Graeme Hancock says every world leader should take ayahuasca a dozen times before running for office

The Graeme Hancock plan for geopolitics is less Davos panel, more jungle purge bucket: make world leaders take ayahuasca a dozen times before they can run anything. On The Diary of a CEO, Hancock told Steven Bartlett he would require the sessions before anyone even applied for power, then landed the real punchline: most of them might stop wanting the job.

I’ve said many times and I’ll say it again. If I if I had the power to do so, I would insist that every world leader has at least at least a dozen sessions of ayahuasca before they even apply for the job.

I think most of them wouldn’t apply for the job at all.

This is, to be clear, not a governing platform. It is not even a vetting process unless your secretary of state also carries a rattle. But it is a very Graeme Hancock claim, which means it sits exactly where his public persona lives: between a genuine moral anxiety about civilization and a taste for ideas that make credentialed experts reach for the nearest fire extinguisher.

Hancock is famous for arguing that a sophisticated lost civilization may have influenced known ancient civilizations, a view that has made him hugely popular with readers and viewers who think official history is too tidy, and deeply unpopular with many archaeologists who think his theories outrun the evidence. Here, though, his boldest claim isn’t about pyramids, comets, or the Egyptian judgment scene. It’s about the inner life of the people with launch authority.

The bad-trip theory of political reform

Hancock’s argument starts from a bleak premise: humans have built tools their moral software can’t run. He talks about nuclear exchange, AI, humanoid robots, and a civilization edging toward self-inflicted catastrophe. The old Hancock story is that the past may be warning us. The new wrinkle is that the warning should apparently be administered in ceremonial doses.

our species is poised on the edge of an abyss right now. Uh our technology has outgrown our mentality.

There is a real insight hiding inside the woo. Power attracts people with enormous certainty, heroic self-mythology, and a truly Olympic ability to explain why their enemies deserve whatever is coming. A drug famous for humbling the ego is an amusingly direct answer to that. Imagine a primary debate where the qualifying question is not whether you support the troops, but whether you have recently met a jaguar made of your childhood shame.

Still, the ayahuasca line is cleaner as metaphor than mechanism. Psychedelics can produce awe, terror, tenderness, narcissism, confusion, and the sort of revelation that sounds profound at 3 a.m. and like a refrigerator magnet by breakfast. They don’t automatically turn ambitious people into saints. Some of the worst men in history were probably excellent at feeling chosen.

Hancock’s real enemy is obedient certainty

The ayahuasca claim also plugs into Hancock’s broader suspicion of institutional authority. He is not simply saying politicians need therapy with better visuals. He is saying modern culture has outsourced too much judgment to systems, credentials, and slogans. That is why his answer to a question about a machine god swerves into science, trust, and obedience.

I don’t ever want to hear the words trust the science. The words for me are investigate the science.

This is where Hancock is both useful and slippery. Useful, because science really does depend on challenge, testing, revision, and the right to ask annoying questions. Slippery, because the phrase “investigate the science” can mean anything from reading the data to vibing your way past expertise because a YouTube thumbnail gave you goosebumps. Hancock wants the moral glamour of inquiry without always accepting the boring discipline that makes inquiry work.

Bartlett gives him a friendly runway, including a comparison to Bryan Johnson, the longevity entrepreneur whose whole project is basically trying to turn death into a software bug. Hancock, born in 1950 and speaking openly about mortality, is coming from the opposite emotional weather. He is not trying to optimize his way out of the human condition. He is trying to leave with fewer regrets, less bitterness, and a family still close enough to matter.

That is why the ayahuasca proposal has more bite than the usual podcast spirituality smoothie. Hancock is really asking whether the people most desperate to lead are the very people least suited to do it. The practical test is brutal: if the people asking for power wouldn’t survive twelve nights with themselves, why are they being handed nuclear codes?