Name: Graham Hancock's TED Controversy (from Joe Rogan Experience #360)
Uploaded: 2013-06-17T00:23:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Graham Hancock's TED Controversy (from Joe Rogan Experience #360)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-06-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Graham Hancock's TED Controversy (from Joe Rogan Experience #360)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-06-17. Transcript available.

I'll tell you what the problem is, Graham Hancock, is the children.
What you're ignoring is you're endorsing drug use to children.
And I think that's incredibly irresponsible.
That's exactly what Ted said when they banned my talk.
One of their statements, they said that we can't allow this talk to be on the
air
because some young man might go off to South America and drink ayahuasca.
That's so hilariously dumb.
And Ted cannot be seen to be endorsing the drinking of ayahuasca.
Is that the – there was a huge issue with you.
And by the way, your issue was after Eddie Wong came in here.
Eddie Wong told his gross story that makes you just go, ew, Ted.
Apparently John Anthony West has a Ted story as well.
And I think that there's a lot of beautiful things that come out of Ted, a lot
of incredible –
Some fantastic talks.
But it seems like any organization, once people get into power
and once people have the ability to tell other people what's cool and what's
not cool,
it starts getting weird.
And you start telling Eddie Wong that he has to attend all these different
things
and meet all these donors and –
Like some kind of freaky cult.
Yeah.
Well, that's what he felt like.
He felt like it was really strange.
Now, your thing got pulled.
And what was the scientific explanation for why they got pulled?
Well, it was none.
You had an exchange with one of the guys on Ted.
I read the comments and you presented all the things that he had said
and said, please show your example of when I said this, I never said this.
What were the things that he accused you of and what was the response?
There were two of us who got our talks deleted.
Rupert Sheldrake as well.
Rupert Sheldrake is the other.
His talk was called The Science Delusion.
My talk was called The War on Consciousness.
He can't be shitting on science like that, called The Science Delusion, Rupert.
How dare you poke the beehive.
It was as though Ted felt that these talks must automatically be wrong
and that they had some kind of preconception about what we were saying.
So they didn't even bother to sit down and listen to the actual 18-minute talk.
It's not that much to listen to before deleting it from their YouTube channel.
They just said this is pseudoscience.
It's full of – and they listed a series of false statements that we had
supposedly made.
But the problem was neither I nor Rupert had made those statements.
So they never even bothered to look at it.
They just read complaints and then responded.
They read complaints and responded on the basis of those.
So when we challenged them, okay, please go through – in my case, go through
my talk
and find where I say that ayahuasca allows you to communicate with an ancient
mother culture.
Where do I say that?
I never said that in my talk.
I never said any such thing in my talk.
They actually couldn't do it.
Is that something you've said before?
No, I've never said that.
I've never said that.
You said it right now.
I heard you.
What I talked about was the mother goddess or the experience of an encounter
with the mother goddess.
But I never said it allows you to communicate with an ancient mother culture
like a lost civilization.
They knew I'd written books about lost civilizations.
So they thought I must be bringing my lost civilization beef into my TED talk,
which I didn't.
It didn't have anything to do with lost civilization.
It was a talk about consciousness.
Anyway –
And the real – the original version was Giving Up the Green Bitch where you
were talking –
It was originally – I originally called the talk Giving Up the Green Bitch
because I was giving my personal story of why I gave up cannabis.
I changed that title because a lot of people pointed out to me that that's
deeply disrespectful of cannabis and that for many people, cannabis is a green
goddess.
And cannabis was a green goddess for me and I accepted that.
Well, to those people, I'd say, fucking relax, okay, because I love cannabis
too, but it didn't bother me.
Yeah.
Some people got really upset.
They're looking to be upset.
I realized that there is in fact a cannabis orthodoxy as well, which by talking
about my quitting of cannabis, I had upset this orthodoxy.
But when I looked at my talk, my talk was much more about the war on
consciousness than it was about that.
That's what it was really about.
So, for example, I made the point that our society doesn't object in principle
to altering consciousness.
I mean what happens when you put a kid on Ritalin?
That's a powerful pharmacological drug which is altering consciousness.
When you overprescribe Prozac or Ciroxat for conditions of depression, those
drugs are altering consciousness.
We value alcohol.
We invest – we have a multibillion-dollar alcohol industry.
People don't primarily drink alcohol because of the taste.
They drink it because it alters their consciousness in a way that they like.
And so we don't object to altering consciousness in principle, but we object to
altering consciousness in certain kinds of ways which threaten the status quo.
And that's what psychedelics do.
They alter consciousness in ways that lead people to ask profound questions
about the nature of the society they live in.
And that appears to be the line that I crossed.
So TED tried to dress it up as pseudoscience.
And when I called them on that, in the end, because they realized I think that
they were – they'd got themselves into some kind of danger.
And it's still there on the webpage that – Rupert and I call it their naughty
corner.
They created a naughty corner of the TED website where our talks were put back
online.
And with all their reasons why they had taken them off.
So first thing they did was they crossed out all their reasons.
So you can find that everything they said has actually been crossed out.
And then they published our rebuttal.
Deleted.
Completely deleted?
No.
Just crossed out.
We insisted that they – they accepted that nothing they had said was true.
But we insisted they leave it there on the public record but put a line through
it.
Oh, wow.
So that –
And they did that?
They did that.
They did that.
Oh, my god.
They did that.
That's kind of a cool victory.
I know.
I know.
And they published our rebuttals in full.
But it wasn't a complete victory because what they didn't do, which is all we
wanted, was for our talks to be reinstated on the TEDx YouTube channel.
Not only that, but you can't put your talk online yourself.
Well, no, I have put my talk online myself and so have about 100 other YouTube
channels.
Oh, beautiful.
And I think TED took such a massive beating over this because it clearly was an
act of censorship.
However, they tried to dress it up that they've decided not to go and pull the
talks from YouTube, which probably they could do.
So, I mean, my talk had 132,000 views on YouTube, on their channel when they
pulled it.
But since then, it's had hundreds of thousands of more views all over the
internet.
So, you know, rather than actually suppress the talk, I think it's called the
Streisand effect.
You know, rather than suppress the talks, they ended up multiplying.
Same with Rupert's talk.
How is that a Streisand effect?
Apparently, I think it was Barbara Streisand tried to stop some public
statement that had been made about her and it ended up multiplying the
statement.
You know, when you try – this is the great thing about the internet.
When you try to suppress something, it grows.
It doesn't get suppressed.
The internet is –
Including dick pictures.
It is.
Interesting.
Got one of those out there?
Coming back around, Graham Hancock.
I'm going to find you.
I've never had my dick photographed.
Congratulations.
How about you?
I plead the fifth.
I'm going to find you.
Frigs and Geeks