Graham Hancock Appears on Podcast to Defend Life's Work Ahead of Heart Surgery

​Graham Hancock appeared on The Diary of a CEO podcast today to discuss his life and work ahead of what he says is very serious heart surgery. Hancock said there is a 15 percent chance he will not survive the surgery, and he did not want an upcoming feature about him that he suspects will be hostile to be the last word on his claims about a lost civilization. “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,” Hancock said. “I probably would live another two or three years without the surgery, maybe even five, but the quality of life would be very low. I can’t even walk up three stairs without being exhausted at the moment.”

​During the two-hour interview, Hancock was as explicit as he has ever been that he is drawing largely from Plato’s story of Atlantis in shaping his claims about an advanced lost civilization that fell from grace when it attempted to impose its power on other peoples before being destroyed by a cataclysm.
 
“Archaeologists pour scorn on Plato’s story of Atlantis,” Hancock said near the top of the interview, “but Atlantis is another of those stories that remembers a global flood that wiped out a former era of existence, leaving only a few survivors.” He added that he is “sick” of archaeologists rejecting a global cataclysm just because there is no geological evidence of it, arguing that myths and legends are just as accurate an account of Earth’s history as rocks.
 
Hancock seemed to treat this interview as a valedictory, using most of the time to repeat his greatest hits. He opened, for example, with his famous line about humans being a “species with amnesia” (a line, incidentally, that he adapted from Immanuel Velikovsky’s Mankind in Amnesia). He also attempted to talk up Hamlet’s Mill, a book he has used as the foundation for his understanding of mythology for his entire career despite—as I have pointed out many times—the authors’ fundamental misunderstanding of the astrological system they claim to have discovered. Short version: It wasn’t an ancient system but one invented by Abu Ma’shar in the 800s CE to retroactively link all of the known world’s astrological systems. “They found encoded in those myths numbers and imagery that could only relate to one thing and that's an obscure astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes,” he said. It’s not true, though: The numbers aren’t related to the 71.6 years it takes stars to move one degree but to the base units of 20 and 30 (derived from the cycles of Jupiter and Saturn) that Abu Ma’shar used to develop his system. Multiples of 2 and 3 yield the same sequence of numbers (6, 12, 36, 72, 144, etc.) as factors and multiples of 72, the key number from Hamlet’s Mill.
 
Hancock even replays his most frequently debunked greatest hit from Fingerprints of the Gods (1995): “There are ancient maps that show the world as it looked during the ice age, again dismissed as just total coincidence and not significant by archaeology.” There are no such maps. None show Ice Age coastlines, and the one he most frequently cites, and indeed cites in this interview—that of Oronteus Finaeus—literally says on it in Latin that the mapmaker did not base it on any ancient map.
 
And, of course, he insists on the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis, despite the consensus of scientists that the claim lacks evidence. (Recent papers from the researchers advocating for the claim were retracted due to gross errors.) He also touches on Göbekli Tepe and the origins of agriculture, a good number of specious claims about the precision and hidden meaning of the Great Pyramid, the Orion Correlation, and he repeats his frequent assertion that our civilization is corrupt and decadent and a new Atlantis begging to be destroyed. He says that global leaders have “low consciousness” and mistakenly view the world in “material terms” instead of spiritual ones.
 
Hancock repeats many claims from his books without acknowledging that they are not original to him. Pyramid measurement claims are centuries old, but his suggestion that the Followers of Horus and the Apkallu—the sages who brought civilization to Egypt and Mesopotamia in myth—were not just real but a hidden priesthood preserving the traditions of a lost civilization is derivative of nineteenth century French archaeological speculation. He also took time to berate archaeologists for not accepting Filippo Biondi’s claim that massive pillars and an underground city lay below the Giza Plateau: “They won’t look further. They say it’s impossible, and they won't look at it. And I think that’s shameful for people who imagine they’re scientists.” He refers to archaeologists who disagree with his speculation as “the archaeological mafia.”
 
A long discussion of psychedelics and consciousness follows, with Hancock linking the healing he experienced through using these drugs to the trauma of his childhood. He said that his father, a doctor, had him watching dissections at the age of five and that he was isolated and beaten at boarding school. He said he feels lonely from a lack of parental support and love back in the 1950s and from a lack of support at school in the 1960s. Now about to turn 76, Hancock says he is feeling the urgency of time running out, and he sought his own spiritual path because he did not want an authority figure mediating his relationship with God.
 
Across the interview, several of Hancock’s usual themes appear repeatedly, notably his animus toward archaeologists as an evil force conspiring against him and his insistence that the scientific conclusions he remembers learning in his high school textbooks half a century ago are somehow an unchanging dogma that he and he alone is correcting. He seems not to understand that science is a process and that conclusions change with new evidence, but it also seems difficult not to connect his animus toward authority figures and bitterness toward textbooks to the childhood experiences—daddy issues and boarding school trauma.
 
Hancock said that he wants people to know that he is a genuine believer in his claims and is not simply in it for the millions of dollars in royalties and revenue it has provided him over the past thirty years. “I would I would hope that people will come to understand that I’m not the person that a very small minority of archaeologists have mobilized social media to present me as,” he said. “I’m not a grifter. I’m not a hoaxer. I’m not a con man. I’m deeply committed to this. I've devoted my life to it for more than for more than 30 years. I’m passionate about it. It matters to me. And I think again I’ll be laughed at for saying this, but I feel called to do this. I feel it’s my obligation and my responsibility to do this.”
 
The interview ends with the host and the guest expressing their mutual belief that science has replaced religion and that this is a bad thing because science should only be one tool among many, coequal with spiritual revelations, in understanding and making sense of the world. They choose not to follow through with the obvious objection: What does one do when science and spirituality reach contradictory conclusions? Instead, they believe that a holistic worldview rooted in spirituality and consciousness will uncover a hidden reality beyond the merely physical.