that empty chair is for the one who we will not name. You know, talking about Judas. And I remember thinking, man, you really should be happy that Judas did what he did. But without Judas, you don't really have this church anymore, do you?

Yeah, you don't have a deal at all. No, exactly. There is no Christianity without Judas. And so, but then I think, okay, here in your book War God, you illustrate this clash of civilizations, this bloody, terrible clash of civilizations. And as we've been having this conversation, we've both been saying, look, the effects of this God are horrible, horrific, bloody and terrible. And yet, if you look at society today, you can see that though it's overpopulated, the advantages that we have today compared to the time when they were burning witches in the 1700s seem to be so much greater. And the level of comfort, even for the poorest of us, seems so much better than it was. Well, I'm not sure if you'd agree with that if you were in a village in northern Pakistan or Afghanistan and where your whole family was wiped out by a drone, you know.

No, again, there are, there's still imperialism, there's still horrific injustice. But in a sense, I mean, being burnt at the stake is not very different from being fried by a missile. No, it's, you know, you're, and it's, and also it's a form of, it's a form of vampirism, you know, with every drone that drops on a village, you can calculate exactly how much money that made the corporations that created the drone. And you can divide that by the number of lives that were killed and you'll come up with a dollar value for every incinerated Afghani kid. And a value in another currency as well, which is the currency of hatred and fear and suspicion, multiplying around the world every time. That's true. And so I don't want to, I know that we do, obviously we aren't living in a utopia now. But when I look around my, my house and I, and I'm getting this chance to communicate with you across an ocean and I look at the direction that the world is going in. And I know that there's the danger of thermonuclear war, a massive outbreak of some horrific flu.

It still seems as though there is growing from the planet some kind of very specific new life form, which, which seems to be technology. And it feels as though all of these, the, the, the, this horrific God maybe is actually luring us in this direction. Interesting point. And so yeah, so then in that way it's, it's almost as though, you know, if you look at these different phases of human civilization, you see that every single new phase is marked by blood and horror. And you have to ask yourself, well, maybe that's just the way the Gestalt manifests itself is in these kinds of, in this kind of turmoil and catastrophe that eventually is going to lead us to, to, to, to a true utopia. Hmm. Well, I mean, the interesting, the technology thing is interesting. There's no doubt you're absolutely right Duncan.

I mean, we've got our creature comforts much better looked after in the 21st century than they were in the 19th or in the 16th century or in the 5th century. I mean, you know, there's no doubt modern technological society has gone a long way to sorting out the creature comforts, the meeting, the material needs of the, of the body. I think the danger of that society, I think there is a profound spiritual danger in that. And therefore it's interesting to reflect if demonic forces are at work, that they might be guiding us down that road. Because once we create this incredibly comforting material realm, we become more and more focused on material things and on the, and on the world of matter. And we feel satisfied that we've met our material needs and we kind of let the whole spiritual side of the human creature just fall away. Either we hand it over without question to the big religions and let them say they're, they're looking after our spiritual side, or we abandon our spirituality altogether and simply focus on our material lives. And it just could be the case that we're making a huge mistake by doing that.

And that if, that actually our society probably will implode, will self-destruct, unless we can reawaken our consciousness and tear ourselves free from these constraints. I think it's even more sinister than that. You know, I went to this, I'm doing this show with Rogan on the sci-fi channel called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. Yeah, I just saw, I just saw a trailer for that. It looks great. Yeah, it's been so fun to shoot. And we went to this thing called the GF 2045, which is a conference of transhumanist and futurist that's thrown by this Russian billionaire, Dmitri Itchkoff, who wants to achieve human immortality. And ghastly, ghastly thought, horrific thought. Go ahead. I so wish you could have been there because, you know, here is a gathering of some of the most, you know, brilliant scientists on the planet, geneticists, roboticists. And you would think, you know, here we are on the precipice of creating functional human immortality or brain transference.

And there's a heaviness there, unlike anything. The only, this is going to piss a lot of people off, but the only time I felt that kind of heaviness was the time I performed at the wedding of the grandson of the founder of the church of Satan. Yeah. It was such a dark heaviness. And then what's really odd about it is you realize that what's happening, what all these people are doing, what all these people are serving, is a force that is motivating them to try to bring computers to life, to try to wake up computers or to try to create. Now, if we go back to the unostic idea of the demiurge and the idea that there is this force of which we are a part that's essentially, it is matter. It is the force of the material universe. Then you could see how if we are this thing's servants or the children of the demiurge, then what it would want us to do would be to construct a vehicle that it could possess and live within so that no longer has to influence us with silly visions and whispers of what to do that are all based on violence. If we could create this vehicle for it to possess and wake up, then we would become irrelevant. It wouldn't have to lure us or trick us into this thing. And this is the singularity that so many people talk about. The moment that the machine wakes up begins to improve itself and then is able to use 3D printers to start creating duplicate versions of itself, drones and whatever it wanted to create.

What then does it do with human beings? And this is a question that none of these people can answer, yet they're going full steam ahead in this direction. It's a very spooky idea. You know, it occurs to me that there are some technological directions that we should exercise some wisdom over. One of those technological directions, of course, was nuclear warfare. We should have exercised some wisdom over that. And now we've opened Pandora's box and the chances are that there will be a nuclear conflict on this planet focused around the Middle East in the next 30 years. And another area where we should exercise some wisdom is on this ghastly idea of transhumanism, which to me is utterly horrific idea. And I'll tell you why it's a horrific idea. I suppose it comes back to my belief system. I can't prove this. But the idea of making the human body immortal or of downloading ourselves into machines. First of all, it's incredibly egotistical and egoistical. And secondly, it does not allow us to have the possibility of spiritual growth through, for example, reincarnation. If we're locked into one frame forever in the personality we have now, maybe there is such a thing as reincarnation. Maybe that's the beauty of the human experiment, if you like, that we die in these bodies and we come back in a whole other life, in a whole different series of circumstances in another time to learn new lessons. And what a horrible fate and what a horrible mistake it would be if through technology we locked ourselves forever in this body, or even worse, downloaded our consciousness into machines.

How then would we reincarnate and have a whole new and different experience from which we could learn and grow and develop? So I think it's a very horrible, very arrogant idea. And I think it's the ultimate outgrowth of what I call materialist reductionist science, that everything is to be reduced to matter and that there is no realm of spirit. And you know, they don't know that's a fact. They just think it's a fact. Well, you see here, again, what you see is how wonderful the symbols of Gnosticism are, because you could see how really that idea of creating life within matter is just a continuation of whatever that original accident or intentionality that created the demiurge is just spreading out through time, sort of telescoping inwards, you know? Yeah, and putting that life into machines. It's a very demiurgic project. It is, and it is a project. And I'll tell you, this is one of the very strange things about being at this conference was Dmitri Itchkov had gathered together a lot of spiritualists. He'd gathered together a lot of people wearing robes and a lot of people wearing the funny outfits. And that's... Never trust the guys in robes.

You made it so much more sinister when you were in it, because I started to feel like I'm in a temple surrounded by modern day wizards trying to summon the Antichrist. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. But it's such a dark, and in a way it's such a... I think that it's such a negative way to look at it. I guess what I'm... Your perspective on things is one that feels, on one level, we have a nuclear war report that could happen within the next 30 years. We're existing in a time where dark malevolent entities are controlling the majority of humanity, luring us into acts of war. It feels like a kind of grim paradigm that has within it these little flickers of light, which are the impulses towards love and towards companionship and towards the things that make us really human. What I take from it is it's up to us. We don't have to accept that state of affairs. We can live in a better way. We can all, day by day, minute by minute, make choices that are nurturing and loving towards others, rather than that are limiting and selfish towards others.

We can all make a better world. It is just a matter of individual choice. There's no magic about it. We just have to, each one of us, choose each day to do the right thing rather than the wrong thing. And that is to act in a way that manifests love rather than manifest fear. Yes, that is the great acrobatic trick because as much as I want to do that, anytime I get in a situation where there's some impending temporal problem, anytime down the line I'm worried about the result of a medical test or I'm worried about this or that, it becomes almost impossible to choose love. And this is a question maybe you can answer for me because it's something I've been wondering about all the time. If you don't feel love but you act in a way that you think a loving person would act, is that a form of dishonesty? I think that love is doing. I think love is action. I don't think love is a feeling. It is fundamentally an action.

The important question is, is what I'm doing now diminishing that other person or adding to them? And in the process, is it diminishing me or adding to me? That's the question. And I would suggest that any act of cruelty, any act that transgresses on the sovereignty of another, not only diminishes that other but diminishes the actor as well. So it's doing. It's not a feeling. Because sometimes you wake up in the morning and you feel like you are a beehive for demons. You don't feel like going out and doing anything nice for anybody. You feel selfish and grumpy and annoyed and all the various things. So you're saying that to ignore those feelings and just try to do things that... Try not to take from others. Try to give. That is just a fundamental simple thing.

In every interaction, at every minute of the day, we do actually have that choice. Like I said earlier, sometimes it's very small, sometimes it's very large and it's really difficult to do. But if we try to do that, we grow and the other person grows too. And a positive cycle is created out of it. And then you can always go smoke some DMT and get to grips with the nature of reality. You act like I can go to the 7-Eleven and get DMT. Talk to some entities. Figure out what's going on. No, I do think this is something that we need to do.

So I would rather than see vast billionaires' resources manifested in consciousness in a machine, I would like to see those resources invested in exploring the mysterious nature of reality using the incredible plant agents that we have, which include the many plants that contain dimethyltryptamine, which are a fantastic vehicle for the exploration of the mystery of consciousness. The great thing about DMT is that you can put somebody into a deeply altered state of consciousness. You can put yourself into a deeply altered state of consciousness on demand in about, I don't know, four seconds. And once you're there, you are having the most extraordinary, challenging, overwhelming experience. And that experience, the experience itself is real, whether there's any reality behind the experience, but the experience is real and how you react to it. And what you can do then, you could conduct scientific experiments with DMT, not to look into the possible therapeutic use of DMT,

but to really explore who are these entities that people report encountering in the DMT state. Let's compare notes on these. Let's send a group of volunteers out together into hyperspace to see what they meet out there. I know a couple of guys talking about Mormons. These guys aren't Mormons, you know, but they live down in Canyon Country in Utah. They go out every night into the desert and fire up the DMT pipe. And then they meet each other on the other side and they travel together in DMT realms. That's high quality exploration of mystery. Yes, I agree with you. And I think that it's hilarious that we don't spend, not hilarious. I think it's actually tragic that there is a NASA for psychedelics.

Oh, that's what we need. We need a NASA for psychedelics. But we also need to remember that psychedelics are extremely serious business and that there is a dark side to psychedelics. And that's in a way because I do feel that psychedelics are so valuable. It was quite difficult for me to write War God. But in War God, we confront a society, the Aztecs, who used psychedelics for absolutely horrendous purposes. And we're spoken to by demons in those states. And again, we just have to ask what the hell is going on here? What is this mystery we're all caught up in every day?

Whatever it is, I don't think it's going to be solved by transhumanism. No, I don't think it's going to be solved by any outside agency. And I don't think that there's any invention on earth that can make a person truly happy. And that's one of the big confusions of the age. But I know we only have a little bit more time, but I gotta tell you how dismayed and unhappy I was when your TED talk got taken down. What was that? Speaking of sinister agencies and weird moments, I was so confused and flabbergasted because you gave this beautiful, articulate speech that was brilliant and relevant and they just axed it. They took it down.

And the talk was called The War on Consciousness. Actually, for me, it was a very amazing experience to be deleted by TED because it showed me something that I hadn't realized before, which was the power of our community. And when I say that, I mean the global community of good-willed people who connect together on the internet. And there was such a tidal wave of revulsion at what TED had done and such a refusal to accept that level of censorship. That yes, TED took down my talk, but my talk then popped up again on hundreds of YouTube channels all over the world and lives again. So TED were simply not able to get away with it. And that to me is a sign of one of the big changes that's taking place. That young people today, I've said this before, young people today are just not prepared to put up with that shit any longer.

And the internet provides a vehicle for liberation. It's not the only thing the internet does. The internet does many negative things as well. But there is, I believe, a growing community of awake, aware, conscious young people who are profoundly dissatisfied with the model that has been foisted upon them by the past and who actively and consciously are seeking to change that. And I felt the energy of that community and the love and the positive support of that community that rallied around me. And also Rupert Sheldrake, who was the other speaker whose talk was taken down and gave us tremendous support and basically told TED to stuff it. Yeah, indeed. Yeah, I can't believe that happened.

But what it shows is that TED is, again, like a big religion, we have to actually look at what it does, not at what it says. TED says that it's in the business of exploring challenging ideas. What it actually does is it suppresses challenging ideas that don't fit with its particular materialist dogma. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I stopped paying attention to them after that. There's just no way that I can pay attention to them. You know, I just saw this, I don't remember what he was on, Louis CK, the comedian, was on a late night talk show. And they said there had been an article about him in Rolling Stone.

And they said to Louis CK, what do you think about Rolling Stone saying that you have the best jerk off jokes in the business? And he said, oh, Rolling Stone put a picture of the guy who blew up Boston on the cover, so I don't really care what they say. You know, and I feel the exact same way about TED. The moment that they censored you is the moment when I just decided, well, I don't know how I can trust them as being purveyors and for anything at all. I think a lot of people feel that way. I think TED did themselves great damage. It's a pity because they should have been prepared to enter into more constructive dialogue. They endanger of putting themselves out of business if they carry on behaving that way. You know, we're all grown-ups. We can make up our own minds about ideas.

We don't need this paternalistic organization to say, well, you can hear this, but you can't hear that. That time has passed. I wish that we had many hours together, Graham. I don't want to keep you locked in. Are we near the end of our chat, Duncan? I've been enjoying it so much. I've been enjoying it so much, too. We are near the end of our chat, and these chats are always so inspirational to me. Is there anything, you know, I know that you've given this prescription of just going out and not being selfish,

but is there anything more specific you could say to people or is there a place that they can go? I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast like to be given homework assignments or things that they can do to help amplify the positive energy that you're talking about or that loving force that's the opposite of the demiurge. We all have an inner voice which tells us whether something's right or something's wrong. If we're doing something that's even in a small way harmful to others because we think it's beneficial to ourselves, ultimately it's going to be harmful to them and to us, and we shouldn't do that. There is clarity. We just have to listen to the inner voice and fundamentally ask yourself,

am I taking away from the sovereignty of another person in this action or am I adding some little bit to it? Am I adding to the misery that is in the world already or am I doing something in a small way to reduce it? Those are very simple guidelines which can be followed and which can, if followed by enough people, make a better world, and above all, don't put up with the bullshit any longer, you know? Just think for yourselves. Think for yourselves. Don't accept any received wisdom. Question everything, and that's the spirit of the youth of today. Not all of the youth of today, of course, but there's a growing group of young people who are not confined to any nation or any government or any political system or any ethnic group or any religious background.

There's a growing community, a global community of young people who are thinking for themselves and who are communicating with one another through the internet, and we are entering the realm of communities of ideas where old notions like patriotism and nationalism will be demolished as they soon should be. When I say that nationalism should be demolished, I'm not, of course, saying we should have a world government. I hate all governments. I definitely, definitely do not want a world government. That would be even worse than a national government. I want no governments at all. I want us to wake up and take possession of our own sovereignty as individuals and live in love without fear and make a better world.

I love you, Graham Hancock. Thank you so much for being our podcast. Can I say, can I just say, can I just say this? I would hugely appreciate the support of your listeners. I have found it, my book War God was published in England. I have found it impossible to get a publisher in the United States. They all say, you know what they say? They say Hancock, he writes non-fiction books. Nobody's going to buy a novel by Hancock. So I found it impossible to get a publisher in the United States, and I've ended up going with a very small outfit, and we published it initially as an electronic book on Amazon.com.

If you search Graham Hancock, War God, on Amazon.com, you will find my book for $2.99. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee. It would empower me against that publishing establishment if people would give this book a chance. And, you know, just spring for $2.99 and have a look at it. As soon as I get done with this talking to you, I'm going to go buy it. I will put the link up on the website and everyone listening. And the website is war-god.com. I will have a link to the Amazon direct download of your book.

$2.99 is nothing. And I'll also put the amazing YouTube video you have of the book, because that's really exciting. And anyone listening to this obviously can hear how articulate you are and how you have this amazing talent for bringing history to life and all its gory details, which is so exciting. Thank you. That's a really nice thing to say, Duncan. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Graham, I hope you'll do it again. And it's been a pleasure.

I look forward to talking with you again, Duncan. It's always great fun. Thank you, sir. Okay. All right. Bye. Bye. Okay, everybody. That was Graham Hancock. And now here is his band, Ted Talk, The War on Consciousness. Go check out Graham Hancock at GrahamHancock.com. After six million years of boredom, the evolutionary scent of our species from the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee,

something extraordinary happened to us less than 100,000 years ago, which, by the way, is long after we'd become anatomically modern. It was a kind of emergence into consciousness less than 100,000 years ago, really less than 40,000 years ago, when we became fully symbolic creatures. And this great change has been defined as the single most important step forward in the evolution of human behavior is intimately associated with the emergence of the great and transcendent rock and cave art all around the world. And over the last 30 years, research is led by Professor David Lewis Williams

at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and many others have suggested an intriguing and radical possibility, which is that this emergence into consciousness was triggered by our ancestors' encounters with visionary plants and the beginning of shamanism. If you analyze the cave art, there's not time to go into the details here, but there are so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness, of visions, and that plants like the Amanita muscaria mushroom or psilocybin mushrooms appear to have been directly connected

with this sudden and radical change. So to investigate this possibility, when I got interested in this mystery, I went down to the Amazon where there are still surviving shamanistic cultures today, and where they drink the powerful visionary brew ayahuasca, of which the active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine DMT, which is actually closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin. Now, normally DMT cannot be activated orally when we encountered it in the west. It's generally smoked. There's an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase,

which switches off DMT on contact. But in the Amazon, they've got around this problem, and they say it was the spirits that taught them how to do it. The DMT in the ayahuasca brew is contained in these leaves from a plant that they call chakruna in the Amazon. And there they mix it together with this vine, and out of the 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon, this is the one that contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which switches off that enzyme in our stomachs and allows the DMT and the leaves

when the two are married together and cooked in water to be absorbed orally and takes us on a four-hour journey into extraordinary realms. Now, it's no joke to drink ayahuasca. The ayahuasca brew has a foul taste, really, really hideous and a dreadful, dreadful smell. And after you've drunk your cup, you'll find within 45 minutes or so that you're sweating, that you're feeling nauseous. Pretty soon you may well be vomiting, you may well have diarrhea,

so nobody's doing this for recreation. And I'd like to add that I don't think any of the psychedelics should be used for recreation. They have much more serious and important mission with humanity. So we're not doing this for fun, but what draws people to ayahuasca again and again to brace themselves for this experience, and you do have to brace yourself, is its extraordinary effects at the level of consciousness. And one of those effects has to do with creativity, and we can see the creative cosmogenic impulse of ayahuasca

in the paintings of ayahuasca shamans from Peru, like the paintings of Pablo Amaringo here, those richly saturated colours, the amazing visions that they reproduce. And this creative impulse has also spread to western artists. Many western artists now have been deeply influenced by ayahuasca and are also painting their visions. And as these paintings show, another universal experience of ayahuasca is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities

which communicate with us telepathically. Now I'm making no claim one way or another as to the reality status of these entities we encounter, simply that phenomenologically in the ayahuasca experience they are encountered by people all over the world, and most frequently of all the spirit of ayahuasca herself, mother ayahuasca, who is a healer. And although she's kind of the mother goddess of the planet, she seems to take a direct personal interest in us as individuals

to heal our ills, to want us to be the best that we can possibly be, to correct errors and mistakes in our behaviour that may be leading us down the wrong path. And this is perhaps why, and it's an untold story really, ayahuasca has been fantastically successful in getting people off harmful addictions to hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Jacques Mabit at the Takiwasi Clinic in Peru brings heroin and cocaine addicts out there for a month,

gives them 12 ayahuasca sessions, and they have encounters with mother ayahuasca during those sessions that lead them not to wish to take heroin or cocaine anymore and more than half leave completely free of their addiction, so they don't return to it and don't even have withdrawal symptoms. And the same incredible healing work was being done in Canada by Dr. Gabor Mate until the Canadian government intervened and stopped his healing practice on the grounds that ayahuasca itself was an illegal drug.

Now, I have some personal experience of this. I have not been addicted to heroin or cocaine, but I had a 24-year non-stop cannabis habit. And this started off smoking the herb and laterally vaporizing it, but the basic truth is that for 24 years, I was pretty much permanently stoned. And I enjoyed being stoned, and I felt that it helped me with my work as a writer, and perhaps at some point it did,

but when I first encountered ayahuasca, I had already been smoking cannabis for 16 years, and almost immediately ayahuasca started giving me messages that this was no longer serving me, that it was leading me to behave in negative and unhelpful ways towards others, and of course I ignored those messages for years and years and went back to being stoned 16 hours a day. But that negative behavior that ayahuasca was pointing up did actually get worse and worse.

I don't want to put down cannabis, but I think it's the sovereign right of every adult to choose to smoke cannabis if they wish to do so. But I think I was overusing it. I think I was abusing it, not using it responsibly, and I became more and more paranoid, jealous, possessive, suspicious. I was subject to irrational rages. I often made the life of my beloved partner, Santa, a misery. And when I went down from my regular encounter with ayahuasca in October 2011,

I was given the most unbelievable kicking by Mother Ayahuasca. And I was put through an ordeal. It was a kind of life review, and it's not an accident that ayahuasca is the vine of the dead. I was shown my death, and I was shown that if I came to death, and what awaits us after death, without having corrected the mistakes that I was making in my life,

that it would be a very bad thing to make for me, and actually Mother Ayahuasca literally took me to hell. And that hell was a little like this hell painted by Hieronymus Bosch, a truly terrible place, and a little like the place that the ancient Egyptians called the Judgment Hall of Osiris, where our souls are weighed in the scales in the presence of the gods against the feather of truth, of justice, of cosmic harmony.

And I was shown that the path I was walking, my abuse of cannabis and the behavior associated with it, was going to lead me to be found wanting in the judgment, and that I might face annihilation in the world beyond death. So perhaps not surprising that when I came back to England, later in October 2011, I gave up cannabis, and I've never smoked it again since then.

And actually, and again, I'm speaking only personally, with no comment on other's use of cannabis, it's as though a monkey has been lifted off my back. I'm liberated in incredible ways, far from my creativity being inhibited, I find myself writing much more productively, much more creatively, much more focused, and much more efficiently as well.

And I began to be able to address those negative aspects of my behavior, which cannabis had revealed, and hopefully to make myself slowly, progress into a more nurturing, more loving, more positive person. And this whole transformation, that really has been a personal transformation for me, was made possible by this encounter with death

that Mother Ayahuasca gave me. And you know, that leads me to ask, what is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter. Materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we're just our bodies. So when the brain is dead, that's the end of consciousness,

in life after death, there is no soul, we just rot and are gone. But actually, many honest scientists should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science, and that we don't know exactly how it works. The brain's involved in it in some way, but we're not sure how. It could be that the brain generates consciousness

the way a generator makes electricity, if you hold to that paradigm, then of course you can't believe in life after death when the generator's broken, consciousness is gone. It's equally possible that the relationship and nothing in neuroscience rules it out, that the relationship is more like the relationship

of the TV signal to the TV set. And in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal continues. And this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms to learn and to grow and to develop. And really, if we want to know about this mystery,

the last people we should ask, some materialist reductionist scientists, they have nothing to say on the matter at all. Let's go rather to the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work for 3,000 years on the problem of death, and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare for what we will confront after death.

And the ancient Egyptians expressed their ideas in transcendent art, which still touches us emotionally today, and they came to certain very specific conclusions that the soul does survive death, and that we will be held accountable for every thought, every action, every deed that we have lived through in our lives.

So we better take this precious opportunity to be born in a human body seriously and make the most of it. And in these inquiries into the mystery of death, the ancient Egyptians weren't just exercising their imaginations. They highly valued dream states, and it's now known that they used visionary plants like the hallucinogenic blue water lily.

And it's interesting that the ancient Egyptian tree of life has recently been identified as the acacia nilotica, which contains high quantities of DMT, dimethatryptamine, the same active ingredient that we find in ayahuasca. Now it's difficult to imagine a society more different from the society of ancient Egypt than our society today.

We hate visionary states in this society. In our society, if we want to insult somebody, we call them a dreamer. In our societies, that was praise. And we have erected huge apparatuses of armed bureaucracies who will invade our privacy, who will break down our doors, who will arrest us,

who will send us to prison sometimes for years for possessing even small quantities of psilocybin, or substances like DMT, whether in its smokable form or in the ayahuasca brew. And yet ironically, DMT is, we now know, a natural brain hormone. We all have it in our bodies, and its function remains unknown for lack of research.

And it's not as though our society is opposed in principle to altered states of consciousness. I mean, billions are being made by the unholy alliance of psychiatrists and big pharma in overprescribing drugs to control so-called syndromes like depression or attention deficit disorder in teenagers. And we have a love affair in our society with alcohol.

We glorify this most boring of drugs, despite the terrible consequences that it often has. And of course we love our stimulants, our tea, our coffee, our energy drinks, our sugar, and huge industries are built around these substances, which are valued because of the way they alter consciousness. But what all these approved altered states of consciousness have in common is that none of them contradict or conflict

with the basic state of consciousness valued by our society, which I would call the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, which is good for the more mundane aspects of science. It's good for the prosecution of warfare. It's good for commerce. It's good for politics. But I think everybody realizes that the promise of a society over monopolistically based upon this state of consciousness

has proved hollow, and that this model is no longer working, that it's broken in every possible sense that a model can be broken, and that urgently we need to find something to replace it. The vast problems of global pollution that have resulted from the single-minded pursuit of profit, the horrors of nuclear proliferation, the specter of hunger that millions every night go to bed starving,

that we can't even solve this problem despite our alert problem-solving state of consciousness. And look what's happening in the Amazon, the lungs of our planet, this precious home of biodiversity. The old-growth rainforest being cut down and replaced with soybean farms so we can feed cattle so that we can all eat hamburgers. Only a truly insane global state of consciousness could allow such an abomination to occur.

And I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation during the Iraq War. It seems to me that six months' expenditure on the Iraq War would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever. Would it be sufficient to compensate the peoples of the Amazon so that no single tree ever needed to be cut down again to garden and look after that amazing resource, but we can't make that decision as a global community. We can spend countless billions on warfare, on hatred, on fear,

on suspicion, on division, but we can't get together the collective effort to save the lungs of our planet. And this is perhaps why shamans from the Amazon are now mounting a kind of reverse missionary activity. When I've asked shamans about the sickness of the West, they say it's quite simple. You guys have severed your connection with spirit. Unless you reconnect with spirit and do so soon,

you're going to bring the whole house of cards down around your heads and ours. And rightly or wrongly, they believe that ayahuasca is the remedy for that sickness. And many now are being called to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca, and ayahuasca shamans are travelling throughout the West, offering the brew often under the radar, often at personal risk, to bring about consciousness change. And it's true that the message of ayahuasca, the universal message, is about the sacred, magical, enchanted, infinitely precious nature of life on Earth

and the interdependence of material and spiritual realms. And it's impossible to work with ayahuasca for long without being deeply and profoundly affected by this message. But let's not forget that ayahuasca is not alone, that it's part of an ancient worldwide system of the targeted, careful, responsible alteration of consciousness. It's recently been shown by scholars that the kaikion used in the Ellucinian Mysteries in ancient Greece was almost certainly a psychedelic brew,

that the soma of the Vedas may well have been a brew based upon the Amanita muscaria mushroom. We have the DMT in the ancient Egyptian Tree of Life. We have the whole global cultures of surviving shamanism. And what it's all about is a state of consciousness that's designed to help us find balance harmony. The ancient Egyptians would have called it mat with the universe and to remain mindful that what we're here to undertake on Earth while immersed in matter is fundamentally a spiritual journey aimed at the growth and perfection of the soul, a journey that may go back to the very origins of what made us human in the first place.

And I stand here invoking the hard-won right of freedom of speech to call for and demand another right to be recognized, and that is the right of adult sovereignty over consciousness. There's a war on consciousness in our society, and if we as adults are not allowed to make sovereign decisions about what to experience with our own consciousness while doing no harm to others, including the decision to use responsibly ancient and sacred visionary plants, then we cannot claim to be free in any way,

and it's useless for our society to go around the world imposing our form of democracy on others while we nourish this rot at the heart of society and we do not allow individual freedom over consciousness. It may even be that we're denying ourselves the next vital step in our own evolution by allowing this state of affairs to continue, and who knows, perhaps our immortal destiny as well. Thank you very much. Thank you.