Mel Gibson — Oscar-winning actor and director behind Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto and Hacksaw Ridge. A devout traditionalist Catholic now promoting his thriller Flight Risk and developing a Resurrection film.
The gist
Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson open against the backdrop of the Palisades wildfires threatening Gibson's home, then range widely across collapsed civilizations, ancient Mayan and Amazonian history, and Gibson's filmmaking philosophy of shooting in dead languages. Gibson talks candidly about his faith, alcoholism and recovery, a severe PTSD diagnosis he says he healed with fish oil and hyperbaric oxygen, and his traditionalist critique of the modern Catholic Church. A long stretch covers distrust of mainstream medicine and media, COVID, Anthony Fauci, ivermectin and alternative cancer treatments. The conversation closes on Gibson's upcoming Resurrection of the Christ film, which he describes as wildly ambitious and spiritually demanding.
Big reveals
- Gibson says he expects to learn his Malibu home has burned down; his son sent video of the neighborhood in flames.
- Gibson states he rejects the post-Vatican II church, calling it a 'counterfeit parallel church' running a different religion.
- Describes years stuck in his 'animal brain' in constant fight-or-flight, and a brain scan from Dr. Daniel Amen diagnosing the worst PTSD he'd ever seen.
- Says he healed the PTSD with fish oil, B-complex and 40 hyperbaric chamber sessions.
- Attributes his sobriety from alcohol and drugs to appealing to a higher power, calling it a personal miracle.
- Says he doesn't believe in evolution and thinks humans were created roughly 8,000 years ago; questions carbon dating.
- Claims three friends with stage-four cancer are now cancer-free after taking ivermectin, fenbendazole and methylene blue.
- Recounts a crew member being struck by lightning twice on the Passion of the Christ set and vowing to change his life.
Things worth remembering
- The El Mirador pyramid in Guatemala is so large that all the pyramids at Tikal would fit inside it.
- Much of the Amazon jungle is overgrown former agriculture, with lidar revealing grids, pathways and lost cities.
- Gibson deliberately shoots films in Mayan, Aramaic and Latin because an unfamiliar language makes audiences buy the threat and the emotion.
- Gibson's father won Jeopardy in 1968 and then beat all the returning champions in a tournament of winners.
- Gibson cites the Shroud of Turin showing a scourged first-century Hebrew male with region-specific pollen and a first-century weave.
- Gibson quit a 45-year smoking habit by reading Allen Carr's 'The Easy Way to Stop Smoking,' which he calls a mind trick that worked.
- Cites a chart of Earth's climate over 485 million years to argue temperature has always risen and fallen long before humans.
- Describes a Shanghai qigong master who could point from across the room and lift him off the wall with apparent energy.