Joe Rogan Experience #2368 - Michael Button

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) What's happening?

   3. MBMichael Button0:12

      How are you, Joe?

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      Good to see you, man. Nice to meet you.

   5. MBMichael Button0:14

      You too, man. Pleasure.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      I love your channel, man. It's really great.

   7. MBMichael Button0:18

      Thank you.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:19

      You, you're really doing some really interesting videos. When did you get started?

   9. MBMichael Button0:23

      (clicks tongue) Thanks. Well, I only started the YouTube less than a year ago. So-

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:28

       That's crazy.

   11. MBMichael Button0:28

       (laughs) Yeah, it's been a bit of a wild ride.

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:30

       I don't even know how I found it. It was like one of them YouTube recommends things. It just popped up and I, uh, I don't remember which one it was. It was something on ancient history.

   13. MBMichael Button0:40

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan0:41

       And I was like, "Oh."

   15. MBMichael Button0:42

       (laughs)

   16. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       "All right."

   17. MBMichael Button0:44

       Yeah, it was cool. I mean, uh, yeah, I started just under a year ago, but no one started watching until like March, and then I think you started seeing me just after that point and it's been a bit of a big, you know, journey since then, upwards and ... (clicks tongue) But it's been very exciting and very happy to be here today, very excited to be in Austin and, uh, yeah, looking forward to talk about some ancient history.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:05

       (clicks tongue) So did you start off on y- a traditional academic journey and then sorta get sidetracked into a YouTube career? Like how did this work?

   19. MBMichael Button1:13

       Yeah, basically. So I studied ancient history at university for four years, um, and I've always been interested in history. I've done history all the way through. Like I was fascinated by that history as a kid, and got to the stage of my life where it was, you know, thinking about going to university, so I thought, "I'll do ancient history at university," and studied there for four years. Graduated, all of that kinda stuff, but (clicks tongue) there came a point during my degree where I was kind of, you know, a little bit ... I w- I didn't quite agree with their kind of high-level ideas regarding the timeline of history and what we're taught about our ancient past. And it wasn't that I disputed anything that I'd been taught, and I have like great respect for the people that I met at university and my professors, and I don't dispute anything that we were taught actually on the course, but it was more the kinda high-level macro perspective of history that I found myself having more and more questions about, and (clicks tongue) yeah, so once it-

   20. JRJoe Rogan2:08

       What, what bothered you? Like what were the questions?

   21. MBMichael Button2:11

       It was kind of the big questions regarding the origins of civilization and how deep civilization goes and how complex human behavior, you know, I thought went way back further into history than what we were being taught, and I wasn't too ... I, I just didn't buy this idea that nothing happened for like vast stretch of time. 'Cause it was during my course that they found the modern humans. They made this discovery in Morocco in 2017 or 2018 I think, and that was when I was at university.

   22. JRJoe Rogan2:41

       Was that Denisovans?

   23. MBMichael Button2:43

       No, no. Homo sapiens.

   24. JRJoe Rogan2:44

       Which ones are?

   25. MBMichael Button2:44

       So I can't remember the s- it's called like the Jebel Irhoud site or something like that, but they were modern homo sapien remains. They thought they were Neanderthal initially 'cause they were so old.

   26. JRJoe Rogan2:54

       How old were they?

   27. MBMichael Button2:55

       They're 315,000 years old. Uh, that's kind of like the estimate. It goes up to-

   28. JRJoe Rogan2:59

       Oh.

   29. MBMichael Button2:59

       ... potentially 360,000 years old, so they're super old and, yeah, they thought they were initially Neanderthal 'cause of this age, but then they discovered a few more and they were ... they classified them as homo sapien, and when I saw that, I was like, "How is this not kicking up more of a fuss?" Because before them, the oldest homo sapien remains we had were around 200,000 years old, and that had been the case for like a decade or something, and before that it was like 100,000 years old. So this discovery pushed back the age of our species by another third, like 100,000 years. So I s- saw that and I was thinking like, "How are we still basing our kind of idea of history around the fact that nothing happened for, you know, 310,000 years and then everything happened in like the last, you know, 10,000 years, since the Neolithic revolution?" I just thought that was odd because, you know, we've been in this anatomically modern form for so long, and yet we were being taught that nothing was ha- nothing had happened until, (clicks tongue) you know, the last 10,000 years, and I ju- that just didn't make sense to me. So that's kind of where, uh, where I started thinking about it, and then we did this module at university, I remember, called, uh, (smacks lips) it was called something like Cataclysms or something, and it was all about how in recorded history, natural disaster had a big impact on human societies and stuff like that, and how it s- small, like tiny changes in climate could massively disrupt human civilization and b- bring them all crashing, crashing down and the case study they used was something called the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Have you ever heard of the Late Bronze Age Collapse?

   30. JRJoe Rogan4:19

       Yes.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Right. …

   1. MBMichael Button15:00

      the question I always ask is, well, what about all the other warm periods that have come in the past? If, as the idea is that, you know, stable climate led to agriculture, then why couldn't such a thing have happened in the Eemian period 120,000 years ago? Or there's been four distinct warm periods that have lasted for like over 10,000 years while modern humans have been around, at least. And obviously, these Morocco remains of Homo sapiens, it's unlikely they're the earliest Homo sapiens that ever lived. They're just the earliest we found. So-

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:29

      Right.

   3. MBMichael Button15:30

      ... we could be even older than that. So considering we've been through four distinct warm periods before the Holocene, and if the argument is that the Holocene was what led to the invention of agriculture due to the stable climate, then why couldn't it have happened in the earlier warm periods? That's like, that's a question I've always asked myself and been fascinated by, but...

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:49

      And the real problem is there would be n- very little evidence, if any.

   5. MBMichael Button15:53

      Yeah, so this is the preservation problem, and this is something I talk about in my videos. So I kind of always ask the question, like, what if a human culture had flourished in the Eemian, for example, which was from 130 to 115,000 years ago, what realistically would survive? Because it's, it's such a vast, vast length of time that it's really unlikely, at least as far as I can tell, and obviously I'm not a scientist. I'm not like a, you know, a materials... I'm not any kind of, I'm just a guy. I'm not even a historian technically. But as far as I can tell, it's extremely hard for these, for any materials, but even our modern materials in our huge civilization that, you know, eight billion people, industrial society, sending rockets to space, you know, all the crazy stuff that we're doing. Even us, if we disappear tomorrow, I think it would be extremely unlikely that pretty much anything would survive when you get up to these huge timescales of like 100,000 years. And so I've been doing quite a lot of, you know, research into this, um, because I don't... I obviously don't wanna, you know, get things wrong and put falsehoods out there and mislead people. Like, I don't wanna look like a, a dickhead in front of like-

   6. JRJoe Rogan16:59

      Right.

   7. MBMichael Button16:59

      ... in front of like millions of people or whatever. So I've been trying to, like, you know, debunk myself or play devil's advocate to myself on this point because, you know, that's the best way to make your argument airtight and no one's really out there debunking me. Um, I don't know if that's because I'm right (laughs) or because, like, no one knows me. Maybe that will change after a show like this. But I've been really looking into the kind of degradation of modern materials as much as I can and trying to work out how much would survive from a civilization like ours if we disappeared tomorrow in 100,000 years time. So if you-

   8. JRJoe Rogan17:31

      Right, like some place like London or Manhattan, like-

   9. MBMichael Button17:33

      Yeah, yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan17:34

       ... what, what would be left in 100,000 years?

   11. MBMichael Button17:36

       Yeah, of like an actual modern city. And the scary truth is it's, it's almost nothing. Like there are-

   12. JRJoe Rogan17:42

       Really?

   13. MBMichael Button17:43

       As far as I can tell. And also submit-

   14. JRJoe Rogan17:44

       Cement buildings, they would just deteriorate?

   15. MBMichael Button17:46

       They would g- they would go, like... Concrete would crack and you'd get CO2 in there and freeze-thaw weathering. And over these huge timescales of like 5,000 years, 10,000 years, they would just crumble down into dust and be absolutely imperceptible.

   16. JRJoe Rogan17:59

       Just 10,000 years?

   17. MBMichael Button18:01

       I think so. Obviously these, I mean, I'm just doing this off the top of my head. I haven't got any notes in front of me or anything. But as far as I can tell from my research, it's gonna be a few like 10,000 years, 20,000 years max. It's not gonna get up to these timescales of 100,000 years.

   18. JRJoe Rogan18:15

       So if you do add in... If you, you think about what Manhattan would look like in 100,000 years, it's almost nothing.

   19. MBMichael Button18:21

       I would say it was nothing.... to be honest.

   20. JRJoe Rogan18:23

       Nothing. It would just get overrun by trees again.

   21. MBMichael Button18:27

       Yeah, because there's just, there's, it's just such an incredible amount of time that all these materials that we build with are just gonna corrode, and they're gonna, they're gonna rust away. If they're metals, they're gonna oxidize, they're gonna flake until they're just tiny little fragments that just disperse in the sedimentary record, and they're just invisible to see. And same with concrete, same with even things like glass. I've heard a lot of people say that glass would potentially survive because glass is a, you know, it's a very durable material, and glass would survive a long time. But glass in the form of a human-made recognizable artifact isn't gonna survive in that form. It's gonna get crushed. It's gonna break away into tiny little nano fragments, into silica grains that are just invisible in the kind of archeological record when you get up to these huge levels of time. And yeah, I mean, there's... Well, I would say almost nothing would survive that long. And again, with the caveat that I'm just some random dude who's investigated this on the internet and researched this myself, not a scientist. If anyone out there is a material scientist, I encourage them to reach out to me. But as far as I can tell, there are very few things that could possibly survive that long. Um, I mean, we're pretty crazy fucking apes, like we do crazy shit, so things like nuclear weapons, like we test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. You could argue if we knew when to look and what to look for, we could see traces of plutonium in the atmosphere from our nuclear weapons testing, or you could see our nuclear waste deposits. Or things like carved stone, because stone obviously survives a very long time. Human-carved stone, you'd be able to find that. But we do find that. We find, you know, stone tools. But just because ancient humans used stone tools doesn't mean they didn't use anything else. It's just stone is the most likely thing to survive. And the crazy thing is, like do you, Joe, do you know how many sites we have, Homo sapien sites from more than 100,000 years ago?

   22. JRJoe Rogan20:15

       How many?

   23. MBMichael Button20:16

       Nine. We have nine sites, nine glimpses, nine snapshots into over 200,000 years of history, nine moments in time, and we use that to extrapolate out what every single human was doing for-

   24. JRJoe Rogan20:30

       Nine globally.

   25. MBMichael Button20:32

       Nine globally, yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan20:33

       This episode is brought to you by Whoop. You probably heard me talk about Whoop before, but if you hadn't, here is the rundown. With Whoop, the goal isn't just to live longer, it's to live better. Well, Whoop sent me their latest tracker, the Whoop 5.0, and I love it. I love all the new features, especially the new battery. It lasts for over two weeks on a single charge, so you never miss a beat. But there's one new feature that's really, really exciting. Healthspan is a totally new feature on the Whoop app that shows how fast your body is aging and if you skew younger or older than your actual age, helping you slow your aging down so you can keep doing what you love. It pulls from nine metrics backed by science like sleep consistency, heart rate zones, and VO2 max to give you a personalized Whoop age. Join whoop.com/jre and get a free trial. That's join.whoop.com/jre for one month free of Whoop. Check it out. And where are they mostly?

   27. MBMichael Button21:38

       Africa.

   28. JRJoe Rogan21:39

       And so what do they find? Like, what is the evidence?

   29. MBMichael Button21:42

       It's usually caves, and it's usually just, you know, remains of fire pits and stone tools. And that's kind of it. And so we see that and we think, "Okay, they just lived in caves and used stone tools." (laughs)

   30. JRJoe Rogan21:52

       Right. But-
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Yeah, yeah. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      'cause they had so much food and, and they weren't being attacked, so they could kinda set up shop and figure some things out-

   2. MBMichael Button30:07

      Yeah, yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:07

      ... over a long period of time.

   4. MBMichael Button30:10

      Yeah. So, my theory is that things were happening in the Sahara Desert when it was green, in the Green Sahara, for those 9,000 years. And then, because it was really quick, that's what I don't think people realize, is that when the Sahara Desert turned from, you know, green lush paradise, whatever you wanna call it, to a desert-... it was like a few centuries. It's called rapid desertification, and it, it flipped ... well, not overnight, obviously, but in a few centuries compared to 9,000 years is a rapid change. And for any kind of culture that was living there, you wouldn't have noticed it straight away, but in 50 years you'd be like, "Fuck, it's getting a bit hot here." (laughs) You know what I mean?

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:44

      (laughs)

   6. MBMichael Button30:44

      Like, shit is going on.

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:45

      Yeah.

   8. MBMichael Button30:45

      And then some ... I think maybe people migrated to the last stretch of green that was still available to them, which was the Nile River, and then the kind of survivors or the migratory populations developed around the Nile River, and using the kind of experience and knowledge that they had from their lives and the kind of history of their cultures in the Green Sahara period, that is what led to ancient Egypt. I mean, that's just a-

   9. JRJoe Rogan31:08

      Well, it's also-

   10. MBMichael Button31:09

       ... theory, but-

   11. JRJoe Rogan31:09

       ... just an assumption that ancient Egypt didn't exist alongside that or-

   12. MBMichael Button31:12

       That's true. Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:12

       ... or even previous to that-

   14. MBMichael Button31:14

       Mm-hmm.

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:14

       ... which is also possible. E- especially when you consider what Robert Schoch thinks about the erosion, the water erosion and the temple of the Sphinx.

   16. MBMichael Button31:23

       Yeah, the kind of explanation away of that also never made sense to me, that it's wind and sand, because when you see pictures of the Sphinx even from when they kind of found it in Napoleonic times, it's buried in sand.

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:34

       Right.

   18. MBMichael Button31:34

       And there's records from the Egyptians themselves who, uh, you know, took, uh, excavated it effectively 'cause it was covered in sand. So, if it quickly gets covered in sand, how could it be eroded by wind and sand if it doesn't take very long for it to, you know, kind of get filled up with sand? Then how does wind and sand erosion even count? I've never seen anyone kind of explain that away.

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:55

       Well, though, it's the walls that are the most fascinating to me, because the, the deep fissures that clearly look like rainfall. It looks like something that water does over thousands of years.

   20. MBMichael Button32:05

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan32:06

       You know? And when you-

   22. GUGuest32:07

       There's those whales that were ... the whale ... uh, the Valley of the Whales?

   23. JRJoe Rogan32:11

       Yeah.

   24. GUGuest32:11

       It's just about, I don't know how many miles south, but it's south of Cairo.

   25. JRJoe Rogan32:15

       That's bonkers, too. (laughs)

   26. GUGuest32:16

       There's this arch-

   27. JRJoe Rogan32:16

       That's crazy. They find whales-

   28. GUGuest32:18

       ... these hundreds of whales.

   29. JRJoe Rogan32:19

       Hundreds of whales in the desert. That's so cra- look at that image. That's so nuts. That is so nuts.

   30. GUGuest32:27

       Th- some of them had teeth and toes.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Very recent. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      years ago. Fairly recent, right?

   2. MBMichael Button45:02

      Very recent.

   3. JRJoe Rogan45:02

      Younger. Right.

   4. MBMichael Button45:03

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan45:03

      And think about the 6,000 years it took for civilization to reemerge from that. Now you think of Toba, and you knock down the entire population of the planet to ... What did they think it was? See if you can find out what the number was. I think it was very low. I think it was below 3,000 people on Earth.

   6. MBMichael Button45:22

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan45:22

      On Earth.

   8. MBMichael Button45:23

      Yeah, just from one natural disaster.

   9. JRJoe Rogan45:24

      Three thousand people. One massive super volcano, which is, by the way, just like Yellowstone.

   10. MBMichael Button45:30

       (laughs) Yeah. There's lots. I- it could all happen again.

   11. JRJoe Rogan45:32

       That motherfucker is bubbling, too. Um, here it is. Uh, "Potentially almost all of humanity leaving around 3,000 to 10,000 humans left on the planet."

   12. MBMichael Button45:44

       That's crazy.

   13. JRJoe Rogan45:44

       Wow.

   14. MBMichael Button45:46

       And a super volcano isn't the only thing. There's so many others. I mean-

   15. JRJoe Rogan45:49

       What time period is this, Jeremy? This is 74,000 years ago.

   16. MBMichael Button45:52

       So that's quite recent.

   17. JRJoe Rogan45:53

       Yeah.

   18. MBMichael Button45:54

       In terms of our story.

   19. JRJoe Rogan45:55

       Well, in terms of your theory that I thought was one of the most interesting ones that you brought up, um, that ... In your videos, you were talking about how anatomical humans, just based on what we've agreed to, ba- based on what we found, 300,000 years. Like, what are the possibilities that there have been civilizations that emerged and were destroyed and then there's no evidence of them?

   20. MBMichael Button46:19

       Yeah. Because I mean, aside from the preservation problem, which we kind of already ta- talked about when you get up to these massive time scales, you know, very little's gonna survive. Especially when you think about what early humans were likely building with.

   21. JRJoe Rogan46:31

       Yes.

   22. MBMichael Button46:31

       Like, it's probably the things they could find in their environment-

   23. JRJoe Rogan46:34

       Right.

   24. MBMichael Button46:34

       ... like wood-

   25. JRJoe Rogan46:35

       Right.

   26. MBMichael Button46:35

       ... hide, plant remains, reeds.

   27. JRJoe Rogan46:36

       You'd have nothing left.

   28. MBMichael Button46:37

       Nothing.

   29. JRJoe Rogan46:37

       Just look at what we know about the Amazon now.

   30. MBMichael Button46:40

       Yeah.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:14:33

   I think so, yeah.…

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      300,000 years ago?

   2. MBMichael Button1:00:01

      I think so, yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:01

      And where was that?

   4. MBMichael Button1:00:02

      It's in Morocco.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:00:03

      And so that's Morocco, right. You said that. So, uh, imagine if they found something similar in China.

   6. MBMichael Button1:00:09

      Well, that would fuck everything up, because-

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:00:10

      Yeah.

   8. MBMichael Button1:00:11

      ... the Out of Africa thing and-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:00:12

      Uh-huh.

   10. MBMichael Button1:00:12

       ... that would really, that would really fuck everything up. But, um, it could, I mean, it could happen.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:00:16

       Well, it wouldn't really even fuck it up, it would just push it back.

   12. MBMichael Button1:00:19

       I guess so, yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:00:19

       Yeah.

   14. MBMichael Button1:00:20

       But we're, I mean, we're not even supposed to have left Africa until this time of the cognitive revolution, and that's always been the, one of the points. Like, "Oh, look, we got smart, we left Africa 60,000 years ago."

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:00:30

       Mm-hmm.

   16. MBMichael Button1:00:30

       But that's never made sense to me either, because Homo erectus managed to migrate out of Africa and colonize loads of Asia and parts of Europe over a million years ago. And if they're supposedly, you know, s- uh, inferior to us, then how can they make this massive leap, and Haderbergensis did it 600,000 years ago? And if they're supposedly inferior to us, how come they did this? And ...... so, I mean, I don't know. I try not to delve into the Out of Africa thing because it's, uh, f- I don't know, it gets a little bit controversial sometimes.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:00:56

       It does. Well, it gets controversial when you bring in aliens too-

   18. MBMichael Button1:00:59

       (laughs)

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:00:59

       ... because aliens become racist.

   20. MBMichael Button1:01:01

       Yeah. (laughs)

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:01:01

       It becomes racist 'cause now you're not accrediting the Africans to building the pyramids.

   22. MBMichael Button1:01:05

       Mm.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:01:06

       You know, which is really fascinating.

   24. MBMichael Button1:01:06

       That's never made sense to me, that, because it clearly wasn't white people that built the pyramids.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:01:09

       Well, I watched this very bizarre discussion between some guy that was trying to claim that it wasn't Africans that built the pyramid, that it was white people that built the pyramids. So, there are people that have this sort of racist idea of the construction of the pyramids, but you can't attach that to everyone who's speculating about the construction-

   26. MBMichael Button1:01:29

       Yeah. (laughs)

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:01:29

       ... because it's too, uh, the things are too weird. It's too weird. And let's assume that it was Africans that built the pyramids, but if we are assuming that, like, how were they so much smarter than everyone alive today?

   28. MBMichael Button1:01:44

       (laughs) yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:01:44

       How were they so much smarter, let's say it's 4,500 years ago, how were they so much smarter? What was going on? Like, what happened? Did they get visited by (laughs) aliens?

   30. MBMichael Button1:01:52

       (laughs)

Episode duration: 2:54:08